The Canadian north has long been southern Canada’s personal vision of an alien world. Mythologized as the setting for perilous exploratory journeys of self-discovery, and used for our claim to “the True North, strong and free,” the Arctic is nevertheless a place the south views as distinctly other.
Winnipeg artist Lynn Richardson’s installation, “Inter-glacial Free Trade Agency.ca,” currently on display at YYZ, exposes the danger of this view by visualizing a global-warming-ravaged arctic where the (currently icebound) Northwest Passage is open year-round. In Richardson’s bleak vision of an unspecified future, the North is uninhabited, but is decidedly not the untouched wilderness we think of today.
Amidst a flotsam of bubble wrap and broken reflective “NWP” markers (which count the nautical miles the opened Northwest Passage will save on shipping) an inflatable canoe hangs precariously from the ceiling, empty save for a collection of miniature plush diamanté reindeer. All is quiet except for the eerie creak of the neon-lit, Victorian-stylized oil jacks that cast a bluish glow over the room and offer no comfort. Everything but the jacks tilt in the melting ice, creating instead a sense of abandonment and toxicity.
The show is timely, as a flurry of global warming reports has put the Arctic in the news again. This show makes art of the news, and so connects with the viewer in a way news often can’t. If this were a show simply about pollution or global warming, it would be easy to convey the main idea. Throw some garbage around! Photoshop macaws into downtown Iqaluit!
Rather than telling us what we already know, Richardson’s art asks us to think about the way we think. In “Inter-glacial,” we are dealing with the uncanny, a venture into the otherworldly that nevertheless strikes a chord.
On the one hand, “Inter-glacial” takes aim at the easy target of laissez-faire government policies. However, the way the installation interacts with its viewers tells another story. Those oil jacks are motion-sensor activated, and the visitor must peer around the cascade of packaging to view a slide show of bungalows and gardens, walking into the frame of the installation itself. By requiring that the audience participate in the exhibition in order to see the warped Earth it imagines, Richardson reminds her viewers that we, sitting complacently in Toronto, are playing an active role in the unfolding ecological disaster. The real target here is our apathy over holding political leaders to account for their decisions, and, more importantly, over questioning our convenient assumptions.
Look to the Agency uniforms, white life preservers over mangy fur jackets. Alongside bundles of rope and the inflatable canoe, these uniforms suggest either an absurd authority or an outdoors store aesthetic run amok. Who are these courieurs du bois of tomorrow, peddling their glittering reindeer? Probably the same people you buy your backpacks from.
“Inter-glacial” asks us to question how preconceived notions of natural beauty-that is, real natural beauty, not some wishy-washy Dove campaign-might actually hinder our attempts to meet present environmental challenges. The show presents a perspective-an emminently reasonable one-in which every issue is an environmental issue.
That global warming has reached the point it has is evidence enough that not enough people are getting the point. We’d do well to continue repeating the questions “Inter-glacial” raises.
Inter-glacial Free Trade Agency.ca is on until February 24 at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, 401 Richmond Street W. For more info visit www.yyzartistsoutlet.org
