STILLED WATERS

STATEMENT

This exhibition is about a project from 2019 in which I built a kayak with my dad and then paddled it the length of the Columbia River, 2000km in 3.5 months. This river is more like a series of reservoirs, chopped up and bloated by 14 dams. Where the waters once flowed, they now have been stilled.

I undertook the 2019 project for a number of reasons, but one of the major ones was to test a hypothesis … that it is possible to find a sense of true connection to the natural world even in deeply altered landscapes, even with all the noisy distractions of a world that lives and breathes capitalism.

I found there to be truth in this; I found that I was able to stay engaged in my relationship to the river even as I paddled alongside busy highways, as fighter jets ran training paths overhead with startling echoes, as I paddled past a nuclear reactor and mass incarceration facilities and giant landfills and Google data centers.

But it was only possible with concerted effort, only possible because I continued to ask in each moment “am I able to connect even here, even now?” and that question, asked a thousand times over, would prompt me to refocus on the tiniest detail in front of me. Most often, that detail was in the surface of the water. In this way, the 100+ days I spent on the Columbia became a meditation on water surfaces.

Stilled Waters was exhibited at The Hidden Garden Gallery in New Denver, BC from August 1-6, 2023.

The 2019 journey and the art arising from it has been made possible in part thanks to funding from Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance, Canada Council for the Arts, Rivers for Change, The Puffin Foundation, Ambler Mountain Works, and financial gifts from private donors, as well as other donors of gear, supplies, and food.