Emily Neufeld
Artist reveals spectral traces of the colonial enterprise in rural Canada.
Emily Neufeld, “Prairie Invasions: A Lullaby,” 2019
photographic wall, detail of installation, 132” x 96” x 2"(courtesy of the artist)
In 2018, Vancouver-based artist Emily Neufeld travelled with her partner and 10-year-old son through the Prairies – the previous home of her Mennonite grandmother – investigating the abandoned farmhouses built by settler migrants in the 19th century.
At each site, Neufeld observed the material and affective traces of past lives through the discarded objects within these derelict structures. She also performed subtle interventions either within or around each house, adding to the historical lineage of domestic and agricultural labour across Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Emily Neufeld, “Prairie Invasions: A Lullaby,” 2019
photographic wall, detail of installation, 148” x 97” x 2" (courtesy of the artist)
At one house, she transplanted wild grasses and trees into a defunct second-floor bedroom, seeking to renew a sense of life and dissolve the boundaries between domesticity and the natural landscape. In another, she taped a grid of brown-eyed Susans, a common prairie flower, to a bedroom’s peeling pink walls.
Her solo exhibition, Prairie Invasions: A Lullaby, at the Richmond Art Gallery in Metro Vancouver until Oct. 18, documents these enactments, revealing spectral traces of the colonial enterprise through large-scale photographs, sculptures and remnants of natural and domestic landscapes.
Emily Neufeld, “Prairie Invasions: A Lullaby,” 2020
detail of installation at the Richmond Art Gallery (photo by Michael Love)
Neufeld seems most interested in creating an atmosphere that mirrors her investigations. Dotted throughout the gallery are complex tableaus – domestic arrangements interrogated with a twist: a kitchen table littered with melted candle wax and vintage coffee cups rests atop a conical pile of soil; a wall of floral wallpaper sprouts barn swallow nests that the artist made using plaster and clay.
Evident throughout is Neufeld’s challenge to certain white-cube ideologies. For instance, she wraps panoramic photographs around cylindrical lightboxes, a subtle nod to the Vancouver School of photo-conceptualism that also mimics barrels – a common Prairie motif.
What’s more, she leaves the edges of the panoramas jagged to expose the labour involved in digitally stitching together dozens of photographs. The three cylinders are placed not on white plinths but on unique – almost kitschy – domestic-style surfaces, such as the ornate legs of a dining room table. It’s clear she considers presentation to be an extension of her work rather than something to mask or dissolve into a white abyss.
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Emily Neufeld, “Prairie Invasions: A Lullaby,” 2020, installation view at Richmond Art Gallery (photo by Michael Love)
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Emily Neufeld, “Prairie Invasions: A Lullaby,” 2020, detail of installation at Richmond Art Gallery (photo by Michael Love)
Neufeld’s primary concern is the natural landscape and how the Prairies have been permanently altered by agriculture. How does she grapple with being both an advocate for environmental sustainability and a descendant of people responsible for irreversibly shifting ecosystems as they colonized land once occupied by Indigenous peoples? She explains that her project recognizes these tensions by highlighting rural labour and pointing to species affected by ecological changes. While her work by no means erases or reverses the effects of colonialism, her thoughtful and obvious efforts to address the Western museum setting while bringing awareness to ecological issues across the Prairies is commendable and exciting.
The exhibition concludes with a video captured by her son that shows the process of her interventions, punctuated by his voice. The intent is to disclose, rather than disguise, the labour involved in making any work. ■
Prairie Invasions: A Lullaby at the Richmond Art Gallery in Metro Vancouver from Aug. 21 to Oct. 18, 2020.
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Richmond Art Gallery
180-7700 Minoru Gate, Richmond, British Columbia V6Y 1R9
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