Landscape as Issues of Identity extended installation strategies into more sculptural forms in order to engage the viewer with experiences that related the body to site or location. Identity concepts focused on an emotional attachment to site in works such as Passageways; while Bridge played with relationships to place. Both works disrupt the audience’s initial assumptions. The unexpected mirrors are playful phenomena. They redirect the viewer to realize the passage is no longer about ‘corridor’, nor is the bridge about its function to connect. It is about where they are – and the photographic images of my own body within the works imply a relational transference of the experience of place.
Installations such as Desire and the Landscape and Authority is an Attribute, part II explored the complexities of land identification and ownership. Desire and the Landscape examined community pride in a rural, industrial paper mill town in northern Ontario in contrast to cosmopolitan tourist expectations, whereas Authority is an Attribute, part II focused on the unequal power relationships between First Nations people, the provincial government, and the logging and tourist industries.
Authority is an Attribute, part II was a collaboration with the Teme-Augama Anishnabai of Bear Island, designed to provide a visual forum for their land claim, and to address an urban, southern Ontario audience. The installation was designed with three components. The Game Players documents two businessmen in pin-stripe suits playing chess on a manicured lawn at the edge of a forest. Cautioned Homes and Gardens are mural-scale portraits of Teme-Augama Anishnabai band members montaged into a favourite site they selected within the contested landscape. The collage gesture is left apparent as a signifier of ‘re-placement’. Authority is an Attribute revealed life-sized photographic cut outs of confrontationally posed white urban professionals, inserted into the forest landscape. These figures stare out through binoculars, thus concealing their identity, while also giving the viewer a sense of being scrutinized. The figures cast 15 foot long canvas shadows out onto the gallery floor, covered with scripted definitions of authority, gamesmanship and ownership. To get a closer look at the photographs, the viewer has to step onto the shadows, becoming physically implicated in the work. Power relations and complicity with them were mapped out through gaze and gesture in each of the three components to form a complex set of narratives.