LOUIS COUTURIER and JACKY GEORGES LAFARGUE : "Resolute Bay: The Daytime Journey in the Night," Feb. 7 to May 4, 2013, Yukon Arts Centre Public Gallery, Whitehorse

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“place with no dawn”

Louis Couturier and Jacky Georges Lafargue, Qausuittuq “place with no dawn,” 2011, inkjet print on wood, resin and varnish, 4’ x 8’.

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“place with no dawn”

Louis Couturier and Jacky Georges Lafargue, Qausuittuq “place with no dawn,” 2011, inkjet print on wood, resin and varnish, 4’ x 8’.

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“place with no dawn”

Louis Couturier and Jacky Georges Lafargue, Qausuittuq “place with no dawn,” 2011, inkjet print on wood, resin and varnish, 4’ x 8’.

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LOUIS COUTURIER and JACKY GEORGES LAFARGUE

Resolute Bay: The Daytime Journey in the Night

Yukon Arts Centre Public Gallery, Whitehorse

Feb. 7 to May 4, 2013

By Nicole Bauberger

Two southern francophone artists, Louis Couturier and Jacky Georges Lafargue, shot photographs and video footage in Resolute Bay, Nunavut, and then created multimedia installations for public galleries in France, Montreal, Regina and Moose Jaw. Now, in Whitehorse, their material has returned to the North, albeit the southern fringe. Still, this is a northern enough vantage to provoke questions about how the South represents the North.

The first room contains photographs of buildings in Resolute Bay printed on plywood. Sepia tones evoke times past and golden wood grain glimmers through the glossy pour-on varnish. The plywood is meant to evoke the building material used for ad hoc shelters the Inuit inhabited after their forcible relocation from Inukjuak in Northern Quebec to Resolute Bay by the Canadian government in 1953. But this 13-ply good-two-sides plywood only barely resembles the cheapest possible wood that was used as building material. In the room’s centre, two of these photo-boards stand on a sled purchased in Inukjuak. Curiously, for a project that claims to be centred on community involvement, aside from two dots in an aerial view, there are no people in any of these pictures.

In the next room, two snowmobiles replace the wooden sled. Videos beam from each headlight. In one, children and adults introduce themselves in English, recounting a wide range of places they’ve come from and travelled to. A woman on an ATV, ducking behind her partner to hide from the camera, gives the finger. Older residents tell the story of the 1953 relocation, the government’s attempt to assert Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic during the Cold War. Allie Salluviniq concludes the film by saying it’s for the glory of God that they came to Resolute Bay, and he loves it.

For the second film, Couturier and Lafargue returned to Resolute Bay in the dark of winter. They had assembled images from the summer into a 20-minute sequence looped to make a 90-minute projection. They filmed Salluviniq carving a snow “screen” with the front-end loader he uses to clear snow around town and then projected their footage on it, outdoors in temperatures of forty below. In this video of a video, children climb over the snow block and throw snowballs at projected close-ups of eyes.

French art professor Paul Ardenne writes in the exhibition catalogue that Lafargue and Couturier went to Resolute Bay to make contact with the local population, who would “become part of the(ir) aesthetic project.” But did they really connect? The children with their snowballs and the couple on their ATV suggest inattention at best, not a successful “procedure based on sympathy ... integration and participation.” In their 20-year artistic collaboration, Lafargue and Couturier have often travelled to communities and let residents use their cameras. But to whom, then, do those images belong? When asked whether they had any notion of shared authorship about the content of the exhibition, the artists said no.

Artists and curators typically describe their work as being based on research. In the North, contemporary academic research follows a formal process that requires permission from First Nations. Sometimes this research includes the First Nation as co-author of resulting publications. While independent visual arts research does not require this degree of formality, artists and curators undertaking contemporary art projects in the North might benefit from thinking about the respect and relationship-building opportunities this new kind of research embodies, especially if they want to truly engage a northern community.