On Oct. 1-2, 2005 I presented an installation Shifting Landscape #1, to the public.  The work is situated out in a local farmer’s field seen from outside my kitchen window. As I have leased a house for 27 years in the country-side I am very familiar with this scene, albeit without an extended living room situated in the centre of the view. To provide a description of the work I will rely on film business terminology used to describe  parts of a set. The installation consists of a 9‘x12’ platform raised up on 3’ risers, upon which are installed four 4’x 8’ flats held up by headers and 10' jacks. The work has been prepped, painted and dressed.  The field was ploughed after the work was installed. The farmer has delicately worked around the site to make it accessable to the public.
 
The purpose of this work is to raise questions around issues of urbanization, the sensing body and our perceptions of nature. Everyone who has visited the site to date has been asked the question “what is nature”. Most of the responses have been recorded either on video and or on a digital audio receiver. The work is a continuing process: I would like to locate an interesting building in downtown Toronto to re-install this work, utilizing a rear-view projection screen with the view out the window appearing via digital video.  As an additional audio element a layered collection of voices (just recorded in the field) will be played at the  “indoor” installation.


 
There is an urban myth that life in the country is far more peaceful and sublime than city living. Many people seem to think that they are moving to the country when they leave a large city. (A friend once announced that he was moving to the country, to a brand new house being built in the middle of a cornfield, along with 3,00 other homes.) I live 45 minutes N/E of Toronto on a small lot which is part of a 30 square mile plot of prime farmland that were expropriated 33 years ago for a failed attempt to build an airport by the Federal Government. My experience of observing the expansion of the burbs around the city as I travel to and from Toronto has brought me to install Shifting Landscape #1. The question “what is nature” is one that has been provoked in me by loving life in the city and, in the country yet observing close hand the monster we are creating with urban sprall. Robert has asked me to open up a conversation with the members of Reading Toronto so here I am to explore with you issues of urbanization, the sensing body and our perceptions of nature.
 
There is a Shifting Landscape #2 installed in an uncultivated field constructed out of the natural surrounds. I will post an image of this at a later date. My thanks go out to farmer Ashmore Reesor, photographer Chris Thomiadis and two remarkable carpenter friends from the film business, Thomas Peter Pearce and Joe Curtain for their enormous generosity in making this project happen.

 

1. Beautiful images. I wonder if the iconography requires a chair. The window is not the prototypical “picture” window. Should it be?

   Posted by Jane Donland  on  10/21  at  07:49 PM

2. I think it’s stunning.

   Posted by Jeff N.  on  10/22  at  09:17 AM
4. Thanks for your comments Jan and Don. Jan, regarding the choice of window size and the use or not of a chair, they raise some interesting issues in regards abstraction. I am going to elaborate my somewhat complex view with regard to my experience of the work. First, the site is political as it is marked with an impermanence to the space. It is a “marked site” to quote a sculptural term established in the early 70’s by Rosalind Krauss for Smithson’s Spiral Jetty where an affinity between architecture, landscape and sculpture exist. Shifting Landscapes #1 is a dwelling and a non-dwelling simultaneously, a landscape that is shifting in a number of directions. The chair is suggestive of a subjectivity in the viewer. The field pulls us towards a level of  perception of the land as “other” as it supports a temporary and partial dwelling, towards the chair and beyond the frame of the window. The tree comes towards the emptiness of the chair through the fictional curtains and the frame. The window is a key formal iconic referent. The experience of space from both inside and outside suggests a multiplicity of viewing, or the axiomatic qualities of perceiving shifting form and space and the passing of time.   A case in point is the tree itself. Upon close examination the dynamic movement of the upward flow of branches on the left side, the crown at the treetop, and the downward movement of the branches on the right become apparent. The left side is easterly, the right side westerly: the tree reveals a mapping of the movement of the interaction of the earth with the sun through the gesture of the form of the tree. And for me the work is intended to engage the sensing body, with a shift away from the purely optical through the use of the chair. While one sits in the chair real or imagined, depending on the degree of reflexivity that occurs, one is provoked towards a state of becoming, where subject and object become one. By this I mean one can hear the ambient sounds of wind, birds, distant vehicles etc., see in multiple directions, feel the wind on ones body and the weight of ones body on the chair, supported by the platform and the raw earth below. Here the sense of thinking and in seeing is balanced with the other senses. The importance of the chair serves as a still point for the body: the frame of the window as a referencing device.   My question to you, “does the chosen size of the window suggest a somewhat disenfranchised opticalicality for you?” Is there an “ideal” space for viewing from the illusory inside to the outside?     It is my hope that this dialogue may continue.
   
   Posted by Heather Rigby  on  {comment_date format=’%m/%d’}  at  {comment_date format=’%h:%i %A’}
Posted by Heather Rigby  on  10/23  at  09:00 PM

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