This artist's studio is anywhere she can park her trailer

Inside the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, you'll find a record of Julya Hajnoczky's wild pandemic year. The exhibition, on to April 20, features recent selections from the Calgary-based artist's ongoing project, "portraits of ecosystems" that she captures with a photographic scanner. 

On the surface, each image is an assemblage of organic bits and bobs that she's gathered from a specific location in western Canada — a tangle of seagrass from Pacific Rim National Park or sprigs of flowers picked near the coulees in southern Alberta. But there's an element of fantasy too, as her field samples appear to be unaffected by gravity, suspended in an inky void like deserted islands floating in limbo. 

Hajnoczky describes the effect as being even more striking when the images appear as matte prints. (At the Whyte, the largest selections are 54 inches tall.) "I'm not necessarily an optimistic person when it comes to where environmental problems are going," she says. "They feel to me like post-apocalyptic little landscapes — like this is what is left behind after we blow the whole thing up."

To make the works, Hajnoczky travels alone, setting up camp to explore and document the wilderness around her. In effect, her studio is wherever she can park her custom trailer, "a plywood box on wheels" that she's dubbed the Al Fresco Science Machine. Just big enough for a queen-sized bed and her equipment, it's served as a mobile lab/home/maker space since she got it road-ready four years ago. 

"Ever since then, I've spent a good chunk of the spring, summer, fall just travelling around western Canada and studying all these different ecosystems that I visit," she says.

"Building it became this really liberating kind of exercise, because now I can travel anywhere. There's just something about being able to hitch it up and get out and have everything that I need to just go explore the world." And despite the doom and gloom that underpins her work, when she reflects on the Whyte Museum show, she sees the proof of an unusually fortunate 2020.

"I had a really productive year," she says. "For me, as long as inter-provincial travel wasn't being really frowned upon, I was able to travel pretty safely and just keep working." 

At Grasslands National Park in southern Saskatchewan, she says she spent a week captivated by the scenery at her feet, marvelling at how one lichen-dappled rock is never the same as the next one. On Vancouver Island, she was hunting for precious tufts of moss, among other things. (Hajnoczky notes that she sticks to "ethical foraging practices," leaving rare or endangered specimens be, and always collecting as little as possible. Depending on park rules, as well, she often brings things back to where she found them.)

"I can, through an art practice, really share my excitement about [nature] — or just a fascination for how beautiful something might be, or how interesting it is that certain elements in an ecosystem are connected or live together or work together."

"I think my biggest goal with this body of work is to start exploring a little further east," she says, but for 2021, her journeys will keep her closer to home, as she's scheduled a few artist residencies, including a stay at the Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre in Medicine Hat, AB. Still, her Al Fresco Science Machine is ready to go whenever she is.

"I've lived in the city my whole life, but I really just like being alone in the forest," she says. "I'll get out whenever I get a chance, for sure." 

Take a closer look at her work.

Julya Hajnoczky. To April 20 at  the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, AB. www.explore.whyte.org.