Relatively Remote
Relatively Remote
Terra nullius is an ancient Roman legal term meaning empty territory. It infl uenced the early European colonizers, who construed the New World as an uncultivated wilderness. But of course the land was inhabited by people—people who were eventually exploited and marginalized thanks to such paradigms. In these days of climate change, however, as we struggle with our ongoing history of colonialism and the rightful demands of Aboriginal Canadians for compensation following their mangled land grants, attitudes toward nature are shifting away from the European urge for sublime adventure and toward a more culturally complex and politically pregnant understanding.
E. J. Lightman and Anne O’Callaghan, the founding curators of the Tree Museum, do not overintellectualize their outdoor art gallery, stating pragmatically that “The Tree Museum Collective was formed in 1997 in response to an opportunity to create site-specific artworks in a relatively remote region of Ontario, and includes both waterfront and forest.” But there is passion embedded in these simple statements. It is significant that the land has been preserved from development. The Mississauga-based Mentor College owns the land, and uses it to teach nature studies and orienteering skills. Both Mentor College and the Tree Museum demonstrate a gentle stewardship, an understanding that people and nature are not so divided after all.
Situated in Muskoka, a few hours’ drive from Toronto on the cottager-congested highway, this outdoor art gallery is a stunning spot. As a companion of mine put it, “There is nothing more beautiful than granite, moss and lichen, except possibly pools of water and clouds.” There are multiple challenges for artists working in a site of pristine loveliness: it is too easy to be intrusive, to be saccharine, to project, posture and create a silly spectacle of pseudo-shamanistic, earth-motherish, culturally appropriative fetish objects made from leaves and twigs. Lightman and O’Callaghan are savvy curators, and over the years, as the Tree Museum has grown, these issues have been addressed with an increasing degree of subtlety and sophistication.
For the organization’s tenth anniversary in 2007, the Tree Museum hosted a large and impressive exhibition by the 11-person Toronto collective Persona Volare. Wen-Chih Wang of Taiwan, Jaffa Laam Lam of Hong Kong and the Canadians Michael Belmore, Noel Harding and Lightman also created permanent installations that will join the museum’s growing collection of sitespecific works by Tim Whiten, Gwen MacGregor, Francis LeBouthillier and many others.
The opening was well attended. Mid-September is a particularly poignant time for tramping around outside. The sun was low and slanting: puffy yet darkening clouds scudded in the sky. Luckily the day was blessed with only a few spells of occasional light rain, benign soft showers that glinted in the sun and dried quickly in a slightly biting breeze. It was a unique art event, involving exercise, butter tarts and the opportunity to wander in the woods.
The Persona Volare collective has been mounting big group shows since the year 2000. In the beginning, their rambling exhibitions would hang together in a gangly jumble, not linked by content, theme or media. Over the years, however, a shared sensibility has emerged: ironic but not cynical, fun but not frivolous, with a careful consideration for the meanings of materials and, without wanting to make them sound too adult, a strong sense of artistic integrity. Each of these artists is in their own way ambitious, supported in their hard work and discernment by the open-ended welcome that the group extends to audiences as well as to its members.
Muskoka is the landscape most associated with the Group of Seven and is one of the references we have responded to. If a group of seven artists can do it, why can’t eleven?
—Persona Volare artist statement
This was no blurry-boundaried relational-art party. Each artist was firmly the author of his or her own endeavours. And yet Persona Volare is social, and its members have invested in the project as a communicative, collaborative practice. Clambering along one of the trails that leads through the show, I could hear the multi-nodal crosstalk between the various works chattering like starlings in the trees.
If you want to make a garage door elegant, just give it to Carlo Cesta, an artist known for his exquisite sculptural reworking of banal building materials. Here, on the granite, is a sleek little hybrid garage-door/pup-tent, big enough for one adult to lie down in. A two-sided spinning sign—the kind you see at strip malls—fl ashes the word “vacancy,” tempting explorers into the refined little shelter, and at the same time teasing Lyla Rye’s installation just down the trail. Rye’s Façade was an architectural abstraction, a white fabric modernist wall strung between trees, backlit and dappled by the sun. Pop-up windows opened onto trees and sky. The building was not only vacant, it was two-dimensional! Unapologetic, aggravating and lovely, it blocked the path. (No matter; we scrambled past.)
Tool #2 was a large wooden cone crafted by Brian Hobbs. It pointed out over the trees, and, when you put your ear next to it, it gathered the sounds of jays and crickets and the wind moving through leaves. A circular hieroglyph on the nearby rocks was an inky imprint of the cone itself. It looked like an ancient sun symbol but was inspired, the artist explained, by the Macintosh computer’s “loading” icon. These two elements came together as somewhat clunky tools, propositional technologies that may or may not succeed at connecting with bigger forces.
