Smith Dokkie, Dion

IRIS ATOLL 

Ranunculus aquatilis are underwater flowering plants—through photosynthesis they generate and excrete oxygen bubbles that float to the surface. Breathe. Oxygen is like light—I need it. And light is like colour, with which I see. I breathe in oxygen and intromit light-colour. In a certain fleeting frame, this would be all I need. 

Like an aquatic flower that writhes and weeps by the force of water and sunlight, I think all I wanted was that you see what light looks like when I see it. In this way, we can inhabit the same clarifying island, drink the same ocean, and be illuminated by a shared surface. 

Iris Atoll consists of water-based marker drawings on transparent plastic film installed in PoMoArt’s Suncor Gallery. Key formal elements are transparency and texture, which inform the selection of subject matter—oxygen-emitting underwater flowers—and extend my interest in touch and sight, light and colour, atmospheres and islands. Viewers are invited to move throughout the installation and experience near-invisible chromatic membranes, to watch colours projected onto the skin. In this way, the drawings become a prosthesis between you and I, a mechanism that facilitates the echo of touch and illumination. The drawings take up the long-standing dialogue between video, painting and drawing that has informed multiple past bodies of work. Structures like the screen, window, monitor, bubble, and panorama serve as a basis for formal and colour-focused experimentation.

I am deeply grateful to PoMoArts and the Kwi Am Choi Exhibition Scholarship for the opportunity to develop my first solo exhibition. I would also like to thank Professors Gu Xiong, Gareth James, Marina Roy, and Althea Thauberger for their support in the application process.