"Mapping the North": Leslie Reid documents environmental change in a warming climate

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The Llewellyn Glacier in the Juneau Icefield sits amid the Coast Mountains in northern British Columbia near the Alaska and Yukon borders. Ottawa artist Leslie Reid took a dramatic aerial photograph of that glacier in August of 2013. The image reveals jagged towers of ice, standing like soldiers around an exposed mountain peak called a nunatak. In the foreground is water.

The photograph appears to capture a pristine North. But it is actually a disturbing snapshot of climate change. Reid has seen photographs of that same scene taken half a century ago, also during August. Back then, the water was frozen. Now, the glacier is shrinking from warmer temperatures, reshaping the ribbons of water that flow from it into giant Atlin Lake.

“It is really quite shocking,” Reid says during an interview to discuss her environmentally charged exhibition, Mapping the Cold War, at the University of Calgary’s Founders’ Gallery at the Military Museums from Feb. 11 to June 5.

Mapping the Cold War is a multimedia production of paintings, videos and photo-mosaics that document Reid’s three-week Arctic tour as part of the Canadian Forces Artists Program. The retired University of Ottawa art professor travelled with soldiers in 2013 to gather ammunition for her personal war against climate change, a Cold War of a different kind than her late father, Squadron Leader John “Jack” Reid, fought decades ago as a military pilot flying DC-3s around the Arctic so aerial photographers could map much of the same territory. Back in the 1950s, the North was deemed strategically important amid fears the Soviet Union was about to catapult missiles across the North Pole. 

Reid’s 11,400-kilometre trip on a Griffon helicopter and a large Hercules workhorse plane stretched from Whitehorse to Yellowknife, Iqaluit and Resolute. The flights were part of the military’s annual Operation Nanook to wave the flag in what has increasingly become a melting Arctic. A self-described military brat, Reid says she felt at home with the “welcoming, helpful and generous” soldiers.

Reid’s goal was to find examples of climate change she could document in photographs and, later, in paintings. Evidence surfaced in “before” and “after” photos of glaciers in the Yukon, where glacier-fed rivers and lakes, as seen from the air, are changing from white to grey and brown as white glacial silt ground from underlying rocks by the moving ice diminishes and is replaced by gravel and debris. Reid also found evidence of climate change in Inuit accounts about the disappearance of ancient landmarks as warmer temperatures swelled rivers and reshaped shorelines.

Climate change was not Reid’s only reason for starting the project. She also wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps. The photographs he helped collect are now housed at the headquarters of Natural Resources Canada in Ottawa. Reid spent many hours there looking at archival prints taken at locations she had visited so she could see how landscapes have changed.

Hundreds of photos, both archival ones and Reid’s contemporary shots, will be displayed in Calgary in four mosaics, each about seven feet high and 10 feet wide. Some of Reid’s photos of people are included in the mosaics. Those photos record changes brought by visiting outsiders. In one, an Inuit teen is given a lesson about sharks by a British scientist. Another shows a group of uniformed soldiers teaching a different Inuit boy how to handle a rifle. 

Scenes like these appear in Reid’s seven-minute video, Heartbeat, which captures cultural exchanges between the military and Inuit in Resolute on Cornwallis Island in Nunavut. Soldiers organize a baseball game with Inuit teenagers. Later, Inuit throat singers and dancers perform for the soldiers. 

The scenes are a contemporary version of Samuel de Champlain visiting First Nations’ villages to trade trinkets for furs. Drenched in latter-day colonialism, the video ends with text reminding viewers the Inuit came to Resolute in the 1950s, when they were forcibly relocated from Inukjuak, Que., 1,200 kilometres to the southeast, as the crow flies, as part of a Cold War strategy to demonstrate Canadian sovereignty over the North. Many starved due to a lack of game and other food sources. But others survived, just like the shark heart in Reid’s video, still miraculously beating on a Resolute dock, long after it was cut from the creature’s body.

In Heartbeat, a visiting scientist tells shark tales to an Inuit youth, a seemingly globalized lad in baggy shorts and unlaced shoes. Once, it would have been the Inuit explaining flora and fauna to visitors. But Reid says indigenous people are losing that knowledge. With climate change, she adds, resource development will increase, outsiders will increasingly take over and the Inuit connection to the environment will erode even more.

A second video for Mapping the Cold War is the eight-minute Resolute, largely composed of aerial views of the barren island’s brown summer landscape, which seems to stretch to infinity. According to local lore: “Resolute is not the end of the world but you can see it from there.”

Six paintings are planned for the exhibition. They are based on Reid’s photographs of landscapes around shrinking glaciers. One, yet to be named, shows the Disappointment River flowing fanlike near the Kaskawulsh Glacier, seemingly ready to gobble up the entire landscape.

Reid has always painted from photographs. The resulting misty, dream-like images evoke more emotion than scenery. They are like the soul of a place, rather than the landscape itself. So much so that the National Gallery of Canada acquired two of Reid’s ethereal Newfoundland scenes for its 2012 biennial.

When creating paintings, Reid projects a photograph onto the canvas. Broad details are drawn in graphite. “I then block in the major colour and tonal areas, letting some of the graphite mix into the paint, and allowing some of the drawing to show through the paint.” Then, two to eight layers of glaze – thinly applied transparent paint – are added, creating translucency and what Reid calls “density of light and haze.” The goal is to craft a painting that’s “sensory but also disquieting.”

Reid’s first batch of Arctic paintings were exhibited last year at Galerie Laroche/Joncas in Montreal. Critic Petra Halkes positively reviewed the exhibition for Winnipeg-based Border Crossings magazine: “Reid’s painting technique of layering subtle colour shifts results in a veiled distanced imagery that at first struck me as unearthly and then as a recognition of the earth’s fragility.” Other Arctic paintings have been in two Ottawa group shows; a solo exhibition is planned for later this year at Ottawa’s St-Laurent + Hill Gallery. Some new paintings are destined for Calgary.

Lindsey Sharman, the Founders’ Gallery curator, describes Reid’s paintings as “subtle, yet ambitious and sublime.” Collectively, the works in Mapping the Cold War offer “incredible angles at which to look at military, governmental and environmental issues” in a changing North, she says.

Reid is now hooked on the North. She feels transformed. She wants to return. “There is such an urgency to do something,” she says. “And what you can do, what especially someone like me can do, is so little.” 

Nevertheless, Reid says she will persevere. Her Arctic work has just begun. 

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Founders' Gallery

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