Hot Spells: Image and Environment in the work of Laura St. Pierre

Surreal waves of heat and smoke descended on the Prairies this past summer. The sun hung in the sky like a strange red planet in a thick blanket of grey particulates. You could feel it in your throat and your eyes, a shallow sting; on your skin, dusty. People talked about it as some kind of dream or hallucination, like waking up in a post-apocalyptic future, or an industrial city on the other side of the world. This is so strange. Such acts of mental displacement seemed like a coping mechanism, brought on when something you once told yourself was far-off is suddenly here, engulfing you. You grow impatient for it to stop, to clear. Waiting on blue skies to reassure you it was just a temporary anomaly, not a harbinger. Not a new normal.

It was auspicious timing for the debut of Laura St. Pierre’s video installation Spectral Garden II (2018) at PAVED Arts in Saskatoon. St. Pierre’s new work is connected to a larger, ongoing series of her projects that look closely at plants she has gathered, mostly from the boreal forest in Northern Saskatchewan—a place the artist has deep personal and familial connections to. This focus began in 2013, shortly after St. Pierre moved back to Saskatoon and experienced the increasingly intense smoke from surrounding forest fires. Fire itself isn’t necessarily destructive—it plays a vital role in a forest’s lifecycle and regeneration—but it’s unpredictable, and potentially devastating, in an unbalanced system. Decades of fire suppression have created gluts of combustible material, left vulnerable by rising temperatures and changing precipitation patterns. Scientists have projected a doubling of the total annual area burned across Canada by 2100, a prediction that comes with a caveat: in such a complex system, we can’t anticipate how changes this dramatic will play out. In 2003, philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” to describe a new emotional phenomenon: “an emplaced or existential melancholia experienced with the negative transformation (desolation) of a loved home environment.” Spectral Garden II taps into this shared and increasingly common psychological state.

Contemplating threats to boreal ecosystems, St. Pierre began gathering plants on her trips up north, bringing them back to preserve in her studio. Suspended in clear glass jars of alcohol, the specimens are subject to experimentations with light, reflection, movement and time to create dramatic and ethereal images. Often, the resulting photographs and videos are blown up to a scale that engulfs the viewer, transforming the plants into strange, unfamiliar forms. Their monumentality makes for a haptic experience, drawing viewers into stalks and veins that take on bodily relations. The plants present a wealth of pictorial, sculptural, and symbolic potential, which St. Pierre mines while remaining conscious of the certain contradictions that aestheticizing them presents. Her work has long explored the ways in which humans alter, preserve, destroy and romanticize “nature”—a notion of wilderness that somehow we’ve managed to think ourselves outside of.

Spectral Garden II is St. Pierre’s most ambitious moving image work to date. A four-channel projection, the work splits into two panoramic fields on opposing walls, surrounding the viewer. A dense array of boreal plants—mosses, lichens, ferns, berries, conifers—moves languidly across the screen. To create the effect of a slow, endless pan, St. Pierre filmed a rotating vessel in the round, a miniature diorama with no beginning and no end. This continuous flow is an important element of the work; it stretches, haunts, begins to overwhelm. St. Pierre isn’t one for taxonomic details, but her arrangements do reflect her experience with the forest, a landscape reassembled from memory. Eerie, stone-like, already ashen, the plants have been slowly drained of much of their colour by the alcohol preserving them. The only source of illumination is the flicker of fire burning on the flammable liquid surface, a warm light giving soft volume to each needle and bud, beaming through transparent forms to reveal veins, ribs and fibers. “Spectral” has a dual connotation: of the ghostly (specter), and of light (spectrum). The plants’ state of suspension echoes a Dutch still life or Victorian terrarium, a frozen moment with a twinge of memento mori.

Underneath the sharp crackling of the fire, a plaintive song adds to the sense of impending loss: Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” a traditional dirge, often heard at funerals. St. Pierre chose the rendition from Disney’s Fantasia (1940), taking viewers familiar with this classic animated film back to a state of enchantment laced with dread. Slowed down to a haunting refrain, the song gives the gallery a reverent and ritualistic atmosphere, adding a sombre edge to the work. Spectral Garden II is not simply an elegy for nature threatened or destroyed. Instead, it pushes at darker and more complex human tendencies: how we sentimentalize the environment, and in so doing, distance ourselves from it; the way we defer or appeal to higher powers, usually to save us from ourselves. Our manner of gazing at large-scale destruction, chasing a high via the sublime.

St. Pierre has developed this complexity—desire and aversion, serenity and gloom—in her practice over time, addressing the fallout of industrialized life ways, while avoiding simplistic critiques or appeals. In the large-scale landscape images Woodland Accretion and Shoreline Accretion (2007), created during a residency at Est-Nord-Est in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Quebec, multitudes of conjoined plastic buckets and lids appeared like invasive species, sprouting from crevices and glomming like barnacles. St. Pierre also applied wallpaper to the shoreline rocks in a mimicking purple hue, like a second skin to be shed or a real-life Photoshop clone stamp. Representing the artist’s first use of sculpture in staged photography, the images are visually complex and ambiguous; the eye sorts through what is natural and what is invasive, refuse and remnant, what may be absorbed and what must be rejected.

St. Pierre took this scene-setting further in her Urban Vernacular series (2009-2013). Produced during her time living and working in Grande Prairie, Alberta, the series revolves around The Scavenger, an artist alter ego. The Scavenger occupies the margins of the city, cobbling together makeshift shelters and decorative assemblages in and around neglected sites. On the one hand, the images are distressing, stark in their picturing of refuse, abandonment, and waste. On the other, they depict ingenuity, making due, the ability to create worlds that, however vulnerable or temporary, provide a spark of warmth in the disparate, impersonal cityscape.

For Autopark (2010), St. Pierre continued to explore the value of castoffs, working with mechanics and horticulturists to modify old cars into functional greenhouses. Displayed in public plazas outside the Art Gallery of Grand Prairie and Edmonton’s city hall, the vehicles might have appeared a bit unsettling from afar (there’s always something ominous about a vehicle appearing out of place) but up close revealed thriving, opulent ecosystems. Simple instructions were available to all who might want to try this elaborate DIY garden project. Autopark has a renegade, survivalist spirit. It’s fun but there’s that pang again, the reminder of our accumulating scraps and atmospheric CO₂, a foreshadow of the impending flip between proposition and necessity.

Following these public interventions, the Spectral Garden series signaled a more intimate turn to St. Pierre’s work: handpicked flora, carefully preserved and closely examined. Jars and jars of cuttings line the artist’s studio shelves, and this collection has an air of longing to it, a desire to fix and hold on (St. Pierre framed this sentiment explicitly in her recent exhibition “Museum of Future History” at Dunlop Art Gallery, displaying the plants in vitrines against a backdrop of red velvet). The cliché of the collector or hobbyist is one of a solitary figure burying themselves in their pursuit, perhaps as a way to mitigate the chaos of the outside world. Video and photography are also methods of preservation, just like alcohol, and these mediums speak to the fleeting nature of time and humanity’s urge to pause it. Closeness, control and escape—what are the dangers of the impulse to hold on to something? St. Pierre’s own thinking has evolved since her first physical and emotional reaction to climate change spurred the Spectral Garden series. As she describes:

At the beginning of the project I was looking towards Thoreau, especially Walden, but as the project progressed, my thinking changed. Thoreau saw nature and culture as opposing forces. His “wilderness ethic” championed ecological preservation, and he often contrasted the untouched wilderness with society, the former positioned as a source of physical and spiritual nourishment and the latter as a negative force that transforms humans into sleepwalking capitalists. Although Thoreau is still deeply influential, many contemporary thinkers argue that viewing nature and culture as being separate hinders our ability to cope with impending ecological crisis.

The smoldering image of Spectral Garden II makes me think of a mirage; the way heat itself can bend light, completely altering one’s perception. The term mirage comes from the Latin mirari, “to wonder at,” and this strikes me as a quality of gaze important to St. Pierre’s work; a state of contemplation premised on the unknowable—one that informs both our romanticization of nature and our desire for visual technologies. Cultural theorist Jonathan Crary proposed that capitalist modernity “has generated a constant re-creation of the conditions of sensory experience,” wherein the media we refer to as film, photography, and television “are transient elements within an accelerating sequence of displacements and obsolescences.” Limits of vision are tied to limits of understanding, and pictorial modalities inform our perceptions of time, scale, veracity and permanence. Just as St. Pierre’s immersive imagescape reflects on environmental instability, it does so through a medium that is itself constantly destabilized. Forecasts in either area (climate, images) are rife with the unknown, an impending sense of the uncontrollable, a feeling that what we’ve started is escalating beyond our grasp.

Hot Spells: Image and Environment in the work of Laura St. Pierre by Rose Bouthillier was originally commissioned for PAVED Meant Vol. 3 (2017-2018), which will be published in summer 2019. PAVED Meant is an anthology of critical essays that analyze contemporary visual and media arts exhibitions and events that have transpired at PAVED Arts in Saskatoon, SK. Please visit pavedarts.ca for more information on this incredible resource.

This article is published in issue 36.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue