CARLA GARNET

DROWNING OPHELIA probes our watery relationship with nature by alluding to literature as a sea of dreams and fears, desire for meaning, justice, and pursuit of beauty and reveals contemporary art practice as a fictional stream to be investigated for cogent environmental reflection upon notions of sustainability. 

Janet Bellotto’s 2004 five-minute video loop Torrential Drift features moving imagery taken from a gondola-ride during the early morning hours in Venice. In this work, the artist captures the reflections of the surrounding architecture while passing through the canal.[2] It is interesting to see this fluid city as a reflection, the image acting as a premonition of Venice’s potential drowning due to global-warming. In other words, we see the city already drowned.

In another series entitled Diluvian Lure the artist optically merges imagery from Pre-Raphaelite paintings, sea anemone and Italian landscapes. The central Lenticular photograph restages John Everett Millais’ well-known 1852 Pre-Raphaelite painting, Ophelia, which pictures Shakespeare’s drowning personae floating down river, her hair loosen in the stream; a necklace of violets still around her neck and an unfastened bouquet of many different flowers drifting away from her open hands.[3]

From Charlotte Bronte to Leonard Cohen, writers engage water for its ability to both recoup and drown and as a fluid symbolic presence animating our imagination and connecting to our ever changing, and often-conflicting, emotions.

The stuff of nightmares, myths, and fairytales are performed in Janieta Eyre’s 1995 photograph Rehearsal #23, in which the artist stages herself as Tennyson's Lady of Shallot, “Lying, robed in snowy white/That loosely flew to left and right-/The leaves upon her falling light-/Thro the noises of the night/She floated down to Camelot.”[4] Alluding both to classical literature and the Greek custom of burying deceased unmarried women as brides of Christ, Eyre depicts a woman suspended between life and death.  Dreaming or still unborn, there is a sense in this image both of peace and anxiety that lies floating on the water.

Sue Lloyd’s 2001 works Float, Night Storm, Twilight and Tangled show a world impossibly split in two. The women in the top portions of her large digitally produced, photographs image women out on floating boats, searching with lanterns, and staring down into the depths. The bottom part of these new media prints depicts women swimming deep under water, literally separated from the top half of the work: metaphorically separated the others above, by time, space, and the physical constraints of the image.[5] Deliberately constructed, each image is a compression of time and place, spanning years and continents. They are Canadian landscapes, but also places everywhere and nowhere.

‘Fictionality’ is fore-grounded in Lloyd’s backlit 2002 digitals titled Flood, Swamp, and Swimmers…  The Aristotelian dividing line between reality and fiction is highlighted by the artist’s refusal to have her new media water-soaked photo-based works line up or match. In-as-much Lloyd evokes both the pastoral tradition of picturing the land as a generous and fertile Mother Earth (providing us with rest, diversion and solace) while activating the other equally primal understanding of the earth as chaos and death. For Lloyd, both views of Nature and Mother Earth are in play at once.[6]

Temporality, memory, and loss weave through Paulette Phillip’s 2002 Floating House video projection with 5.1 surround sound, shot on 16mm film and transferred to DVD, as does the very contemporary fear of being drowned just as Atlantis was. The conceptual artist’s work broadcasts a spectral vision of a maritime house adrift out on the Atlantic Ocean as the force of the sea pulls it under. Paulette explains that her work questions the implied stability of structures like “human nature,” knowledge, and architecture and how over time these structures are contested, disappear or get reclaimed by nature. She writes, “My interest in the psycho/socio nature of phenomena − how and why things appear − is guided by research into histories where the romantic oscillates with the scientific.”[7]

Connecting the aesthetic to the political John Dickson’s works Franklin Expedition, Oil Spill, Leviathan, Sinking Ship and Cyclone are all made using found components such as wine-bottles, water, cork, and magnets and in the case of Cyclone a small motor. These five sculptures are excerpted from Dickson’s larger 1996/97 series, TEN SMALL NAUTICAL DISASTERS. The DISASTERS are based on the idea of the 'ship in the bottle', which is often associated with a tradition in folk art that expresses a naive nostalgia towards a life at sea. Describing the context of his work, John writes,

In my bottles I use real water, sand and rocks, and carve small vessels out of cork that really float (or sink). Much of my effort has been directed towards the stabilization of very dynamic situations. The floating ships are held in a fixed position by magnets inset into the shelves that cradle the 1.5 litre wine bottles. Algae, mould growth, and condensation inside the bottles create little isolated eco-systems complete with weather conditions. In some cases I've chosen to inhibit this `natural' behavior while in others I have accepted it as thematically appropriate - Nature is the cause of most tragedies at sea. In my bottles humanity is not always the victim. One of the `DISASTERS' shows a listing tanker, the waters surface covered by a slick of black oil.  Some of the scenes depicted are based on historical events – the Titanic and the Franklin Expedition – while others are not specific in their references - a ship sinking among icebergs. Others [sculptures] are pure fiction and fantasy – a sea monster, Hollywood under water.  They all depict tragic situations that subvert the naive and cheerful character of the traditional 'ship in the bottle' by alluding to a darker and more complex relationship between humanity and nature.”[8]