Latitude 53 Contemporary Visual Culture

Ownership Responsibility Reliability Care

Text by Lindsey V. Sharman

Orphan Well Adoption Agency (OWAA) Offsite Office, 2018. Installation with 500+ polyethylene neckties.

In November 2018, The National Observer exposed documents revealing the estimated cost for cleaning up mining operations, including the reclamation of inactive and orphan wells in Alberta, to be $130 billion. This number far exceeds any estimates previously made public by both industry and the provincial government. A mere $1.4 billion has currently been secured by the oil industry itself leaving residents of Alberta responsible for the remaining balance.

Julie-Ann Mercer responds to Lineage by artist Brittney Bear Hat

In the installation Lineage, Brittney Bear Hat explores her relationship to Pink Mountain, an area in British Columbia’s Rocky Mountains that is home to Bear Hat’s family and is near Fort St. John, the core of the province’s oil and gas industry. The artist takes supplies that would be needed by an oil industry worker and juxtaposes them with her personal experiences of learning from the land. The comparison creates a conversation about living from and profiting off of the environment.

Items needed for working in the bush, including leather work boots, a brightly coloured safety jacket, heavy tarps, and ropes, are some of the objects that Bear Hat has collected and displays in the gallery. Each object is a necessity for surviving in unexpected and unpredictable weather conditions. They are materials that may be needed—just in case—while living and working outdoors. Placed together, the objects allow Bear Hat to situate herself in the role of a rig worker, challenging her to understand a perspective that is unlike her own.

The collection of practical objects is contrasted against large-scale vinyl prints that depict Bear Hat’s family’s acreage. The prints portray the land where Bear Hat’s father grew up and where he taught her and her sisters how to hike, how to hunt, and how to be prepared for any kind of situation. It is also where he continues to encourage her to build connections to her Cree community and culture. The landscape is filled with childhood memories of summers spent learning from her father, and rooted within its terrain is a responsibility to keep honouring and sharing the knowledge it holds.

Written on the gallery walls next to the prints are excerpts from a conversation between Bear Hat and her father. The text conveys her father’s perspective on why he wants Bear Hat and her sisters to start taking on more of a legal and mature role in caring for their land. He encourages them to continue to learn from the traditions of her Indigenous culture that shape who she is as well as define her relationship with her family and community. By sharing her father’s words in the gallery space, Bear Hat creates an environment where her father’s wisdom can impact beyond the borders of their land.

The importance placed on sharing, connections, and relationships creates a safe space for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants to join the conversation. Emphasizing the differences between the opposing practices in Pink Mountain challenges participants to consider the implications of both perspectives. By occupying the same space, the ordinary objects and personal images and text convey the difficulty in achieving a balance when caring for and profiting from our surroundings.

Julie-Ann Mercer is an independent writer and researcher based in Edmonton, Alberta. She holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of Alberta in the History of Art, Design and Visual Culture. Her SSHRC funded thesis project analyzes the construction of Indigenous and settler culture in nineteenth-century prints. She continues to examine how art objects accumulate and convey meaning over time.

Noor Bhangu responds to the work of Luther Konadu

Dear Luther,

I am writing to you in the wake of the deeply troubling acquittal of Gerald Stanley from the murder of Colten Boushie. I sit in dumb shock while my social networks are in uproar—online and in real life—demanding justice for the 22-year old Indigenous man’s murder at the hands of the white Saskatchewan farmer. As a response to this acquittal and the larger monster of systemic racism it brings to light, people have begun circulating images of the smiling young man with the banner, “Justice for Colten.” The most popular ones are animated and colourful duplications of the original photo, which I’m sure was taken by a friend or a family member, somebody whose warm gaze encouraged that smile. Have you seen these images, Luther? Have you saved some of them to your growing Instagram collection?

