Now on view at our gallery until September 30th, Ideas Of Far North was curated by Mark A. Cheetham, exploring how visions of this region have changed over a century.

From early maps to lavishly illustrated travel narratives to oral histories, paintings, and prints, images of the far north from both southern and Indigenous standpoints have been increasingly integral to its understanding. Beginning in the 1920s, some of Ontario’s best-known artists, notably Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, and later, Doris McCarthy, travelled to, pictured, and defined for many southerners the look and nature of the far north, including the Arctic. Their views encapsulate a still-potent identity for many Canadians, but for others, paradigms to revise.

Challenged by Indigenous and settler artists, and shaped by global environmental concerns, familiar paradigms have evolved. Once seen as an existential threat, the region is now recognized as itself vulnerable to climate change. The exhibition invites us to examine the constant interaction between different versions of the far north from our southern perspective in Canada and from other parts of the circumpolar north.

Doris McCarthy is perhaps best known for her images of icebergs. Her first excursion this far north was in 1972 after she retired from a forty-year teaching career. She returned in 1973 and then frequently to different locations in the far north. In Pangnirtung, she presents one of the most physically dramatic locales in Nunavut.

Glen Alps is an aural and visual mapping of the flora on Little O’Malley Mountain at Glen Alps in Anchorage, Alaska. Walde composed the score by “assigning instruments to each major grouping of vegetation on the mountain face; [he] translates the location and size of the trees and shrubs into standard notation, with each species being represented by a group of instruments.” He explores the considerable extent to which plants at higher altitudes and latitudes are especially vulnerable to climate disruption. His sonically emotive Glen Alps is an explicitly environmental artwork and an example of ecoacoustics. If he were to redo the work now, after almost ten years, change in the vegetation would produce a different score.

This remarkable image was made at Three Mile Lake in the Muskoka Lakes region north of Toronto. That it is a drawing over a drone photograph begins to suggest its innovativeness, as does the fact that the interlacing circles on the frozen lake were inscribed by Millard with a snowmobile. The inevitable racket of producing this ephemeral pattern contrasts profoundly with its stillness as an image, an evocative silence claimed by the deer—captured serendipitously by the drone camera—as they purposefully cross the lake in a straight line. Crossing I makes an environmental point. In Millard’s words, “I am interested in the contrast between the orderly movement of the deer against the chaotic path of the Skidoo and how it reverses our assumptions of the rational human and the wild animal.”

Maureen Gruben grew up and now works in Tuktoyaktuk, on the Arctic Ocean in the Inuvik Region of the Northwest Territories. Her parents were traditional Inuvialuit knowledge keepers, a culture she maintains through works such as Untitled (Sled). She has arranged and photographed modern, working versions of the qamutiiks (sleds) not unlike those we see in A.Y. Jackson’s painting. But this sculptural example is different because it has been built up from a toy sled, an armature that Gruben salvaged—as she often does—from her local landfill site. The work is literally recycled, an environmental priority she embraces and also a metaphor for the reappearance of this Inuit invention in miniature. Without picturing a landscape, this work is very much about land, its uses and preservation. Gruben maintains the original’s playfulness in an art world setting by placing the toy on a plinth and reconstituting its surface to give it the appearance of a ‘serious’ bronze sculpture.

Analogue photography is inevitably a recreation, a ‘fixing’ of momentary light conditions. Tristan Duke takes the self-referentiality of this material fact further by fabricating his photographic lenses from the same glacial ice that he photographed while on the Arctic Circle Residency Program in Svalbard in the summer of 2022. In a material and an elusive, haunting sense, he is photographing ice with ice. The ice is creating a pictorial autobiography. The wet surfaces of his ice lenses betoken melting glaciers, yet ironically, without the clarity of this liquid surface, his photographs would not be successful.

Life Boat at Dahlbreen Glacier, Svalbard 02 is an image of everyday transport to and from the expedition ship Antigua. Yet the global climate emergency might make us think of climate refugees or of an immediate maritime crisis. Duke asks, “is this the rescue party or the ones in need of rescue?” And where is the pilot heading? This question could be extrapolated to the Arctic and the planet.

Not content to show us the climate crisis in the far north alone, Duke has also photographed fires with ice lenses. Here he materializes two bold ideas: the first lenses used for starting fires were made of ice by Zhang Hua in third-century China. Today, the climate disruption experienced at the poles is also responsible for the increased frequency of fires worldwide.

Laura Millard was part of an invited group of artists and scientists on the Arctic Circle Alumni Residency in the Arctic Archipelago of Svalbard in the summer of 2024. These islands at 82 degrees north are heating more quickly than anywhere else on the planet, with a dramatically negative effect. Among Millard’s reckonings with this reality is a suite of motion lamps that combine her photographs of disappearing glaciers with lamps that rotate thanks to heat convection from their bulbs. Popular in the mid-twentieth century as mementos of tourist sites such as Niagara Falls, Millard reconstitutes the lamps themselves and what they show to underline the increase in global temperatures in the increasingly touristic far north. People watch this happening in her images, but as in Crossing 1, we humans are turning to climate issues too slowly, even pointlessly ‘going in circles.’ The lamps seem as poignantly fragile as the ecologies they present.

To inquire about the availability of these works, please contact us at [email protected]

Ideas Of Far North
Life & Environment
1920s – 2020s

August 27 – September 30
On view at Cowley Abbott