Under every stretch of highway lies the memory of a landscape.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My artistic practice investigates the notion of Progress. Harkening back to Henry Ford’s utopian desire to have a “car in every driveway,” I use the automobile as a metaphor for Progress. My current studio practice consists of dismembering and reconfiguring cars into sculptural assemblages that I can carry on my back. By inverting the relationship of human to automobile, I am questioning this notion of Progress.
My sculptural assemblages reference modes and accessories of transportation used during the opening of the Western Frontier: canoes, dogsleds, knapsacks, walking sticks, and snowshoes. These objects are then portaged, dragged, or carried along early fur trade routes. During these car-carrying performances, the waterways and trade routes of this historic period stand in as the forefathers to our current system of highways, freeways, and overpasses.
Ford Explorer takes a lone but valiant figure with a Windshield Wiper Tent and Side Mirror Musket into epic vistas of Northern Ontario. Trail-blazing through areas historically connected with the French River fur trade, the Explorer drags his survival gear heroically through these sublime wildernesses forcing us to ask questions about how we will survive once the Fordian Empire finally collapses.
Documenting these rugged voyages with large-scale photography, my work depicts a nostalgic attitude towards the wilderness, and a romantic belief in the dream of the Western Frontier. I believe that these colonial attitudes remain with us today, underpinning our desire for the freedom and romance of the open road.
NATURAL ARTIFICE By Dayna McLeod
Featuring photographs and an installation, Elinor Whidden charges head-on into deconstructing and assembling nature through artifice, representation, kitsch farce, consumption criticism and epic landscape in her exhibition. Elinor Whidden inserts herself into Canada’s heroic frontier history to circumvent and transform it into a post-apocalyptic future that quietly waits for car culture to die.
Elinor Whidden maximizes the breathtaking reality of nature and capitalizes on the authentic Canadian landscape within her series, Ford Explorer. Whidden subverts the automobile industry’s agenda by imagining its demise, as it mysteriously disappears into Canada’s bucolic landscapes leaving behind only innocuous remnants. Windshield wipers, side-view mirrors, and the steel belting in tires are the only things left to scar Whidden’s sublime wilderness. Her questioning of the colonialist practice of recording history in grandiose portraits of explorers and settlers gazing proprietarily over the landscape parallels the domination of the automotive industry over our contemporary car consumer culture.
Within her sculptural, performance and photographic work, Whidden questions colonialist representations of history and humanity’s conquest over nature by infiltrating the very scenes she depicts with the ultimate symbol of progress: the car, or more specifically, car parts. Carrying, dragging and portaging windshield wipers deep into the Canadian wilderness in knapsacks, Whidden follows the fur trade routes of early trappers, traders and explorers to create Windshield Wiper Tent deep in the wilderness of northern Ontario. Whidden’s lean-to shelter becomes a farcical, ineffective, obsessive accumulation of car parts of the past in a post-apocalyptic future where nature has regained control, featuring Whidden as the sole survivor. The contradiction in function cannot be lost on us here: both cumbersome and useless without the context of a car, windshield wipers carried in a backpack become a satirical adventure in endurance with the resulting Windshield Wiper Tent nestled in the open landscape our reward. As the car industry slips into bankruptcy”i and driving habits change, a future without cars may in fact be realized within our lifetime, and Whidden’s prophetic wish of such a future may actually come true.
Capturing big skies, epic vistas, dense wilderness and the natural magnitude of the Canadian landscape, Whidden situates herself in her images simultaneously as an historical figure and a post-apocalyptic explorer. At first glance, we are drawn to the epic proportions of Whidden’s images; Sunny Lake Ridge grandly showcases the vastness of the deep blue skies peppered with soft billowing clouds, while Smoke Lake and Georgian Bay feature a confident, masterful figure gazing over a rough and rugged landscape. The formal composition and feeling of vastness is reminiscent of paintings of the Canadian wilderness by the Group of Seven, Tom Thomson and Paul Kane. These paintings reflect a late 19th and early 20th century Romantic dream of a new frontier and a humble attitude toward the majesty of nature in the untouched landscapes of the Canadian wilds. When we examine Whidden’s photographs more closely, we see anachronistic details that lead us to ask questions that complicate a seemingly colonialist depiction of our conquerable country. Questions arise about time, place, car culture, consumption and how we will survive when the last vehicle fails to start.
Dressed in t-shirt and cargo pants, Whidden strikes a slight pose in the traditional colonialist position, making post-apocalyptic man, a woman. Challenging the narrative structure and accuracy of our Canadian history and how we create narrative out of our collective memories, Whidden’s lone figure travels through the epic vistas of northern Ontario in both the distant past and distant future. Armed with a musket fashioned with a car’s side-mirror, our heroine can see her past as readily as she sees her future, and guards against it.
Whidden cleverly references colonialist ideals mirrored in car industry rhetoric that we are bombarded with daily through television, print, and web-branding propaganda; “built for the open road”ii, “moving forward”iii and “no boundaries”iv are slogans that attempt to position the car as a means of escape, freedom and adventure, and propose that you can just as easily experience nature by looking at it from the comfort of your car as you can by experiencing it first hand. Car windows and windshields act as mediators between a visceral or authentic experience of nature, allowing drivers to assume their rightful place as colonizers and to dominate the landscape simply by driving through it.
It seems fitting, then, that Whidden’s occupation of this industrialist/colonialist position within her work should occur in her fantasy of its demise. Her photographs are documents of a process of her own exploration of colonialist representations of Canada, history, nature, conquest, and consumption. The resulting performances ambitiously take a road less travelled through the act of walking, while playfully satirizing a romanticized new frontier and a modern day car culture that is trying desperately not to fall apart.
Dayna McLeod’s essay was commissioned by Gallery 44 and first published in their exhibition catalogue Natural Artifice.
i Campbell, Colin, “The Decline of the North American Car,” Maclean’s, 12/1/2008, Vol. 121, Issue 47.
ii 2004 Ford slogan
iii 2004 Toyota slogan
iv 2001 Ford SUV slogan
