DIS/CONNECT

We live in an age when technology’s promise to build connection and communication has failed to live up to its potential. Instead of forging and reinforcing relationships, the digital age has often inserted distance and disconnection between people. We face a crisis of loneliness, detachment, and fragmentation. Yet despite the challenges of systemic isolation, we have a biological drive to connect. Many of us are finding ways to shape alliances and accommodate distance. In this way, we enact a social form of biodiversity, acknowledging what the ecological world already knows: connection is crucial for survival.

The graphite, coloured pencil, walnut ink, and coffee drawings in Bettina Harvey’s series DIS/CONNECT explore the complexity and importance of human interconnection. A contemporary take on realism, the series employs driftwood as an overarching metaphor, deliberating on a human range of responses within a wider sphere of social connections. Like humans, each piece of driftwood tree collar is unique, resisting change while also bearing the evidence of its passage through space and over time. However, as an installation, the progressive arrangements of the subjects within the series also comments upon the experience (was place) of an individual in connection with others.

The driftwood clusters, patterns, and solitary images in Dis/Connect engage negative space — cracks in our social lives that can easily grow to crevices. But the points at which the driftwood meet suggest that by moving from solitude to connection, we can find solidarity, building strength and the possibility of more resilient communities. 

Bettina Harvey would like to acknowledge that she is living and working on the traditional unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, specifically the scəw̓aθən Tsawwassen First Nations.