Les Ramsay: BORDERCROSSINGS
Les Ramsay, installation view, “The Adventures of Atrevida Reef,” 2019, Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal, Quebec. All photos: Paul Litherland. All images courtesy Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal, Quebec.
“The sea is everything,” wrote Jules Verne in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. “It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe.… It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.” As such, no human vision of the sea can be finite; each connects and merges with those of others elsewhere, sometimes quite distant in space and time.
Visitors to Les Ramsay’s recent exhibition “The Adventures of Atrevida Reef” will have encountered such a dynamic. As the media release states, “Atrevida is Spanish for ‘bold’ and references significant landmarks near the artist’s rural studio/home” on BC’s Sunshine Coast. Atrevida Reef is indeed an underwater feature off that coast a short way north of Tla’amin First Nation. Yet, the exhibition’s visual language traverses a broader circuit, pointing at themes and motifs from oceanic environments and seafaring cultures around the globe, even across millennia. The ocean divides cultures from one another, true—but to a soul with a boat, it is a superhighway around the world and has been since antiquity.
