Someone I'd like to work with... Part I

Yesterday I had the priveledge of finally reading some of the work of Carmella Gray-Cosgrove, one my oldest and dearest friends. From her adventures living in Egypt and Spain, to her cross-Canada bicycle journey, to her thesis research in the North West Territories, she's certainly an inspiration for any aspiring traveler, anthropologist or geographer. 


Sometimes I wonder if the way we were raised or the games we played as kids, for example, help build the people we are today, and the work we yearn to create as adults. Carmella's most recently published Active History article poetically analyzes both landscape representation and social or human geography throughout Canada's history (specifically, the Sahtu Region), topics often revisited within my own artistic practice. So Carmella, shall we collaborate? Want to work with a visual artist? You have my number.

Here's a passage from her article Picturing uranium, producing art: A.Y. Jackson’s Port Radium collection which I find particularly relevant to themes that I am exploring currently...

"Recently, Jackson and the Group of Seven have been criticized for painting Canada as a sublime ‘terra nullius’ (a land belonging to no one), 'a pristine, edenic expanse' (Bordo, 1997, p. 25)—notions that played a vital part in molding the now ubiquitous idea of a Canadian 'wild' (see Jasen, 1995; Bordo, 1997; Jessup, 1998 & 2002). By emptying Canada of (Indigenous) people, this wilderness ideal justified colonial expansion—after all, an unpeopled land cannot object to imperial domination; a wild land must be tamed. Structuring an imagined divide between nature and culture, primitive and civilized, north and south, a colonial wilderness ideology contributed to the dispossession of Indigenous people from all corners of the territory we now call Canada (see Jessup, 1998; O’Brian and White (eds.), 2007.)"