After five projects, Scenic View by Anne O'Callaghan takes "Art on Public Lands" well into the new millennium, and as such it also affords the opportunity to reflect upon its past and future. Looking back has been integral to this endeavour, with many of the artworks referring to aspects of the mill's history. However O'Callaghan's installation for 2001-02 sidesteps local history and takes its inspiration from the natural environment in which it sits. Situated as far as possible from the man-made building, the work speaks of and from the creek, the trees that might be found in the area, a reverence for nature and lament for its losses.
Four table-shaped objects stand in a row at the edge of Soper Creek Park, where a dense clutter of underbrush leads to the banks of the water. The artist calls the objects vitrines, a French word for shop–window, glass case, or cabinet. While they are not glass cases, Anne O' Callaghan's vitrines function as show–cases into visual, auditory, and tactile sensory experience, as display tables for a marketplace of ideas, and as metaphors for the passage of time, for the potential death–struggle between nature and civilization.
Steel legs are rapidly rusting to velvety sienna as the metal oxidizes. The legs support boxes plated with the artist's signature photo transfers. Images from nature, framed by representations of architectural features from Trinity College in O'Callaghan's Dublin are visible in fragments where rust inhibitor has been applied to the plates. The artist's intention is to present images and texts that will gradually disappear as the piece weathers. In this, the work is a metaphor for the not–so–gradual extinction of many varieties of tree species. Around the sides of each of the vitrines are painted Latin names for many trees, venerable and exotic–sounding designations such as Fagis grandifolia or thuja accidemtalis––now extinct or near extinction. Victorian classification systems and classical associations express their inherent majesty and as the words weather and disappear a momentum is established that magnifies the tragedy of their demise. Sculpture as anti–monument has antecedents, for example in the work of German artists Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev–Gerz, whose disappearing "countermonument" to victims of the Holocaust undermines its own authority: by disappearing into the ground it manages to memorialize without creating an establishment fixture. Much contemporary sculpture intersects with its contexts, artistic expression and viewer response refusing the static and authoritative position that statuary had previously assumed. O'Callaghan is aided in this testimony by the motion–activated voice of poet Victor Coleman, whose words connect to the images and their context, and by the technical expertise of Norman Verrall, an audio engineer who has developed the sensitive inner workings to respond to the slightest motion and trigger the sound recordings which emanate from the vitrines. A poem from Coleman's collection C.O.R.R.E.C.T.I.O.N.S evokes images in the fragments which can be heard as they join with enhanced sounds from the natural environment.. The word "littoral" floats out ––and as a transitional space between high and low watermarks it is also the space within which the sculpture is situated. Truly in a littoral zone, the work is installed at the rim of the park, the boundary between mown ground and the wilder area leading down to the creek. There sumacs thrive, the red–winged blackbirds find marshy hiding places, and the detritus from years of vegetation acts as a barrier against human intrusion. There, Coleman's "ghosts in the landscape/passing through trees" resonate against memories of other sculptures, of children's voices, of earlier memories still, when the creek swelled its banks and engulfed the valley. Out of text and into environment, voice and words are newly contextualized.
The piece is experienced through all of the senses, and as such, exceeds its title Scenic View. Running water, and phrases, fragments of the poem are audible:
| sometime tadpoles... |
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sometime toad... |
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shape changers... |
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corpses... |
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beaches... |
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boxes......... |
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Locks........ |
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sucks.......... |
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| from under the rocks..... |
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bones of amphibious.... |
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The words float out and mix with local sounds of traffic, water, bird cries, and the rustling of breezes through the trees that circle the park, spinning links in a chain of renewable meaning and encounter. Mutability and temporality are paramount. Surrounding foliage is gradually eliminated. The clarity of blanketing white will isolate and visually solidify the forms –– new spring growth will screen the sculpture from the creek, one of its inspirations. As an organic entity, the park is a body, its scars resonant with memories of past projects. A cleared circle circumscribes the space once occupied by Rowena Dykins' Rivercairn from "The Real Mackay" show. Indentations in the grass are all that is left of Penelope Stewart's Psyche's Inventory from the same exhibition. A massive Monument to the Montreal Massacre, shares the space, its two–ton stone embedded with a plaque containing the fourteen names, and surrounded by a little perennial garden. In December candles flicker during the annual vigil, another echo. Still earlier memories exist of the site and its previous lives within the development of a farming-based community along Soper Creek and the shore of Lake Ontario. Old-timers remember Mckay's Cream of Barley cereal, and traces remain of the loading ramp where grain was hauled to the third floor. A newspaper account of the 1937 flood describes the devastation in the mill yard when ninety-five pigs were swept away. Maps exist which show the earlier course of the creek and the elevation of the mill building tbe very different from what it is today.
O'Callaghan found the title "Scenic View" on an old architectural drawing. At one time there was a "scenic view" across the creek to the bluff on the other side. Now the sumacs and other trees have grown too thick to penetrate, yet the sound of flowing water is still in evidence, and a determined foray through the brush will reveal a vital watercourse, filled with living creatures –families of ducks, a heron, groundhogs, muskrats, and most spectacularly in September 2001, a school of salmon in an upstream sex and death dynamic. O'Callaghan's project looks out upon a wilder nature while sitting within a boundaried area, and in so doing speaks of the transitional and temporary spaces of existences. As such they are also spaces where possibilities might foment, where considerations of what is lost and what can still be lost are weighed. As O'Callaghan demonstrates, a Scenic View cannot be enough.
Scenic View 2001-2002
