Exhibit A Photography From Atlantic Canada

Exhibit A
Photography From Atlantic Canada
Prefix Photo Magazine, November 2004

by Scott Mcleod

... the private experience, if articulated with skill, may communicate an appeal that is universal beyond the limitations of time or landscape.
- Alistair MacLeod

Accounts of growing up in, inhabiting, leaving and returning to Atlantic Canada bear witness to a fierce and, at times, inexplicable grip of the place upon its people. They do so through the oral history transmitted from generation to generation, the personal testimony of expatriate East Coasters and the stories of authors such as Alistair MacLeod. Such firm attachment demonstrates that the character of the place and its inhabitants are inextricably entwined, inseparable. As one might expect, the art that emerges from this region is as diverse and varied as the land and the sea, and is subtly distinct from the work produced in the rest of Canada.

Exhibit A features the work of nine artists whose lives and artistic practices originated in the Atlantic provinces. While all of these artists approach photography in individual and idiosyncratic ways, their work has been indelibly imprinted by their East Coast experience. Often eschewing romantic notions of the sea and rejecting the traditional genre of seascape photography, these artists shift their gazes from the sea to the land. In so doing, they examine constructions in the landscape that, whether for habitation, worship, industry or leisure, offer evidence of life in the region, past and present. Yet life on the shore is inescapably linked to the sea. When people are perched on the edge of an abyss, they unsurprisingly develop a fervent devotion to the ground beneath their feet. As if in response to the eternal and monumental force of the sea, these artists focus on traces of human presence that, by contrast, appear fleeting and inconsequential.

Paulette Phillips's The Floating House is a video installation that depicts a typical late-nineteenth-century wooden dwelling adrift in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia. The odd incongruence of a house floating upon the sea results in a breathtaking image that is at once strikingly surreal and strangely evocative. In successive shots, the house moves in and out of the frame, accompanied by the entrancing sounds of lapping waves and the ghostly echoes of domestic bustle. Over time, surrealism gives way to reality; the water encroaches upon and ultimately overcomes the house as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

Situated within a larger body of work that includes photography, film and video installations, The Floating House was inspired by the historic practice of relocating coastal dwellings by sea and was specifically modelled on a house that was built in Mahone Bay in the 1890s and subsequently floated to Sambro, Nova Scotia. This uncommon procedure becomes an apt metaphor for the artist's choice to move away from her place of birth, with the associated feelings of dislocation and loss.

Relocation by sea continued until the 1960s, when the latest social engineering strategies led to the removal of port families from Newfoundland's outlying coastal villages to new "serviced" communities. Scott Walden's Unsettled is an extensive series of silver prints that creatively document the traces of abandoned communities and the signs of previous habitation that still dot Newfoundland's rugged coast. In these images, the viewer literally witnesses the decline and erosion of the past and, through extrapolation, observes the conflict between a traditional way of life and current notions of efficiency and progress.

Steve Payne's House Music, a series of colour photographs, emerged from the activity of restoring an unoccupied family home in Harbour Grace, Newfoundland. Through the depiction of subtle details that emphasize the play of light, colour and texture, Payne dispenses with a factual representation of the contents of the house to expose its underlying quality and character. In so doing, he animates the house and makes manifest the presence of its occupants, past and present. Viewed in relation to more traditional or documentarian work, House Music contributes to a sense of historical continuity, bringing the physical evidence of the lost past into the lived experience of the present.

Also bringing traces of the past into the present, Lorraine Field projected images of ceramic fragments onto granite rocks in the Canadian landscape and photographed the results. Her Illuminated Petragraphs employ decorative details from Chinese, Japanese, English, French, German and Italian ceramics photographed along shipping and rail lines that served as migration and transportation routes for some of Canada's major historical immigrant populations. Informed by the archaeological practice of researching patterns of migration through the recovery of ceramic fragments, the work also makes reference to the role of women in the work of relocation, settlement and the building of a home.

In an ongoing series of silver prints titled Common Prayer, John Haney documents the vernacular religious architecture of Atlantic Canada and parts of Maritime Quebec. This typological survey combines comprehensive documentation with formal aestheticization to create a work that expresses both shared conventions and distinct individuality. Here, one learns "to read differences in composition, rhythm and formal solutions where an ordinarily distracted eye would see only indifference and standardisation."1 As in the work of his influential precursors Bernd and Hilla Becher, Haney's disciplined approach to a single subject ultimately heightens the perception of subtle, individual differences. In a work that combines Haney's formal rigour with Walden's desire to document for posterity, Ned Pratt offers a series of colour photographs of Newfoundland's biscuit-box houses -modest, rectangular, two-storey dwellings that were once ubiquitous. The series extends his impulse, cultivated in his earlier series The Garbage Project and intensified by his experience as a commercial photographer, to collect, preserve and transform the ephemeral.

Marlene Creates's work Water Flowing to the Sea Captured at the Speed of Light is a series of four monumental photographic diptychs. In contrast to much of her previous work, which was based on the experience of travel, this series was photographed behind her home in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland. Here, the transient is the Blast Hole Pond River, which flows through her property into the nearby Atlantic Ocean. These images offer seasonal views of the freshwater stream, paired with an assemblage of "self-portraits" taken from beneath the water's surface. Through the simple exchange of viewing the river and the river returning her gaze, the artist contrasts the material and the fluid, the delicate and the dramatic, and the infinite and the evanescent in a complex meditation on mortality and the passage of time.

In his photographic series At Leisure, Scott Conarroe creatively documents playgrounds, parks, beaches, fields, rinks, pools - those areas formally designated for the self-conscious pursuit of leisure activities. Specifically, the images represent locations that are set aside from the day-to-day experience of work or domestic life. Noting that "down time" is now subject to the exigencies of corporate capitalism (time is to be "consumed" with the goal of "producing" fitness, rest, etc.), the artist photographs sites that are fenced in or otherwise apportioned in a way that appears to be a physical manifestation of time-management principles. The artist also notes that the rules and regulations for the use of recreation sites are similar to those governing many work sites, and perhaps this was the inspiration for his subsequent work, Average Pictures, a series that depicts industrial, construction, parking and other transitional or in-between spaces in Halifax.

Shifting from urban constructions to massive international industrial works, Thaddeus Holownia presents Anatomy of a Pipeline, an extensive series of photographs that, while explicitly documenting the laying of the Sable Gas Pipeline from the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia through the artist's home province of New Brunswick to the border of the United States, implicitly comments on the effects of human endeavour on the natural environment. Repeatedly, the sense of the picturesque conveyed by a verdant expanse of forest, a lush riverbed or a natural vista at dusk is interrupted by evidence of human activity, at times ambiguous, surreal or absurd. In this way, Holownia shares with the other artists represented herein a sense, shaped by the experience of a small populace living for generations in an isolated region by the sea, of the landscape as monumental and eternal. As Holownia has stated - and it could be applied to Exhibit A as a whole - "my work [is] about the passage of time in the landscape."3

Notes
The epigraph is taken from Alistair MacLeod, "The Closing Down of Summer," in As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986): 21.

1 Thierry de Duve, Bernd and Hilla Becher: Basic Forms (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1999): 15-16.
2 Thaddeus Holownia, quoted in Robert Enright, "Anatomically Correct," in Anatomy of a Pipeline (Sackville, N.B.: Owens Art Gallery, 2003): 8.