In Christiane Pooley's works, waterfalls, ponds, wheat fields, and highways are recurring themes, their precise locations and temporalities unknown, and dark undercurrents hidden beneath the seemingly peaceful landscapes. The Araucanía region of Chile, where the artist was born and raised, has long been a breeding ground for complex tensions. Conflicts between indigenous people (predominantly Mapuche) and the Chilean government intensified at the end of the 19th century when the Chilean government took over their land and forcibly reclassified them as Chilean citizens. Before that, they had been fighting Spanish colonizers for over 300 years. The tension over land ownership and the hidden past of the Araucanía region she depicts gives her work a deceptively calm beauty. At what moment does a landscape represent nature, extraction and production, a repository of collective memories, or a homeland never to return to?

These questions are encoded in Pooley's paintings, which always start from and return to these archetypal images. One such archetype is the dreamlike hut floating alone on the water's surface. This is not an imagery of a dream but rather a nomadic dwelling style from southern Chile. Locals gather to help neighbors move their houses collectively in response to changes in environment and family life. This ritual of communal reciprocity from Andean cultural tradition is known as Minga, or Mink'a, and it contradicts the spirit of modernity on many levels. This kind of dislocation and paradox are at the core of the artist's images. The scenes are drawn from the artist's own photography, family albums, or Chile's national historical archives. They are specific yet ambiguous landscapes, rich with ineffable psychological undertones. The cascading waterfall cut off by a large color block, with a reclining male figure of uncertain fate at its bottom; a group of horseback riders crossing an abstract glacier-like zone, under an upside-down suspended volcano—all the figurative depictions occur in the crevice between two large intertwined color blocks.

Gallery address: 807, K11 Atelier Victoria Dockside, 18 Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui