It is April of 2018, and Sandra Semchuk has had a very busy month. She is quite literally in the middle of retirement from her position as a tremendously influential and much-loved professor of photography at Emily Carr University, and has just returned to her home from Ottawa where she received a Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts, and opened the Award exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada. More than forty years after completing her first photographic works–portraits of of her family and towns members of Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan–a community that still counts her as one of their own, Sandra Semchuk’s latest projects continue to enact forms of recognition and cross-cultural learning. As Dana Claxton has said: “[Semchuk] has repeatedly engaged with historical Canadian state-sanctioned oppressions, and despite this ugly history, made works of great beauty to place those experiences within the realm of art and life.”1 When I met Sandra in her home on April 12, for this conversation, noticing that I was not feeling well, she had me lay down for a Reiki session. The following is an excerpt of the conversation that ensued between the two of us, cross legged, on the carpet.
Althea Thauberger: Sandra, I first saw your photographs when I was an undergrad at Concordia—they were in a slide lecture, in a contemporary photography class taught by Penny Cousineau. It was your self portraits and collaborative portraits from the 1970’s. I was blown away. I still remember that.
Sandra Semchuk: What was useful to you in what I had done, so that I can be in dialogue with what you are seeing?
A: Well, in that work, I recognized a straightforwardness, and gaze that was accepting and open. There was a directness about your work that I was drawn to and I felt was different than a lot of other photography I was exposed to at that time. Your work, your relationships, your relationship with interiority, it was just …there. It was just…. clear.
S: Why were you interested in that?
A: I was seeking a way to find precedents, or a way to understand why I wanted to be an artist. And I found the answer in other artists’ work, and in your work. This was how I trusted the power and the usefulness of art.
S: Who else were you looking at at the same time?
A: Another artist whose work moved me then was Rineke Djikstra. I think the potential of the social document was a something that I was articulating for myself.
S: What year is this?
A: The late nineties. Between ’97 and 2000.
S: So the document was being thoroughly critiqued, or had been.
A: Yes, but it was also about the time of Hal Foster’s Return of the Real, and that was influential.
S: Do you think that the landscapes and the mindscapes of Saskatchewan—where you are from— was part of what drew you to the work?
A: Well I think so, but I did really consider that consciously until I started writing about your work recently. So many people have been touched by that work. Elwood Jimmy has talked about how he found a deep sense of connection to place in those Meadow Lake portraits; how they have these intangible aspects that he recognizes from the region.
S: Those things that we grew up with in that landscape, and the specificities of place: the different kinds of sages, for example, the different kinds of grasses, the way the moons would move and shape, those have to do with shifts of states of mind. I grew up by a slough with frogs and tadpoles, and very loud sparrows in the spring. Very loud. Hawks. All the birds. Weren’t they amazing? The meadowlarks.
A: I remember the swallows most because they were terrifying.
S: Swoosh! And all the bugs. So many bugs.
A: Millions of grasshoppers.
S: Beetles, ants, worms, caterpillars, monarch butterflies, cecropia butterflies! When a storm would come–all those things would so deeply shape who we are, and who we became. There is nothing that moves or shapes me as deeply or profoundly as the landscape. There in Saskatchewan and later, my resistance to the landscape here in British Columbia…. I was really good at it!
A: What do you mean by resistance?
S: Being a bit closed to the land. You know it was pretty weird to come to a place where the bodies of water came and went with the tides. And rivers did the same thing if they were attached to the ocean. And the way the trees grow is very different than in Saskatchewan. Those big block shapes that we call mountains…
A: Just a bit different.
S: I grew up in a socialist province where the co-operative movement was strong, which is also a different way of understanding the world than most of the places in Canada. But that resistance to being here in B.C. eventually left. It took really spending time in the land.
A: Now you are right in there.
S: Now I’m right in the landscape. I still go to Saskatchewan every year. And one time when I was coming back to B.C., I felt the cedar trees before I saw them. I told this to Leonard George on the phone. He laughed at me and said: Now you’ve got two homes.
A: What about when you were at school in Saskatoon going back to Meadow Lake in the summers? Maybe you had two homes then too? Didn’t you start doing photography at that time?
S: Yes I would go home in the summer, absolutely. I didn’t take photography until the last term of my last year.
A: At U of S?
S: Yes. I was studying with Eli Bornstein. I was studying the movement of light over form and color.
A: Painting?
S: Three dimensional reliefs.
A: Ceramics?
S: Wood.
A: Wood!
S: And color. Eli was very influential because of his interest in constructions and their relationship to the more than human, or the wider than human. He was very much interested in what was happening in that wider world.
A: So you said you just took this one photography class, but then you quickly developed an identity as a photographer. Why did photography become so important to you then?
S: In that last year of going to university, I was the editor of the university yearbook, and Richard Holden was the photo editor. We turned it into a book about the issues of that time, and throughout the book there were full page black/black duotone photographs. At this point I could see how photography was a very effective tool and non-verbal way of communicating that has this kind of historical slipstream built into it.
A: So, it seems like this was also the beginning of those dialogues that brought you together with the other artists who co-founded The Photographer’s Gallery in Saskatoon.2
S: It was just after that when all of those photographers like Sylvia Lisitza, James Lisitza, Richard Holden, John Nanson, Jo Nanson, Bob Wells, started coming together.
A: And you were looking at what was happening in the world.
S: We were looking at capitalism, and at the fact that we were wholesale giving away our resources to big corporations from outside the country. We were looking at First Nations who had been kind of set aside, and largely ignored and marginalized in a kind of apartheid. And trying to figure out: How do we become responsible? We were in our twenties, we were growing up. We wanted to be able to live a life that would be led by an urge for justice. A very, very important idea was to see equality. Part of what we were doing in forming the gallery was we were interested in placing ourselves and our province and our relationship to the land and place in the centre, and not being peripheral. Not being Toronto, or Vancouver or anywhere else. That was key. So going back to photograph in my hometown was an extension of that documentary incentive. That may have been part of why you were attracted to my work.
A: Yes it was. Your portraiture and social documentary.
S: I loved working with people so much. It was amazing for me to be able to photograph someone to acknowledge them. I think I felt so much gratitude, especially to the people where I grew up—in a community where everyone knew me, and I knew something of their stories. I got a lot of support.
A: From your community?
S: From my community. It was a culture that was fully engaged.
A: I can’t even imagine that.
S: That’s just a horrible thing isn’t it? It was a fully engaged culture. I grew up in an extended family. And a small town that was another extension of that; and a farming community and the First Nations communities. It was a rich tapestry. And that extended into the North. And the frogs. And the tadpoles. With all its problems, you know, relations between men and women were often problematic, and there were problems with livelihoods and with racialization of First Nations.
A: I read this anecdote in that article in the Meadow Lake paper that just came out recently, on the occasion of your Governor General award.3 They mentioned your putting these photographs of Meadow Lake residents in a store window right on the main street.
S: Yes. In 1974 when I was seven months pregnant with my daughter, Rowenna, we put up flats on Madill’s Drug Store and pinned up the photographs. I still feel it was one of my best shows. It was pinned.
A: What do you mean, flats?
S: We made flats with burlap over them so that we could pin the photographs outside.
A: Safety pins?
S: Straight pins. And people gossiped about the people in the photographs.
A: So, you could say that the exhibition fostered a critically engaged local dialogue.
S: (smile) I was so grateful for that experience.
A: This is something that is also really important for my work. Having these conversations, spending the time, and then for the work to be immediately shown in community, inside of those conversations. And gossip. They are usually the best shows. Gratitude is a big part of the experience of this kind of work. It is profound, isn’t it? To be in a position to be grateful.
S: It really is. And for me that’s been there in the work all along right from the beginning. I guess the pieces where that wasn’t there never made it.
A: Never made it to be seen?
S: Never made it to be seen.
A: There is this body of work that you did after that, the Self Portraits (1976-79), which went into installation with Mute Voice (1976-1991) when you incorporated video. If I look at that work from an art-theory perspective I might think of conceptual typologies, or feminist discourses of the gaze, that kind of thing, but it is much deeper. It feels like both an honour and a burden to confront it because the gazes and the stories are wounding, painful, and also full of love, and as you say, gratitude. It must have been a risk to make that work, personally and professionally. When I see it, I have to change. I have to be a bit more open, and aware of my own relations.
S: Yes, there was so much resistance to my work at that point. That interest in the subtle shifts and changes has a lot to do with the subtle shifts and nuances of the land. So, my question was, when I was doing that work–I was learning from the land, and thinking about an urge for justice–was how does change occur? It’s so interesting that as I read now about the beginnings of the Burmese Democracy Movement, for example, that the Buddhists there have maybe ten thousand words for states of mind. So, I was doing this elementary work on states of mind and how we change. And it was always in the same place–sitting as you are now with a similar kind of light, setting the medium format camera up always in the same position with the same lens. I would go there when I felt something strongly. I would just sit and witness what I was feeling. To see it. The camera is outside of yourself and creating a counter situation. I was trying to catch that moment in which we slide in transition from one state of mind to another. I wanted to understand the impossible: How does change occur? In this, I taught myself a form of clearing the mind, and a form of getting rid of projections. It strengthened that muscle of actually listening to myself. Big one. Which furthers the ability to actually listen to someone else! Which is most useful.
A: Did you know that that’s what you were doing at the time? Did you know that is why you were doing it?
S: No, I was trying to survive. I was trying to live.
A: Did you know that you were thinking about change?
S: I did.
A: I want to ask you more about change and landscape, because you went to London, Ontario for a teaching position at Western.4
S: Yes, that brought me into a community where there was a very dense and electric artist community, and where performance art was really important. My daughter was seven. We would go every weekend out into the country she would do these spontaneous rituals in nature, like braiding green slime, or digging nests in the sand.
A: So she was a budding Fluxus performance artist…
S: …Yes, and her godmother, Coco Gordon, from New York—who befriended and worked with us in London at that time– is a Fluxus artist. And I had studied freeform Chinese brushwork with Chin-Shek Lam. He had me do a hundred strokes a day, and he was working with a very large brush. The brushstroke itself is a moving articulation of the self in the moment. But it’s based on the basic forms in the natural world: the bone stroke, the sinew. It’s that repetition, and repetition, until something becomes a part of who you are. So these two things are happening at the same time, and then I went to New Mexico.
A: What year was that again?
S: 1983. I was again shifting landscapes and thinking: I can change here, right? New Mexico is this place of huge contradictions. You have the profound strength and spirituality of the First Nations there, and you had all the nuclear activity that was happening there. At that time there was a very strong photo department at the UNM.5
A: It must have been an amazing time and really hard too.
S: I became a single mom and was trying to survive. I didn’t have much money to go to New Mexico, but I got my own dark room there. It had black widow spiders in it and lots of cockroaches.
A: That must have been part of the landscape that changed you!
S: It was! And, every weekend Rowenna6 and I would go out into the landscape and she would continue doing these performances. And I began photographing her. She was so kind and patient with me. But it was there that I saw that possibility of her actions and my use of the camera bringing together that use of the brush stroke and the performance.
A: And that was when your gestural work started.7
S: Yes, and it was that sense of wanting to come back into the experience itself; going back and by allowing myself that freedom—to move and be playful and be engaged at the same time as the person that I’m coming to know through their gestures. Don’t forget I’m Ukrainian, and coming out of a culture from which that word freedom was really important.
A: Why is that?
S: Largely because of the feudal system. People were bound to work for overlords and even when that system was changed, they were still indentured and subservient to pay for the land. The education of their people in their language was repressed they still sustained their culture.
A: But then there was loss here, in Canada.
S: There was. During WW I, thousands of Ukrainians in Canada were interned in 24 internment camps across the country. Racism against and fear of peoples with German or Austro-Hungarian passports was normalized.8 Ukrainian culture was sustained as long as they were within and had the support of community. But, by the time I was growing up there was a loss of language happening and we were being educated in the way the British have encouraged education to develop. So there was this irony that when things were really, really rough people held onto their culture and it kept them going. But the easier things got, the more the effects of diaspora on many levels were felt. So when you responded: “Oh, you had a culture, and I can’t imagine that.” I really get that. It’s a really big issue.
A: What do you do with that?
S: The doing of the work, is itself, the work. So when the pieces are finished they are a trace of culture in the making. It’s trying to create a culture out of actions which are attempting to be restorative. I lost the languages of my ancestors. I lost many of the teachings. Not all of them. I asked my dad9 the question: “What have I brought forward of that which you value?”
A: You asked your dad that? What did he say?
S: He said: “Everything, just everything.” So the substance remains. The overt forms of the substance is not there, but the substance, the energy is there. What I got passed was really important and I accepted it, and I’m working from it.
A: You have said that your father passed you this urgency, and that your late husband, James Nicholas did as well. How did you and James actually meet?
S: I met James in ’93 in Vancouver. I went to visit Kim Soo Goodtrack, and James answered the door. I was doing a giveaway at that time. Kim was going to photograph James’s sister, who is a Medicine Woman, and who has now passed. I was bringing film because I could get it at a cheaper price for her and I had things that I was gifting her with. James and I got talking, and he was reading a poem about his dad, and I said: “Oh, was your dad Lionel Nicholas?” And he looked at me and said: “What?” and I said: “Is your dad Lionel Nicholas?” He said: “Yes, how did you know that?” I said: “Because I have a photograph of him at home.” He was just incredulous.
