SEE Magazine, June. 2001
by Gilbert A. Bouchard

Viewpoint Ahead
by Femke van Delft
at The Works Visual Arts Festival
June 23-July 5, 2001

It1s hard not to get the "point" of Femke van Delft1s brand-new installation, Viewpoint Ahead, nestled across the 102nd Street Centre from Williams1 stylized creek bed. The energetic artist has created a vast topography - a landscape of ideas you might say - from thousands of sharpened pencils of different lengths framed by delicate streamers of pencil shavings.

If you think it was incredibly time-consuming and tedious to construct this intricate work, you1d be right. "I1d make more money working for Nike in a sweatshop," joked the artist the week before the June 23 launch of her installation, relishing the exquisite pleasure of an artistic concept well constructed.

When asked to intellectually encompass her piece, van Delft explained her process sets out to underline intellectual and emotional connections. From globalism to the image of a "language map" (her "topographical map" is constructed with the implement by which we record the traces of language), the images and ideas flood out of van Delft, an artist as inclusive in her energy as the subject matter of her work. "This is the internal landscape we all have to navigate," concludes van Delft. "The pencils used in this piece were chosen to draw the viewer into the work, evoking both the backward pull of memory and that forward movement of creation."