Past Desire Catches the Cloaked Present
This installation explores a breach between the picturesque and the grotesque. Three medium-format photographic prints feature a long-abandoned sawmill, situated in a typically-romanticized coastal landscape, along the remote coast of British Columbia: an old dilapidated dock, cabin, and a boat visibly reference the working past of this regenerating land. One large-format print on the wall depicts a beehive burner, which had fueled the operations of this small mill. Two large-format dye sublimation prints on translucent taffeta hang in nearby windows: one figuring a hummingbird, and the other a circular graphic with radiating spokes – the shape visible from inside the burner, when looking up. This internal view is doubled in a video projection that serves to animate as well as also physically pull the viewer toward the circular shape as clouds pass overhead: innocent, ominous.
The grotesque is what we do not see: caught by the flickering light, incapable of escaping once inside the burner – a trap for hundreds of hummingbirds for a brief period each summer. A voracious, industrial past, now cloaked in the picturesque.
4. Night view of window installation from Past Desire Catches the Cloaked Present at the Centre for Fine Print Research, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK, 2009.
5. Window installation from Past Desire Catches the Cloaked Present at the Centre for Fine Print Research, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK, 2009.
9. Waldon's Sawmill #3, Baronet Passage , Broughton Archipelago BC , 66 x 91.4 cm (26 x 36”), digital archival pigment print , 2008-09.
8. Waldon's Sawmill #2, Baronet Passage , Broughton Archipelago BC , 66 x 91.4 cm (26 x 36”), digital archival pigment print , 2008-09.
6. Beehive Burner, Baronet Passage, Broughton Archipelago BC, 111.75 x 161.3 cm ( 44 x 63.5”) , digital archival pigment print, 2008-09.
7. Waldon's Sawmill #1, Baronet Passage , Broughton Archipelago BC , 66 x 91.4 cm (26 x 36”), digital archival pigment print , 2008-09.
3. Burner Spokes, 1 of 2 window panels in Past Desire Catches the Cloaked Present, 206.5 x 283 (81.3 x 111.5”), dye sublimation print, 2009. Installation at the Centre for Fine Print Research, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.
1. Pressure of the Past, 111.8 x 44.5cm (44 x 17.5”), digital archival pigment print, 2010-12.
2. Hummingbird, I of 2 window panels in Past Desire Catches the Cloaked Present, 161.5 x 282 cm (63.5 x 111”), dye sublimation print, 2009. Installation at the Centre for Fine Print Research, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.