Winter: Phase 1
- Jennifer MACKLEM
Winter, Phase 1 is the first of a series of seasonal landscape installations which will be completed over the course of 5 years. In Winter, a delicate, snowcovered landscape made using a dusky blue, spray insulation creates a slippage between artifice and nature, which are central to Macklem’s concerns, «The project investigates the uses of non-natural material and questions its dubious capacity to mimic the natural.» This confusion between animate and inanimate is one of many gestures of doubling that constructs an uncanny, yet playful encounter for the viewer, while inevitably commenting on the effects of climatic fluctuations.
The sense of youthful curiosity is further articulated by the installation’s exploration of scale and rhythm. As the viewer enters the gallery they see cues that enable them to participate: wooden stepstools that incite mounting, and glass marbles that can be handled, and dropped along an elevated track. These marbles run along a circuit that meanders through the landscape, encouraging visual flow through the space. Here, one encounters micro communities and diverse landscapes that occupy multiple trajectories along an elevated, circuitous path which dominates the expanse of the intimate gallery. The marble vibrates as it rolls through mountain ranges, housing communities and a miniature power station, alternating its pace from slow and lazy to rapid progression, creating disjunctions in our perception of time. Winter’s stark silence necessitates introspection and endurance as we wait and ponder its dormant stasis, yet the movement of the marbles and our bodies through the space reciprocate a season full of potential.
There is a delicacy and nuance in that which is seen and unseen, where time unfurls at an unknown speed that is as suggestive of an ever-changing planet as it is of a poetic embrace of winter. Anxiety is present as we meander through the slight and fragile eco system and imagine nature in the context of extreme manipulations. The dusky blue insulation, which glistens with the play of intricate lights embedded throughout, is at once alluring and highly toxic as it transforms and mimics natural contours. This strange beauty speaks simultaneously of enchantment and disenchantment, of the delight in our navigation through the bulbous landscapes embedded with ‘hidden’ sea foams, mops, and burnt logs, as well as regret as our curiosity is ruptured by its artificiality.
Winter, Phase 1 speaks of interruptions and the denial of semblances in the passage of time, of our fragile recollections of seasons past and the daunting future of a winter transformed by climate change. Winter, Phase 1, is thus the first in a series of works which will explore the seasons as governed by their own episteme, whose sensibilities are distinct and discontinuous.
Celina Jeffery
Assistant Professor of Art History and Theory, University of Ottawa
Originally from Montreal, Jennifer Macklem is currently an Associate Professor of Sculpture at the University of Ottawa, after living and teaching in New Brunswick and in British Columbia. She studied in Paris, France before obtaining her MFA at UQAM in Montreal. With a national and international exhibition record, her artistic practice includes public sculpture, gallery installations and video animation. In 2007 her video work was screened in two LA public venues as well as at three other US destinations. In 2008 she mounted a solo exhibition: our animal nature in a UK art gallery. In 2009, she presented a paper at the College Art Association conference held in Los Angeles. She is currently working on a public art project for the Childrens’ Hospital of Eastern Ontario.
Thanks to Ken Campbell: Marble Lift design and fabrication, Gerry Demers, Eric Jones, Thea Jones, Richard Parson, and Kip Jones