Showing no hesitation about bigger forces, the figure in Johannes Zits’s large-scale digital print The Seduction leapt with joy straight into a thicket—naked and fragmented, dissolving into a fabricated sea of green. In Michael Davey’s Short Life–Long Branch, a bronze cast of a tree branch is suspended in a real tree. The original branch was once used to save the artist from drowning; now the bronze version dangles ominously, scythe-like, attended by tiny bronze skeletons. Chantal Rousseau’s black-and-white Bird Stack Flag was also somewhat spooky. The banner fl aps from a high branch, bearing graphic images of birds and anti-birds, shadows or refl ections that hover somewhere between illustration and icon, fl ight and darkness.
Erected at the highest point of a granite outcrop, Out-House, by John Dickson and Lisa Neighbour, beckoned like a portal to another world. An elegant structure, like Cesta’s pup tent, the outhouse was also a potential point of refuge, serving our least lofty needs. Yet its mirrored external walls created ethereal, liquid optics, a rift in the trees and rocks and sky. Inside was a contrasting cozy darkness. Colourful, softly glowing plastic fruits hung from the ceiling in domestic bounty.
Rebecca Diederichs’s Trail Hitch—a clothesline strung with almost 6,000 coloured pegs—could be domestic. But there was no laundry here, just solid lines of green, red and blue stretching off into the distant trees. The colours formed a rhythmic abstraction, invoking some kind of code, like DNA or musical notation. Who posted this message? Was it a cowboy, or an Indian? A frontier washerwoman? Or was it the forest talking? None of these questions has a direct answer, and the piece was abuzz with quizzical abstraction.
Across the trail, small signs made with Coroplast and vinyl lettering were tacked to various trees, posted so deep in the woods that it was necessary to leave the path and wade through undergrowth to reach them. Kate Wilson’s Living Signs were made from the familiar materials of homemade cottage signage, but the messages they bore, divorced from context, were elusive: “SAM CAN’T SLEEP,” “ELEVATORS ON THE LAKE,” “THE BONES OF GREECE.” These small voices seemed to waft about like middle-class Muskoka ghosts in the luminous green of the sunny forest afternoon.
Nearby, Lorna Mills’s sculpture Moss Mosque Moss consisted of a Google Earth screenshot of a mosque made manifest in blackened plaster and nestled into the mossy green slope. The paradigm shifts in this piece were disorienting—from a digital image in the public domain to a physical sculpture in the forest, from the omnipotent gaze of a satellite to the gaze of an individual wearing muddy boots, from the towers of a magnificent mosque to fungus- like bulbs of plaster poking through a bed of moss. Resting in a strangely shifting paradigm all its own, the piece seemed volatile and portentous, like a warning, or a sign of change to come.
Collectively, these works by Persona Volare communicated a kind of intelligent humility. None of these artists came to conquer the wilderness; none was alone. Instead, in various playful ways, they engaged in a lively dialogue that spread across a vibrant geography that is itself already rustling, teasing and twittering.
While the Persona Volare show was temporary, the works by Wang, Lam, Harding, Belmore and Lightman will remain on the site. Harding’s A Chirp is an upside-down shed originally made for an urban setting. (It was part of the 2006 exhibition “Nature in the Garage” at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto.) It feels somewhat awkward in this new non-urban setting, taking on a cottagey aspect in the middle of a pretty meadow. In contrast, Lam and Wang both created works that merge seamlessly with the forest. Unostentatiously, Lam brought together and replanted young white oaks and Eastern white pines from different areas of the Tree Museum site. Wang created a magnificent architectural network of bridges and tunnels—made from trees and branches—that culminates in a tree house large enough for a board meeting (or a conference of tribal chieftains).
Michael Belmore, a Canadian artist of Ojibway heritage, offered a smart and subtle installation that insinuates a gentle give-andtake between humans and the natural world. Upland is situated at the end of a side trail, a 10-minute walk from the main path across great rounded slabs of granite. Topping a smooth, weathered outcrop is a groin-like cleft that gently bubbles with a pale static froth. Belmore has painstakingly shaped and arranged round river rocks into the form of foaming water; the stones are nestled into one another in a fashion that looked completely natural at first glance. While I was there, a little grey snake made its way straight into the art, seeking shade in the sculpture, which seems as if it has been in this place for a very long time.
For the past ten years, Lightman and O’Callaghan have worked to bring artists and (sometimes) other curators to the Tree Museum with an enthusiasm for contemporary culture that carries as much weight as their love of the land. They do not explicitly position the project as a political endeavour. Yet by creating alandscape populated with art ideas, they move beyond the old unhealthy polarization of man and nature. If we humans are going to collaborate on effective stewardship of the environment, it is high time to relinquish the romance of the frontier. In this respect, the Tree Museum is a decidedly contemporary project. This is no terra nullius, but instead a landscape buzzing with interventions and cross-disciplinary dialogue.
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