2017
performance (video forthcoming)
Canoe Lake, Algonquin Park, ON
A Companion piece to the 2015 performance video Founder, Fouling is a 100th anniversary de-celebration of the death of iconic Canadian landscape painter Tom Thomson. Thomson was last seen alive on July 8th, 1917 as he set off on a painting expedition in a fully loaded canoe on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park. His canoe was spotted later that day, empty and capsized. Shot on Canoe Lake, close to where Thomson’s lifeless body was found 8 days later, this performative/video calls attention to the way early Canadian landscape painting helped shape a persistently dominant version of Canadian identity by working to transform sovereign Indigenous lands into Canadian landscape, and by plying a connection between Canadian-ness and wilderness that naturalizes settler emplacement on, and entitlement to, Indigenous land. As an unsettling re-imagined de-enactment, Fouling also offers an alternate imagining concerning the ‘mystery’ of Thomson’s untimely death.
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