Sudbury is the largest and oldest example in Canada of what the German film director Werner Herzog once called “an ugly mining town.” Years of landscape remediation have softened the harshest visible consequences of mining, but many people have lingering memories of bitter strikes and an apocalyptic, de-vegetated landscape. Pamela Nelson explicitly aligns her exhibition with the city’s industrial identity, but her sculptural works in clay, wood, and rope bear no obvious visual or material resemblance to the sights of Sudbury; in fact, their unifying and harmonious white and tan tones would not be out of place in contemporary interior design. And yet, the work has everything to do with Sudbury. The city has imbued Nelson with a powerful aesthetic – a form of Brutalism closer to the original, Late Modern movement than to its current, modish revival. Nelson’s approach combines a frank materiality with an overarching fascination with cause and effect, leading her to make works that vigorously demonstrate processes and material properties and make them intellectually accessible, even self-evident. It’s not surprising that the artist titles her sculptures with verbs, placing them directly in the conceptual/minimalist tradition of Lee Lozano’s Verb paintings and Richard Serra’s Verb List.

A spirit of experimentation guides the artist’s work, a speculative “how would it look if I did this” logic, along with the commitment to work through multiple iterations to arrive at a perfect resolution. It is a particular strength

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