A vast landscape
On her website www.unfinishedbridge.blogspot.com artist Louisa Conrad quotes the poet Greta Wrolstad: "Each/map leaves every valid detail/out, and those who would be the great/cartographers would never draw/a line."

Conrad does draw lines, but she’s an intriguing cartographer. In her spare show at anthony greaney, she uses a variety of media to chart and evoke the Mackenzie Delta, an area in the Canadian arctic that oil and gas companies have been exploring for decades.

The show's centerpieces are two moody, large-scale color photos, shot with film during a boat ride near the Kendall Island Bird Sanctuary and the proposed site of a gas-conditioning facility. These summon the quiet and scope of the environment.

Nearby, two videos run on a loop. One, "Syncrude Processing Plant, Fort McMurray, Alberta" is disturbingly gorgeous. Conrad set up her camera to capture this still industrial landscape as day made a heavenly turn to night. Air cannons thump, scaring off water fowl; if birds were to land in the still water fronting the factory, they’d be coated in oil and sink to the bottom.

Conrad also offers a wall full of lovely, delicate drawings of native plants, other photos of the landscape, and a wall drawing in which she traces aerial views of different sections of a proposed pipeline, one over the next; they look like an unruly hank of dry hair, bound at two ends. She titles it after Immanuel Kant: "Out of the Crooked Timber of Humanity, Nothing Entirely Straight Can Be Built."

Even approaching the Mackenzie Delta from all these different angles, Conrad has merely skimmed the surface. Still, she conveys the vastness and beauty of the area, and some of how humanity struggles to conquer it.