Nobody in your portraits is ever smiling, not even you. The subjects follow your strict set of rules by holding a neutral face, not wearing any visible logos—and always looking at the camera. Without their fashion betraying them, they seem to be (briefly) lifted out of present time. They become emblematic of what you’ve identified as the broader issues of representation that have marked racialized bodies since colonial time. You reference instances as far back as the 19th century when black bodies like yours and brown bodies like mine were photographed in our native habitats—captured and frozen in time—to travel back to the colonial centre as postcard-sized proofs of cultural and racial difference. Not much has changed from those records to the archive of the present where we are presented with neo-colonial projects of National Geographic, mugshot photography, and video surveillance culture that have taken on the task of narrating our bodies into public existence.

Culled from such archives, your subjects are depicted in ways that make it possible for the viewer to sift through the amalgamation of histories that inform the photographic surface. One of the works that immediately comes to mind is the diptych where you’ve coupled a self-portrait of yourself standing with one that is seated. In the first scene, you positioned yourself in a cool contrapposto (not unlike Michelangelo’s David), and in your second you hold our gaze even as your body slumps down in the chair. All the while the cord for the self-timer snakes around your fingers as a signal of your control in the production of this image. You are authoring the ways in which your body will be framed for our reading. In other works, you continue to resist the singularity and objectivity performed by colonial images of racialized subjects by constructing a circular 360-degree world around them. There are diptychs, triptychs, polyptychs, slews of poetic text, and now your newly erected Truth Study Center, whose scattering of images with visual and textual references further breaks apart the singularity of the image.1 Thinking through the history-making potential of photography, Peter Friedl has written, “To capture death, you need the right technique and the right moment.”2 If we replace the action of capturing “death” to one that affirms the “life”, “nuance”, and “complexity” of individuals from our various communities, I feel that your exploratory and expansive photographic practice is, similarly, engaged in writing and righting history.

Luther, as you record the minutiae of shifts in postures—the briefest of which is a slight raise in the eyebrows and the most dramatic a complete frustration of the borders of the photographic frame—you are reaching like a foghorn out the of the depths of enacted and reenacted colonial hell that has endeavored to consume bodies like yours, bodies like mine, bodies like Boushie’s. In the end, it is your gaze, your circular movement, and your refusal to be pinned down that articulates our future: the right to life and self-determination.

Noor Bhangu is an emerging curator and writer living in Winnipeg. Her upcoming projects include Wrestling with Angels: Artists Revisit the Canon(s) and womenofcolour@soagallery.

Konadu’s Truth Study Center is based on Wolfgang Tillmans’ ongoing project of the same name, which plays on the search of finding objective truth in our post-truth world.

Here's our mini interview with Artist Luther Konadu. Luther Konadu is an emerging writer and artist of Ghanaian descent. He is a content creator for the online publication Public Parking, a project for highlighting the working practices of emerging creatives. He is also a writing contributor for Akimbo. His studio labour is project-based and realized through photographic print media and painting processes. He is interested in how the legacies of those mediums continue to shape prevailing perceptions of group identities. He uses his work to reinterpret those image-making mediums.

L53: What made you choose Latitude 53? Why display your work in Edmonton?

LK: I wanted to show my work outside of the art community that I already know to see how the work will be received both my jurors and audiences elsewhere. It’s a good way as an emerging artist to gauge the sustenance of what you are putting out there. Latitude has had a great roster of showings in the past with artists whose work I respect so I figured I’d take the chance to apply when the opportunity came up.

L53: You have text placed beside and on several images on the walls and table. What is the significance of the text with photography?

LK: In some instances, text helps to continue what the photo has started. It serves as an extender to the image. It at times does what the image can’t convey on its own. It also serves as a way to make the image a bit ambivalent and destabilize a straightforward narrative the viewer may project onto the photo. I’m always trying to avoid portraying a limited reading of the figures in the photos. And text in combination with the image makes the image less conclusive and absolute.

L53: There is something incredibly intimate about your photographs. During the process of making this work did you receive any insight, or learn anything about this process from your friends and family involved?

