Statement: Northern Exposure

In January and February of this year I spent 6 weeks at the Ted Harrison Artists' Retreat located in the isolated community of Crag Lake 90 km outside of Whitehorse in the Yukon. During the residency I began work on a series of paintings depicting a romanticized landscape embedded with uneasiness; I was hoping to capture the 'eerie sublime' of the North. Ruminating on our conflicting relationship with nature and our hesitant acceptance of the fact that our actions and psychology are intrinsically linked to and affecting the natural balance of our planet, the scenes read like giant cell-animation stills caught in equivocal motion and time.

Statement for the painting: Too Much of a Good Thing

In the blur of our fast paced techno-reality, urbanites are yearning for a lost spirituality that is experienced in the "wilds". Because of this, I was hyper-aware of my own experience and interpretations of the idyllic environs of the Residency. "Too much of a good thing" is an ironic meditation based on the photographs and mental images I took during my daily snowshoe treks around the lake. My almost stupid exuberance of being unleashed in this visually stunning white paradise was oddly juxtaposed with the CBC radio Yukon news coverage of the thousands of bunnies being relocated from UVIC to a Texan animal sanctuary.

"Too much of a good thing" is as much about human psychology pertaining to greed, vanity, and obsessiveness, as it is about environmentalism. We often don't recognize a problem until it is out of control, or we see the problem as 'cute.' If we are sluggish in our response to the warning signs, things fall into a feedback loop with the problem multiplying faster than breeding rabbits.

Video/Performance Work

The residency at THARS afforded me the isolation, inspiration and locale to work on a number of outdoor video/performance works entitled: "Why go to India?", "Mind-over-Matter Marathon", "Disappearing Act", and "Canada Shame Stance". These vignettes are concerned with the drive to engage in fanatical ritual in "the Wild" to reach a state of transcendence. I am fascinated by the current trend of Yoga and other marketed mind-body retreats which have urbanites seeking meaning and equilibrium. In the Yukon, the obsession with experiencing the extraordinary lies in the personal conquering of the extreme environment, and competitors flock here from around the world to participate in the Quest, the Arctic Games and other races that test the limits of human endurance. These videos are the culmination of these objectives. However, re-contextualized and endlessly repeating they seem contrived and ridiculous. Or do they in some strange way realize their purpose?

These videos are meant to be projected simultaneously on four walls of a closed space, with "Why go to India?" and "Canada Shame Stance" playing opposite each other and "Disappearing Act" and "Mind-over-Matter" opposite, and with all four soundtracks synchronously audible.