Sylvia Safdie: terra examines the decades-long career of Montreal-based artist Sylvia Safdie through a selection of her paintings, sculpture and videos.

Safdie often explores themes of memory, dislocation and the passage of time in her work. Drawing inspiration from the natural world, the artist has spent a lifetime gathering organic and human-made materials, resulting in her reflections on the relationship between nature and culture throughout her practice.

Nature’s raw materials, when combined by the artist in unexpected ways, assume potent symbolic, anthropomorphic and transfigurative connotations. Among these substances, earth – terra – is the most primal and enduring of materials in Safdie’s artist palette.

This exhibition presents more than a dozen artworks spanning the last five decades of the artist’s career, highlighting key sculptures and paintings as well as selections from her experimental video practice. Subtle and absorbing, these examples from her oeuvre reveal her enduring fascination with both the material and ephemeral aspects of life on Earth, our shared home.