The Greek philosopher Plato wrote of a ringed city, 9,000 years before his time, home to inconceivable technologies and fantastic feats of architecture. But as the story goes, the city sank under the sea over the course of a single day, with largely the hubris of its inhabitants to blame.
Artist Elise Rasmussen recalls that lost city of Atlantis in her current exhibition at Neutral Ground, an artist-run centre in Regina. Part research, part cultural imaginary and part artistic remediation, Fragments of an Imagined Place, on view until Nov. 9, revisits a trail of impassioned accounts and atmospheric impressions of two very different fantastical places that share the same name.
Elise Rasmussen, “Plato,” 2016
C-print, 20”x 26.5” (image courtesy of the artist)
The exhibition brings together ephemera, photography and video, all characteristic to the Edmonton-born, Brooklyn-based artist’s background as a research and lens-based media artist. Crystals, triangles, glass shards and pastel colours act as surviving, aesthetically transferable symbols of a mythic consciousness. In the time capsule of the gallery, busy mythologies and loud histories are quieted, subdued by the artistic focus on timelessness and materiality.
Examining an earthwork Robert Smithson nearly made in the late ’60s, Rasmussen establishes an art historical case study by which to explore her own aesthetic relationship to the tale of Atlantis. Had it been realized, Smithson’s work would have been titled Glass Island (Atlantis).
However, as evidenced by research materials assembled as part of the exhibition, permission to use an islet off the coast of Vancouver Island was retracted after considerable backlash from environmentalists. Protesters opposed covering Miami Islet, near Thetis Island, south of Nanaimo, with 100 tons of glass shards, fearful of unplanned ramifications on the surrounding ecology.
And so, in nearly the course of a day Glass Island (Atlantis) sank into the cultural ambiguity of unrealized schemes, further obscured by the subsequent success of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Utah’s Great Salt Lake.
Elise Rasmussen, “Fragments of an Imagined Place,” 2019
installation view, Neutral Ground, Regina (photo by Nic Wilson)
In Fragments of an Imagined Place, Rasmussen brings Smithson’s project to light, not as a failed vision or even as a victory for the rallied cries of eco-justice groups, but as a conceptual artwork in its own right. Divorced from site specificity, the conceptual potential of Smithson’s imagined treatment of an islet in the Strait of Georgia is used to explore a visual vocabulary of utopian ideals that resonate within a contemporary lineage of artistic practice.
In There was an island situated in front of the straits…, Rasmussen shows the contested site as it is now: small, sunlit and teeming with birds. Viewed again through the lens of an artist, the scene inspires trajectories past and future, as well as possibilities both real and fictitious.■
Elise Rasmussen’s Fragments of an Imagined Place is on view at Neutral Ground in Regina from Sept. 29 to Nov. 9, 2019.
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Neutral Ground
1835 Scarth Street, Regina, Saskatchewan S4P 2G2
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Tues to Fri 11 am - 6 pm; Sat noon - 4 pm
