IDYLL

2019 to present

Idyll responds a series of etchings in the collection of the New Brunswick Museum by American artists Stephen Parrish and Charles Platt. In the early 1880s, Parrish and Platt visited Saint John, New Brunswick – then, as now, a heavily industrialized port city. Their etchings, however, depict Saint John as a coastal idyll, with fisherfolk tending nets and small boats along a quaint, pre-industrial shoreline. I created a large-scale painting for the group exhibition HARBOUR (curator: Amy Ash) that re-staged one of Parrish’s works, conducting a 360-degree landscape survey from the same vantage point as one of his historical etchings. Movable screens allow only some portions of the painting to be seen. The audience is invited to adjust these screens to access unseen portions of the work. I would also intervene at regular intervals (re)adjust the screens to their ‘designated’ place. I am looking to draw attention both to the authority and potential bias of the creator, and also to the agency and potential biases of the viewer. I hope also to raise questions about what is unseen in an image, how and why certain aspects of our landscape are included or omitted. 

This project is ongoing. My current research and studio work continues to investigate historical representations of Maritime landscape in art, questioning the role of historical representations in crafting current social attitudes towards manufactured/industrialized landscape, how nostalgia for an imagined or idealized historical landscape impacts current regional identity, and how notions of the historical ‘Folk’ manifest in my own identity. 

This project has been supported by Canada Council for the Arts and ArtsNB.