OPENING | Studies in No man’s Land

From 2014 to 2016 Bos photographed significant Canadian WW1 battlefields in Belgium and France, using pinhole and vintage cameras.

Working with traditional darkroom techniques, Bos then layered these photographs with found objects related to the events, such as poppies, bullets, or stones. The result is a series of complex visual images.

Bos’s work asks: “In ways other than the presence of memorials, does a memory of that past persist at these sites? Tens of thousands of people who were killed in that war are part of the landscape. Is there a memory in the soil, water, plants, and trees of their presence? Does an echo of war still resonate in the sky above? “

A large exhibition of other works from this series called ‘The Sleeping Green, No Man’s Land 100 Years Later’ was developed into a traveling exhibition by Director/Curator Josephine Mills for the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery and then exhibited at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, France in 2017.

The exhibition catalogue published by the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery in partnership with the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris will be available at the opening!

The Sleeping Green series has achieved international recognition in publications such as ArtNews, Blouin ArtInfo International, Paris Voice and Le Monde to name a few.

Dianne Bos uses a line from British poet and soldier Isaac Rosenberg’s famous WWI poem “Break of Day in the Trenches” for the title of the traveling exhibition.