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.
Video credits:
director, performer, video edit Leah Decter
cinematographer David Hartman
additional camera and field recording Kelsey Braun
production manager Michael Farnan
colourist Bruce Little
music and sound production Andy Rudolph
cello Jeffrey Hatcher
Shot on location at Canoe Lake in Algonguin Park, territory of the Alginquin of Ontario.
Funded with the generous support of the Winnipeg Arts Council
and additional support from SSHRC Insight Grant Crossing Media, Crossing Canada, Performing the Land
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