/ARCHIVE — 2011
/Main Space
/Elinor whidden - ford explorer
|
  |
/exhibition informationFabricated from scavenged car parts, Elinor Whidden’s sculptural assemblages reference modes and accessories of transportation used during the opening of the Western Frontier: canoes, dogsleds, knapsacks, walking sticks, and snowshoes. These objects are then portaged, dragged, or carried along early fur trade routes where the waterways and footpaths of this historic period stand in as the forefathers to our current system of highways and over-passes. Whidden’s work depicts a nostalgic attitude towards the wilderness and a romantic belief in the dream of the Western Frontier, and prompts us to ask questions about how we will survive once the Fordian empire finally collapses. back to top/Artist BioELINOR WHIDDEN’s multi-disciplinary art practice has become a quest to survive and adapt in a world increasingly threatened by contemporary car culture. Whidden received a BA in Canadian/Environmental Studies from Trent University, a BFA from NSCAD University and a MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo. back to top/Exhibition Text/ELINOR WHIDDEN: STAGING THE IRONIC SUBLIME Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, it is about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play. Elinor Whidden brings together the powerful myth of the frontier with the refuse of contemporary car culture to seriously play with notions of wilderness, a distinct Canadian Art History, and progress. Four 28 x 42” wood-framed colour photographs documenting the artist posed in a landscape with the sculptural assemblages accompany the installation of Windshield Wiper Tent and Side Mirror Musket. Upon first glance, the photographic documents and sculptural installations fit into a powerful myth-making megalith, replete with familiar images of the Group of Seven’s Canadian Shield topography: gentle sloping hills disappear into an isolated background, pine trees frame the foreground, and lakes intersect the midground between. Solid bedrock forms the stage upon which the figure of Whidden stands, gazing out at the scene. These distinctive landscape features are matched with technological prosthetics that conjure the historical imaginary of progress—a tent and a musket. And yet, the iconographic obsession that finds Whidden re-staging these powerful myths is also the ironic play that finds her salvaging the discarded relics of car culture. Whidden’s practice is organized around scavenging familiar car parts and refashioning them into forms one might find in an iconic Paul Kane painting: Whidden uses tire skins shed by trucks that land on the sides of highways to build oversized and unwieldy snowshoes. She collects discarded mirrors and windshield wipers from automobile scrap yards to build walking sticks, modified muskets, or the skeleton framework needed to build tent structures. An aesthetic and historical toil is at the heart of her working process and social commentary. In earlier works Whidden disassembled a car by breaking it into pieces shaped like canoes, knapsacks, paddles and a dogsled that she then carried on her back while following the eight mile portage path around Niagara Falls. This effort demarcates a space of performance for opposing and celebrating both past and present, iconic and ironic, wilderness and industry: she brings these diametrically opposed concepts together into an unresolvable whole. The sculptures used in staging her photographs fit into a history of Canadian Art and a modernist painting tradition populated by “rugged virility and hard work”. 2 Two narratives of Canadian landscape are joined in her work in interesting ways: the construction of landscape as pristine, and the construction of landscape as ‘roaded’. Whidden’s work suggests it is not so easy to find pure truth or pure fiction in a Canadian landscape: even fictions have real effects. RE-STAGING the Pristine At a time when Canadian artists and scholars are trying to reanimate ideas of landscape with habitation and presence, Whidden re-stages iconic images from a history of Canadian Art in order to address the wilderness imaginary that she is both attracted to and subsequently compelled to challenge. Whidden mediates this landscape and history, bearing witness with her body and with salvaged and repurposed car parts transformed into sculptural assemblages. Whidden embodies the historically positioned and celebrated role of the explorer, fur trader, or guide found in the history of landscape painting in Canada from Cornelius Kreighoff to Paul Kane. The re-staging of something that has been, (as something recognizable in a Canadian Art History), and never was, (as an exaggerated construction, and a studio creation by Kane and others), is part of the tension of a cultural imaginary that Whidden exposes. Therefore, Whidden’s photographs are not simply playful re-enactments revealing history’s construction, rather they are a powerful emotional signifier and embodiment of history’s impossibility: historical events always exceed our documentations of them, and we can never perfectly return to either events or the origins of iconic representations. Roaded landscapes 1 Haraway, Donna & Thyrza Goodeve. How Like a Leaf: An interview with Donna Haraway. Routledge. 2000. 2 Reid, Dennis. A concise history of Canadian Painting 2nd edition. Oxford University Press. 1988. back to top/writer bio/TRUDI LYNN SMITH brings anthropology, art and curatorial practice to bear on her studies of Canadian National Parks. She holds an interdisciplinary PhD in the Departments of Anthropology and Visual Arts from the University of Victoria and has recently taken up a SSHRC Post-Doctoral position at York University. back to top |
|
