Surrey Art Gallery’s UrbanScreen returns with Nicolas Sassoon's mesmerizing pixel animations
The colourful artworks with sound capture the movement of water, light, wind, and air from seven key geographic sites in the city
Rendering of Nicolas Sassoon’s Serpentine River animation, part of the Liquid Landscapes series at the UrbanScreen site. Image courtesy Surrey Art Gallery
Surrey Art Gallery presents Liquid Landscapes at the Surrey City Centre Library facing Surrey Civic Plaza to February 23
SURREY ART GALLERY’S UrbanScreen is coming to new life with Nicolas Sassoon’s Liquid Landscapes.
Projected on a large screen on the Surrey City Centre Library facing Surrey Civic Plaza, the colourful pixel animations with sound capture the movement of water, light, wind, and air from seven key geographic sites around the city: Serpentine River, Redwood Park, Crescent Beach, Nicomekl River, Boundary Bay, Serpentine Fen, and the Fraser River.
“One of our mandates is to try and create a connection between the artwork and the place—in art we call it site-specificity,” says the show’s curator, Rhys Edwards, Surrey Art Gallery assistant curator. “We try to show projects that have some kind of meaningful connection with Surrey whether it’s the geography or people who work here or the history or culture… With Liquid Landscapes, we really wanted to bring that forward because it has that really deep connection with Surrey.”
The artwork illustrates patterns of natural phenomena likely to be found at each site, such as the undulating motion of waves upon the beach, raindrops falling onto still bodies of water, the reflection of light, and the growth of plants through the seasons.
The exhibition begins 30 minutes after sunset and ends at midnight. Each of the seven animations will be displayed on a different night of the week and is accompanied by audio responses created by local music producers and sound artists specifically commissioned for the project, including Yu Su (You’re Me), J.S. Aurelius (Ascetic House), Jean Brazeau, Scott Woodworth, Baby Blue (s.M.i.L.e), Venetta (NuZi Collective), and x/o.
The colours of each animation are derived from a single found photograph of each location. Gradually, each scene morphs from a documentarian record of a real place to a total abstraction, to the point where it’s no longer obvious what the subject originally was.
Drawing from the pixelated look of early web design, the project alludes to how screen-based technologies distance us from reality and captures the tensions underlying the continuum between reality, nature, place-making, and picture-making.
“Liquid Landscapes is also a showcase of what’s possible with the digital medium,” Edwards says. “We’ve always tried to showcase digital art and new-media art, and Sassoon is one of leading artists in this field in Canada. He has a particularly nuanced approached to digital animation in that he’s trying to capture the essence of each of these different places. For instance, the animation for the Fraser River has this purple colour scheme with beautiful reds and golds and those are meant to represent the lights of the buildings along the Fraser River being reflected on the surface of the river at night. As you watch these lights ripple and flow, it’s a very beautiful animation in itself—quite mesmerizing. As the animation plays it begins to shift and change and moves from a more realistic kind of space into a more abstract kind of space. As it shifts it’s capturing the lingering feeling of a place.”
Liquid Landscapes is accompanied by an essay by Edwards as part of Surrey Art Gallery Presents, an online publication series that features commentary and criticism of specially commissioned artworks, site-specific projects, and exhibitions organized by Surrey Art Gallery.
The artwork was previously shown in 2018 and has since been acquired as part of the gallery’s permanent collection. 
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