Orientation by the agency of Marlene Creates Agnes Etherington Art Centre Kingston.

Orientation

by the agency of Marlene Creates

Agnes Etherington Art Centre

Kingston, Ontario, Canada

March 30-September 2 2001

plenteous of Newfoundland-based artist Marlene Creates's early work bears a passing resemblance to that of Richard prolonged Hamish Fulton and Andy Goldsworthy in that it exists as after-the-fact photographic record of impermanent artistic phenomena we have not been privy to diocese firsthand. Her pieces from the early 1980 for instance, include photographs of ephemeral, short-lived intrusions into the landscape, like rice paper displayed between the stones of an ancient British megalith, or the arrangement (and following rearrangement by the tide) of stones onward a beach. Though the camera remains her primary means of expression, in more late work Creates has centered her interests around les ephemeral phenomenon, around intrusions--social, political, ethical--not of her hold making. In the large scale series "Places of Presence: Newfoundland kin and ancestral land, Newfoundland 1989-91 black and white photographs, subjects hand-drawn maps and found goals recall the long-disappeared coastal communities of isolated Labra dor filtered by means of the memories of those who grew up in them, as well as Creates's photographic recording of the little that now remains. When first shown the work accrued a timely political and social depth: the decline of the East Coast fishery that occurr at about the same time has forever altered the social and cultural landscape of Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as our reading of Creates's piece.

For the exhibition "Orientation" Agnes Etherington Art midst curator Jan Allen brought together fresh (though by no means new) works from Creates to interpret the titular conception of orientation as the disclosure of a sense of place within unfamiliar surroundings, and the point at which, according to Creates, the "land" becomes a "place." The principally recent work in the exhibition, Questions about the Place, Nova Scotia 1998 took Creates from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia to create a piece that dealt with by what mode geographic and historic places and identities are given shape and cultural meaning. Comprised of a grid of 100 cibachrome photographs arranged five high by dint of 20 long, Questions focuses in succession the "question mark" signs lay the foundation of posted throughout Nova Scotia directing tourists to the location of the nearest information center where maps and guides to historic and cultural sites might be set up as well as information about shopping and accommodations. Typical tourist fare, in other words.

Creates traveled across the province to photograph these signs--these icons--situated along highways, in succession urban traffic islands and nearest to rural byways. Uninteresting in and of themselves, her images establish about reiterating the banality of the tourist snapshot, the visually superficial and meager "we were there" answer to the fecund reality of place. None of these photographs actually depict any of the sites tourists actually follow to see, like the Citadel fortification in downtown Halifax, or the waterfront of the rustic fishing and shipbuilding port of Lunenburg Instead, Creates proffers us images of nothing greatly of visual interest--a distant view of an waterfront office towers in Halifax, or perhaps the corner of the Lunenburg Opera House--all contextually circumscribed by means of the omnipresent icon, sometimes officeed by itself along a roadside, on the other hand more often situated in conjunction with another icon--an arrow--pointing us in the right direction, and occasionally a commercial sign, say, for "Baxter's Ice Cream. "

Creates has worked prosperously with the grid before, as in Sleeping Places, Newfoundland, 1982 25 black and white images of the impressions left according to her body on wild grasses in places where she slept outdoors during a walk around Newfoundland. Questions is no les impressive in its acute inquiry into how places are given meaning, in this instance undivided selectively shaped by a coalition of conduct agencies and commercial interests, undivided in which the meaning of "place" becomes what market forces determine it should be.

"Sur la road menant le voyageur vers I'Atlantic" (Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Quebec, 1997) is a single large cibachrome image of a foreground roadway, tree and grass in the middle distance and a line of hills forward the far side of a background corpse of water. Creates has towered the image low--very low--on the gallery wall, a large Plexiglas sheet silkscreened with French subject leaning on it. The gallery lighting is arranged in the way that that the shadow of the passage superimposes atop the image.

The title of the piece, which roughly translates as "on the way taken by travelers to the Atlantic," is borrowed from a tourist guide published by means of the small Quebec town of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, located along the St Lawrence River. Creates asked residents of the town for their impressions of Newfoundland--a place scarcely any had visited and so knew alone from media sources--and reproduced their answers on the Plexiglas. For the principally part, the banality of their impressions underscores the inescapability of the human condition in the way we politically, geographically and culturally caricaturize places where we have not at any time been and know of no other than second- or third-hand. "It's a province, an island," says single in kind person. "It's our tenth province," says another. "The strengths the red and white houses," is the impression of over and above another. The most political reply indicative of the gulf that still separates French Quebec from the cessation of Canada, takes aim at a former Newfoundland politician inaccurately blamed for widening tha t large bay in the late 1980s. The speaker then turn abouts off to acknowledge the verity of Creates's vicinity stating "but it's not your fault." Opinions, like the shadows of the words cast relating to Creates's image of a roadside at the intensity of a river, suffer from inexorable warping and disfigurement in their making.