LK: Yeah, it is important that the person I’m capturing knows me well and is comfortable with me and vice versa. The whole process is a collaborative one. I think this allows for that intimacy. We both have to be on the same page and we don’t have to be other people per se; we are actively involved in the process of portraying each another. As much as for the most part I’m capturing them, I’m capturing myself through them as well. I shoot them in my private studio space, the portrait of them is very much interrelated with myself...so a photo of them is in a lot of ways a photo of myself. They help me through the selection process. They tell me what photos work, and those I should avoid. They tell me which side they want to face the camera and how they want to appear. They are very much in control of their own image even though I’m the one holding the camera.

Our third Parka Patio installation is by artist Ryland Fortie a recent Bachelor of Fine Arts graduate from Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops. Fortie has this to say about his work "I’m interested in these boundaries of what becomes adopted by the masses as normal and what is seen as delusional. We exist in a way, unlike our precedents, where anything can be anything – especially with the Internet – where environments accept artificiality and substitutions as truths. My installations function as what I view as a facsimile of our contemporary habitat; a post-modern synthesis of the natural, the urban, and the virtual; as I find the boundaries between these separate spaces are becoming increasingly blurred."

The second installation for the Parka Patio is by artist Mara Eagle. Eagle is an artist living and working in Montreal since 2012. She is currently a candidate for a Master’s of Fine Arts at Concordia University. She was born in Boston in the year of the dragon, eats everything except mammals and does not drink opaque liquids. Her work has been shown across Canada and in the United States.

Pest Control: “Success!!!!”

Two wooden folding chairs sit abreast and encircled by a collection of six space heaters. An audience faces them, waiting.

Kai Villneff and Sarah Ormandy—Pest Control—enter upstage left. They each turn on three heaters before taking their seats, Ormandy on our right and Villneff our left. A low, barely audible hum drones out of the now-energized heating coils, and several fans innocuously whirr. The reflector of the centremost heater glows a pale orange, but its heat does not quite reach the back rows of the audience. The artists both wear blue jeans and boots, and Villneff has a grey sweater while Ormandy wears a blue blouse with white polka dots. They sit placidly facing us, hands folded quietly in their laps or placed on their thighs, with glasses of water resting on the floor next to their feet. We wait.

Ivan Lupi "Bench"

The whining buzz of quivering needles penetrates the air. It reverberates in my skull someplace behind my eyes and between my ears. Meanwhile, fall leaves, impelled by a cool wind, skitter across the concrete in a staccato arrhythmic rush, and the warmish sun cuts between the surrounding buildings and projects lengthening shadows. People around, passing by, waiting for busses, or maybe eating a hotdog, seem to pretend not to notice. This scene, unfolding before them on that wooden park bench, might as well be the most banal thing they’ve seen. But, some people do take care to notice, sit down, perplexed, intrigued, or curious, and start asking questions or telling stories of their own.

Here's our interview with artist Brandon A. Dalmer about his work Persistence of Vision.

L53: Now being based in Toronto what made you want to exhibit in Edmonton again; why Latitude 53?

BD: Edmonton is my home town, so it's always nice to show things to your fam. When I was planning this show out I really wanted to have it able to travel. I thought of Edmonton as a good test. If the show can travel back to Ontario with me than surely it can travel further. Latitude 53 is also one of (if not the oldest?) Artist-run spaces in Alberta, it takes a lot of risks on its programming and projects that might not be fully fleshed out have the opportunity to develop here. Plus I haven't shown anything in your new space!

L53: You exhibited your work at Latitude in 2011. How do you think your work has evolved since then?

BD: I was only starting to combine scientific methods into my work back then. I feel like it's something that's fully entwined now. I was also creating a lot of miniature/diorama work, something that I've moved past. My work is more painting and installation based now. Focusing on coding and machines as collaborative partners in my process. My work is still heavily process based which is nice.

L53: What’s the significance of the viewer being able to directly interact with piece? What's the reason for the capsule?