FOLKLAND

2023-2024

Folkland is a project that responds a 1985 exhibition at Dalhousie Art Gallery, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, that featured landscape works by American artists Stephen Parrish (1846-1938) and Charles Platt (1861-1933). 

I visited and recreated/reinterpreted some of the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia sites depicted by Parrish and Platt.  I intentionally altered, blurred, rearranged, and omitted sections of my own paintings to create a ‘super’ landscape (or mythical ‘Folkland’).  I wanted to think about the implications of the artist’s perspective in the creation of Maritime identity, and to suggest the importance of a viewer’s perspective and their own agency to see, interpret, and reimagine the landscape from their own vantage point.

This project was supported by the New Brunswick Arts Board (artsnb).