this land like a mirror turns you inward borrows its title from a line in the poem Dark Pines Under Water (1972) by Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen. Ideas and imagery expressed in this poem relating to landscape, embodiment, reflection, and distortion connect to the blurry lofi images I explore in my work. These images which I call time-lags were created using my iPhone to capture failed, frozen, or partially-rendered images. Everyone who uses smartphone technology can relate to the experience of time lags, as they are slow-loading, blurry images that appear when your device tries and momentarily fails to load a picture through a weak or out of range WIFI signal. By embodying this experience, I interrupt the individual and collective relationships we have with technology. 

this land like a mirror turns you inward I 

this land like a mirror turns you inward II

Give Me Shelter 
Confederation Centre Art Gallery,
Charlottetown, PEI 


October 23, 2020 - April 6, 2021

Nicholas Aiden
Greg Bennett
Pepa Chan
Hazel May Eckert
José González Luis
Ashley Hemmings
John McDonald
Jason Penney
Emily Pittman
Daniel Rumbolt
Mimi Stockland
April Mary Lynn White
Olivia Wong

Documentation by Jean-Sebastien Duchesne

This exhibition introduces the work of 13 emerging artists based in St. John’s, NL, reflecting the richness of a cultural community that is both steeped in tradition and looking towards a rapidly-changing future.

Hazel Eckert’s most recent body of work draws attention and gives value to the residue of communication, finding moments of resonance in the unmarked fragments and scraps of our digital lives. She has accumulated an archive of images degraded during processes of lagging and freezing that parallel the imperfection of memory, and transformed them into objects that uncover emotive potential in their colours and textures. Originally from Toronto, and a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, Eckert eventually relocated to St. John’s, a city that seems to dramatize a continuum between protective intimacy and exposure to a larger world. Her work draws attention to the gaps in communication between these poles, the practice of looking closely and finding potential in the forced pauses and failures that we so often ignore or find frustrating.

– Pan Wendt, Curator

Using Format