A: James was an actor…
S: He was an actor and a writer, and an orator and a poet. And we worked together. He had worked for his Nation for most of his adult life, as a liaison between governments. He was Rock Cree from Manitoba.
A: How did he feel about working in a different kind of art sphere, in visual art?
S: He wasn’t particularly interested in it. Being exhibited was not that important to him. He was doing that out of love for me. But the doing of the work was extremely important. The articulation of the understories in the land and the communication of them first to ourselves was important to him. What an extraordinary thing, to have been able to participate in doing that work collaboratively.
A: David Garneau has spoken about how, in that work, James narrated images of himself, and how you were a participant in that, how there was both profound divisions between you—nations, genders, bodies—and profound trust.
S: It was a dialogue between us. I think the sticking it out, the going to all those ceremonies, the doing of all that healing work, the observing, the witnessing, the participating, the living with, the being engaged, the caring, the loving, the getting mad, the hurt, the crying, with all of its joys, and difficulties, and the whole range of being… Not very conventional, but very real. It helped me to become more compassionate. Helped me to understand just a little bit more across cultures. Helped me to move that little bit more out of denial of the ongoing systemic racism. Helped me be a little bit supportive of students who were struggling with similar issues. Helped me be just a little bit more human.
A: The doing of the work, is itself, the work, that is what you said.
S: Yes. James was always doing these performances that I had to be so damn quick to catch before they were gone. He just played out these narratives in everything he would do. There would always be humor. Like, when he was digging the garden, he dug all the way around but left this one little tiny piece of land that he was standing on with the shovel. “It’s called “Eeskoonagan,” the land left over.” That was the land they were given for the reserves. Trying to follow him, there would be all these absurdities that I was getting caught up in, and it got me in trouble a lot of the time. He was a trickster in extraordinary ways. He would turn things upside down so they would be opened up for you to look at in a totally different way. He had this extraordinary ability for humor to lift you up, to raise you up. And, at same time as it’s cracking you open, it hurts like hell. And you see, and you feel, and it opens you up to caring because we, too, are numb.
A: How did you know to take experiences and photograph them, and regard them as art? Did you have a conversation about it and say: “Okay, now we are going to…?”
S: No. Did we do a grant application? No. It happened out of that kind of… because the use of the camera had become so much a part of my life and a part of pushing the boundaries of myself, and getting to know other people. And bearing witness to that process. And learning from it, rather than being locked in a kind of stasis. I think that’s what artists do. We just kind of open up spaces so other people can come in and engage them. Spaces that have become shutdown or suppressed in some kind of way. So, we did that together and for each other. Cross-culturally, it gave us a way to navigate histories. Our marriage itself was an articulation of those histories.
A: Yes, it was.
S: We did this one video piece called, To the Living, The Dead, and The Not Yet Born, which was a dialogue with Taras Shevchenko’s poem. He wrote about feudalism but he also was admonishing his people to cleanse themselves and to not go away to foreign lands, and make themselves into these high people. James read that poem putting in Cree words where he wanted to, and putting his own voice into it. And then he went into this role where he became a drunk. All in Cree. I shot it very close so it’s right in his mouth. Then when he finished, it was very strong. He just said: “Cut!” and then he came back. They say that the family waits, for somebody to feel the pain. There are some people who have that capacity, to do that work, and maybe there’s a punctuality and a timing, for people to/who? do that work.
A: You mean in an inter-generational way?
S: In an inter-generational way.
A: I find the prospect of this work to be very scary, and this can be paralyzing. It is difficult to describe how important it is for me, for artists of my generation, and younger generations, to have precedents like you, and like James. I know this is not what you were talking about but I think it is related.
S: Thank you, Althea. That comes back to my question of you at the beginning. For me, it’s been a privilege. I was the first one to go to university in my family. To have had the privileges that I’ve had… even though I might not have wanted to do the work of going into those things. Looking at those things and trying to move out of denial. I mean when we are talking about reconciliation, people have no idea how painful it is. They have no idea what it means to really bear witness, and to experience that suffering that continues to be played out in multiple ways… Some of which is lateral violence. Some of which is abuse to oneself. Some of which is just straight pain and horror, which is the best kind. If there is such a thing as best kind. Feeling it is a very powerful thing to do. It’s something the sweat lodge and a lot of ceremonies leave room for. First Nations healing methodologies are extraordinary. The psychology behind them is brilliant. And that ability they have to go through stages in that process, to raise people up, so that integration occurs. It’s just extraordinary. James had those knowledges and skills, and shared them.
