Erase me
is a collaborative work that consists of 29 panoramic black-and-white
photographic images interspersed by prose, and followed by
a contextual essay. Over the last five years photographer
Leslie Thompson has returned to the grasslands of her childhood
with a medium format panoramic camera. Writer Len Gasparini
accompanied her. The images were made along the southwestern
Saskatchewan-Montana border, in Grasslands National Park.
The photographer’s vantage point at the eye-level of
a coyote, and corresponding preference for photographing at
dawn and dusk, questions the traditional boundary between
nature and the human observer that is found in western landscape
photography and painting. Mr. Gasparini’s nature notes
and impressions come from his perceptions of the prairie.
Leslie Thompson is a photo-based
visual artist and independent curator. Born in Regina, Saskatchewan,
she currently maintains a studio in Toronto. In 1977, Treetop
Press published Chthonic Light, her first collaborative photographic
project with Mr. Gasparini.
Len Gasparini is the author of
ten books of poetry, including Ink from an Octopus, which
won the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize in 1990.
Petra Halkes is an independent
curator and art critic who lives in Ottawa. Petra’s
critical writing and curatorial projects focus on the cultural
conventions of landscape.
|
