The Painter/her Dilemma: Visualizing Uncertainty in a Territory of Visual Art

To present visual art within the confines of a scholarly journal and as part of a discussion on the impact of gender on the academic disciplines is not straightforward. I do not consider myself to be an academic, even though I work in the academy of visual art and attempt to critique it with my fictional practices as well as inside the art institute and university studio classroom. I present my work here as a set of visual images together with a parallel text in the form of prose/poetry. The text addresses some of the issues I raise in my painting without trying to explain the visual work. By turning to words, I can provide a woman's a location, and a more specific context in the discipline of painting while letting the pictures speak on several ambiguous levels. My paintings involve imaging complexity itself. They represent hidden histories and secrets woven between layers of official colonial documentation, including maps, charts, schedules, treaties, scientific records, and geological reports. In so doing, they continue, but also critique, the history of Canadian landscapes in our national art history where, for example, the portrayal of empty landscapes, ripe for settlement and development, and denial of native ownership serve colonial ideology. In my paintings the word fragments can see and the archival documents used to build up the layers within the pictures simulate a kind of whispering. I aim to destabilize truth over another by holding all in thread-like layers which do not allow for a ranking by first, second, or third place. Instead, the paintings display the interconnections even though in their actual production each layer is laid down distinctly, at a time. The practice interacts with the problem of one marginal voice, which we see in other kinds of art production. My paintings occupy double space (over 2 [Symbol Not Transcribed] [times] 3 metres in size) and also double speak; they have a hidden subversive structure that is camouflaged. The paintings as objects are a template for the viewer's imagination. 1. The first photograph I pull from the drawer is R-6987. An image of an old prairie train yard and bit of town. The corresponding card tells me that this picture is Moose jaw in 1907. I don't know what to do to make it useful to me. There are completely new sets of possibilities here. I carefully run my pencil (gently) over the rail lines which crisscross the 3 [Symbol Not Transcribed] [times] 5 inch photograph. I trace the buildings and skyline through the surfaces of tracing paper I've bought. The archivist is horrified. I feel about six - I know I haven't hurt the image. It's still in its plastic sleeve and I wasn't pressing hard. I try to explain that I'm just thinking through my fingers. Finding a way to begin to feel my way through the mass of history and textual material. But it's not an important necessity. I will grow up. I too, after all, can change the lenses on the camera. [Graph Not Transcribed] 2. Dominion Land(scapes). I'm sure I write because some things just can't be worked out in painting itself. And I can write 'into' the paintings in confidence. The words hidden over. Secrets kept forever in a casing of water and polymer. Retrievable only perhaps by archival X-Ray. These ones have to be big, big enough to make the body do the work - do the reading. It can't be analytically solved. The words take you somewhere before merging into another, like sounds swimming upstream - going in the opposite direction to voices of history and authority. The work is visual, hopefully sensual, and willfully over the top. I negotiate my way - over time - building the structure of the image. …

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