Mitch Mitchell’s new exhibition The Longing Focal (FAB Gallery, to Dec 5) was inspired by recent visits to the northern Alberta tar sands. But rather than the confrontational show you might expect to result from such an experience, it’s so quiet and introspective that it might take you a few moments to realize it’s even about the tar sands at all.

The show opens with a series of small black-and-white print works that could easily be mistaken for microscopic examinations of skin; as you wander deeper into the gallery, you’re confronted by similar but ever-larger images which resemble aerial shots of a strangely threatening landscape. Then comes the pièce de résistance: what appears to be another wall in the gallery with two knee-level peepholes (one with wind blowing aggravatingly into your eye) revealing more aerial views of an unsettling landscape.

From the gallery’s second floor, you can see the peephole wall is in fact “holding back” an entire room of landscaped sand whose relationship to the images in the peepholes is obscured but suggestive.

Mitchell created all the print works by manipulating and layering photographs of painstakingly created miniature model “landscapes” that manage to seem at once very large and very small; there is no obvious visual reference to the tar sands at all. He says he experienced the same the confusion of scale at the tar sands: “I sent the photos I had taken of the sands to my brother [a 3D animator], and he didn’t believe they were real, I knew I would have to make my own world which was more real, more tangible.”

An Illinois native, Mitchell says that when he came to this province, he was taken aback by Albertans’ lack of contact with the physical reality of our own surroundings. He’s amazed, for instance, that hardly anyone actually visits the tar sands.

Mitchell, meanwhile, is already thinking about a return visit. “Yes, definitely,” he says enthusiastically. “I plan to go back again before August, in five years, in 10 years. I will keep coming back.”