Academic Articles
Animal Studies Journal, “Sites of Cultural Production in Response to Mass Extinction”
Turner, Stephanie S. Lindahl, EvaMarie and Nicholson, Tara, 12(2), 2023, 247-275.
Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, “Agents of Change: Documenting Arctic Rewilding within the Anthropocene”
Nicholson, Tara. no. 2 (December): 232–43
Exhibition Catalogues
Arctic Claims, solo exhibition catalogue, published by the Burnaby Art Gallery, BC, 2017. Curator: Jennifer Cane.
Arctic Claims is a series of photographs produced over three years in Greenland and in the Canadian Arctic at remote science stations and field sites. Nicholson’s series of work from the Arctic allows the viewer a chance to question assumptions regarding this remote and ideologically important region, and to examine the overlapping political and economic agendas concerning natural resources in the north.
Surface, Sample, Site, group exhibition brochure published by Gallery 44, Toronto Ontario, 2023. Curator: Laurie White.
Surface, Sample, Site is a group exhibition exploring photography’s material relationships with plants, microbes and the earth. While the artists in this exhibition are all based in British Columbia, their works address a range of locations, from coastal forests and urban gardens to the Siberian tundra and digital space.
“The sample can be an aspect of scientific objectivity or part of ecological ethics of connection—allowing artists to explore what experimental film historian Kim Knowles calls an “aesthetics of contact.” Through formal and material interventions, images can represent fluid agencies of non-human natures linking the surface of a photograph to a site that supplements and complicates the representational image. Addressing the role of photography in modern scientific paradigms of vision, the artists invite microbes, plants, fungi and other critters to render their images in unexpected ways.” (Laurie White)
Fieldwork, group exhibition catalogue, published by The Lake Country Art Gallery, BC, 2024. Curator: Wanda Lock.
Guest writer for catalogue: Genevieve Robertson.
Developing out of several micro-residencies and informal collaborations, artists Annie Briard, Tara Nicholson, Melany Nugent-Noble, Andreas Rutkauskas, prOphecy sun and Leah Weinstein explore land-based forms of creative research and interdisciplinary practice. Investigating the concept of fieldwork as divergent from the Western scientific construct, these artists utilize various forms of art to explore our rapidly shifting environment, including sound recording, data gathering and visualization, sculpture, video and photography. Drawing on forms of narrative, activism and empathic witnessing, they asks what role site plays within the notion of fieldwork.
Cultivate, solo exhibition catalogue, published by The Vernon Public Art Gallery, BC, 2021. Curator: Lubos Culen.
Tara Nicholson’s large-scale photographs focus on the instigation of a dialogue regarding the nature of cannabis cultivation and its use in light of the proposed decriminalization of cannabis for recreational use by the federal government planned for July 2018. Nicholson visited and photographed cannabis grow operations both licensed and unlicensed on Vancouver Island and the interior of BC in order to document the artificial environment created for the indoor cultivation of cannabis. The images capture various sites which were engineered to control the environment in which the plants are cultivated. Nicholson’s photographs document almost laboratory-like conditions where the exposure to light, amount of water, supply of nutrients, air flow and venting are precisely controlled.
Broken Paths, group exhibition catalogue, published by The Two Rivers Gallery, Prince George, BC, 2020. Curator: George Harris.
While travelling this country, it is not unusual, even in isolated locales, to encounter an abandoned shack or trailer, a pile of debris or other evidence of human habitation. Old bed components, fridges and other material that distinguish inhabited space from wilderness — that assert our separation from it — litter the ground. These things form the focus of the works of Tara Nicholson, Patrick Dunford, Jeremy Herndl and Susan Barton-Tait in Broken Paths. They hint at human histories on this land, evoke myriad journeys and map the breaking of trails by a succession of frequently unknown and unheralded humans. They dot the landscape as junk heaps, structures and settlements, marking points along pathways that ended with a home for some and for others in a failed aspiration.
In Session, group exhibition catalogue published by The Legacy Art Galleries, University of Victoria, BC, 2015. Curator: Mary Jo Hughes.
Tara Nicholson’s photography has held a focus on landscape that in recent years has extended beyond traditional approaches to the theme. Her work is technically superb and thematically cohesive in its concern with imagery and what it says. In her work she encourages us to slow down and look and think about that very act of slowing down, the essential need for creative space that all artists require. In her series Tether, Nicholson explores the theme of the artist’s space, both as a physical and external location and an interior retreat of one’s mind.