© D. Wall and Ronald Hambleton (click for bio)
at
Royal Alberta Museum
EDMONTON
May 18 TO July 8 2002
that accompanied the installation
As Canadians we are perhaps doomed to wander more than our fair share but movement gives us time to deal with the issues we face as a Northern people. And this is all about the wandering of Canadians, our radio world, our silent world and our perceptions and thoughts along the way. Today photographs have trouble standing alone, each requires at least a "thousand words" to help it on its cumbersome way and so the words imbedded in this exhibition are necessarily as important as the images.
The images themselves follow in the footsteps of European avant-gardists of the 1930s and 40s, particularly French and German. But others come to mind as well: contemporary Czechs Boldan Holomicek and Jan Reich; Canadians Orest Semschishen, Doug Clark, Susan McEachern, David McMillan and Tom Gibson; and Americans Walker Evans, Tom Zimmerman and (with apologies) William Eggleston of Memphis.
The photographs here are moments in the psychological life of
a wanderer, brief glimpses of what passes through the mind. These are scenes
that can slip in and out of consciousness easily and make the tediousness of
travel in such a vast landscape more troublesome and more hopeful. The poems and
journal entries accompanying the photographs range from the truly sentimental to
more demanding. These too are momentary reflections. The writings and the
questions and answers "Where
would you find this road?" - visitors read a
single question at each photograph and found the answers at the end of the
installation - have been collected and prepared in most part by Ronald Hambleton
former music reviewer for the Toronto Star and writer (e.g., A Master Killing,
The Love and Death of Orpheus, The Branding of America, verse of all sorts,
etc.).
The "texts" and the "quiz" explore whether or not a viewer's understanding of photographs can be directed. The test is about the primacy of text, photograph or viewer's personal mind set or indeed whether it is simply academic to wonder which is more influential. It may well be that the combination of the three media is a rendering of the individual alone.
© deniswall@ncf.ca June, 2002