Pick of the Day: Ab Ovo

We'll have a review of this show, which is on display at the Dunlop Art Gallery's Sherwood Village Branch until March 21, in our Feb. 11 issue. It's by Aussie native Lyndal Osborne, who since the early '70s has been a resident of Edmonton, where she's currently a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta.

From a young age, Osborne recounted at a January 23 opening reception, she has made a habit of collecting all sorts of natural materials -- shells, bones, stones and twigs.

Inspired by the ongoing effort by governments around the world to staunch the loss of bio-diversity in the plant kingdom through the establishment of seed banks where genetic material from endangered wild flowers, grains, fruits, vegetables and whatnot are stored for possible future use, she's taken some of the material she's accumulated and used it to make hundreds of sculptures based on images of seeds derrived from electron microscopes.

On one hand, ab ovo could be seen as a celebration of human ingenuity. But as I discuss in my review, there's definitely a darker side to the show. Not as dark as John Wyndham's classic 1951 horror tale Day of the Triffids, admittedly. (YouTube) But dark nonetheless. Check it out if you get a chance.