Finding Aid is a perpetual work in response to the question “what happens when I try to re-enact a photographic moment”? Since 2002, I have been attempting to answer this deceptively simple question using archival photographs in Canadian National Parks. Formulated around reenactment, I take archival photographs on a walk and attempt to repeat them as ethnographic investigation and as visual art inquiry. This practice is fuelled by the play between the attempt to replicate the photographic act as closely as possible (for example through spatial location, time of day, season, camera type, darkroom procedures) and the revelation that the more the attempt is refined, or the closer one gets, the more distance is felt. However, to attempt to re-enact a photograph is a productive failure, one that provides a great deal of knowledge about the conditions surrounding the production of an historical photographic event. The outcome of this practice is an archive of documents including photographs, text, video, drawings, and ephemera that I compile and then I mine for exhibition.
Finding Aid: The pleasure in a good view, is an archive that records my quest to perfectly re-locate one historical photograph taken in Banff National Park, (a park considered the jewel in the Crown of Canada’s National Park system). This installation is a product of an artist residency at the Banff Centre, wherein I investigated the popular Lake Louise area, focusing on an early 20th century postcard entitled, Lake Agnes and the Beehive. Exploring the possibility of returning to the exact location of the historical postcard, this work reports back my experience to the viewer as a hybrid installation, performance and an archive to converse with the history of photography. A finding aid is a tool that is found in archives to describe records and is often found as a card index, an inventory or a register. In this work I not only produce a finding aid to the work, but I am the finding aid: I am present in the gallery installing and working on the archive, and interacting with visitors during gallery hours. A table holds the archive and stools form a work space and loitering spot for browsing the archive. When I am not present, the archive is still ‘in process’ and visitors become performers in the subtle act of browsing and shuffling files, sitting and looking, as well as sorting and reading.