A: And now you are sharing that work—you have compiled what you did together.
S: Yes, and I continued to do the production after James died. I still have the responsibility to show it.
A: Was it very hard? To put together?
S: It was very hard. I’m just coming out of the grief now, ten years later. You know it was a very tragic death.
A: I heard about his death at the time. Everyone was shocked, and spoke about it with so much pain. That was before I knew you.
S: He fell at a fishing camp, off a cliff. On the Fraser River.
A: And you weren’t there.
S: No, another artist was there. It was the only camp with a television antenna. There’s always humour somewhere.
A: The only fishing camp that had a television antenna?
S: Because his friend, who was also an artist, had playfully had put up this television antenna by the racks where the fish were drying.
A: As a kind of joke?
S: Humour can save us. That is how I recognized which one it was. In this case the drying racks were one foot from the edge of the cliff. That’s where they dry the fish that they catch on the river. A very beautiful place, exquisitely beautiful. A path through sage and blue delphiniums. Very little sign of human activity other than the racks and the little path, after thousands and thousands of years.
A: When you speak of the landscape it is wonderful because you always speak in details. You name the names of plants and creatures. Can I ask: when was it that you had this moment of feeling the cedar before you saw them?
S: It was probably 7 years ago. James was gone.
A: And then after James was gone you also started new landscape work in 3D video and doing these large panoramic forest stories photographs. Was that a way in to this place that you had been resistant to?
S: It was the way in. You know it’s that sense that as we are coming towards the landscape the landscapes is coming towards us. It is not just a one-way thing. It’s like how do you penetrate that space vertically and show something of that movement. Time and space, when it comes to the molecular level, are nothing. Now they’re seeing that there is consciousness is in every cell. Isn’t that something?
A: (reading) The rain was saturating the Earth. One misstep and my foot would penetrate the thin layer of humus over the decomposing trees. I perched by the cedar to witness Vine Maples as they pulled chlorophyll back into their cores. Leaves turning gold. Radiant despite the deep dark. How fragile we are. I heard Stevie Wonder sing on Facebook this morning. On and on the rain will fall. On and on the rain will fall.10
S: When I began to work with my digital medium format camera in the forest again, that 3D influence was definitely there, and I could feel it in my shooting, because I’m moving across the field with my camera. There is this performative aspect still within it, and in this particular case I had to slide down the embankment in the pouring rain. And I’m not supposed to do that with my camera!
A: This is a really different kind of picture. The space is densely full. Layers, webs, paths. There is no horizon.
S: So different from that early work. So, it’s clear it’s the land isn’t it? And that’s what’s happened, it’s like a layering has happened in my perception. I’ve been a practitioner now for almost 50 years. That’s a life in art. I love this work because it takes me back to the slough. And the wet.
Althea Thauberger is an artist, filmmaker and educator who works in experimental social documentary. Her projects are site-oriented, and involves a community of articulation around issues disclosed by collective research. Her recent screenings and exhibitions include the inaugural Karachi Biennale; La musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; and the occupied Kino Zvezda, Belgrade.
- for the Governor General’s Award Nomination, 2016 and 2017.
- See Blackflash Vol 15.2 (1997) Where Semchuk writes about the founding of the gallery, including the dialogues the founders had about the connection to the land and light of Saskatchewan as a broad framework for their approach to photography.
- Northern Pride, March 1, 2018. https://northernprideml.com/2018/03/m-l-artist-receives-award/
- University of Western Ontario.
- University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
- Rowenna Losin is Sandra Semchuk’s daughter. She is now a mother of 3 and manages a women’s clothing store.
- Sandra Semchuk’s gestural work can be characterized by an embodied use of the camera and the simultaneity of sequencing.
- The book, The Stories Were Not Told: Canada’s First World War Internment Camps, by Sandra Semchuk will be released in November of 2018 by the University of Alberta Press.
- Sandra Semchuk’s father, Martin Semchuk, was a first generation Ukrainian Canadian. He managed the family grocery story in Meadow Lake, and helped bring about Medicare as a Member of Legislature in Saskatchewan. He died in 2000.
- Text from Sandra Semchuk’s recent photo work: the rain will fall, 2018.
This article is published in issue 35.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue
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