Scott McFar­land is a Cana­dian artist who stud­ied in Vancouver, and now lives and works in Toronto. McFar­land cre­ates large-format photographs combining film and dig­ital processes. His works present both re­ality and a fab­ricated ver­sion of re­ality by photograph­ing the same space nu­mer­ous times, and dig­itally con­trolling the final result by layering the im­ages togeth­er. While McFar­land’s work maintains a strict at­tention to formal photo­graph­ic detail, his process al­lows him to adopt cre­ative painterly qualities. These qualities come to life through al­terations of colour, and the juxtapo­sition of surre­al, pic­turesque, and oppos­ing vi­su­al im­agery. These have been known to come in the form of oppos­ing seasons, weath­er pat­terns, times of the day, or out of place char­ac­ters and objects. McFar­land’s pa­tient process of observation and doc­u­mentation al­lows him to paint a portrait of the setting, rather than present­ing a glimpse of it through one shutter-stop in time, leading to an enhanced perception of place.

The works on display are Cheltenham Bad­lands, Olde Base Line Rd, Caledon, Ontar­io 2011, and Wortley's Wiggle, Caledon Ski Club, Mis­sissauga Rd. Caledon, Ontar­io 2012. Both of these im­ages depict the Cana­dian tran­sition be­tween winter and spring. In these se­lected im­ages we find winter vistas that are rapidly tran­sition­ing into spring from one side of the im­age to the oth­er. In Wortley’s Wiggle, the speed of the tran­sition is made ev­ident by the skiers who are skiing to the bottom of the run at the same time as the snow disappears and spring be­gins.