This body of work is currently on display at Gallery 881. Roger will be holding an artist talk at the conclusion of his exhibition on Saturday, June 29, from 2-3 PM. Don't miss it!

Below the Sea of Fog, was shot over the three-plus years of the pandemic. The pandemic haunts us still. For myself, the pandemic was marked by my family’s health challenges, and my own work reversals as a feature film maker. We all have suffered. The act of creation was my refuge. I took over 15,000 images in this period. Before the pandemic most of my art production was film installation and photography. Most of the photography was tableau of people at work and play. But as the pandemic wore on, I found myself focused instead on dark eerie landscapes. These photos were so different for me that I spent much time puzzling over them. Then I began to remember… When I was twelve the Art Gallery of Ontario had a show devoted to German Romantics curated by Alan Wilkinson, that included work by Caspar David Friedrich. Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape painter of the late the eighteenth century, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his allegorical landscapes, which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies or a sea of mist. Friedrich is powerfully associated with the idea of the romantic sublime.

Eighteenth century philosophers described the sublime as the limit of human understanding, where the human mind meets something vast and impossible to digest: experiences of the sublime could include confrontations with great precipices and mountain vistas, with the infinity of the sky, or with the darkest depths of the sea. We could say that the pandemic itself was a kind of sublime formation with the virus overwhelming our little lives. In much Romantic philosophy and art the Romantic subject emerges from a confrontation with the sublime ennobled; the sublime becomes a secular spiritual experience through which the romantic subject/person experiences transcendence and totality. But my photographs, I felt, dealt with another aspect of confronting the sublime, one that was more destabilizing.

In fact, in the late eighteenth century there was a flipside to the ennobling romantic sublime, a gothic sublime, often associated with the work of Giovanni Piranesi, Henry Fuseli and Francisco Goya. Instead of stepping back from the sublime precipice, the subject of the gothic sublime descended into an incompressible nightmare from which there was no reassuring emergence. To quote Vijay Misra “this other sublime, the gothic sublime, is in many ways the voice from the crypt that questions the power of reason … as the mind embraces the terror, located at the near abyss where the subject says, I am my own abyss, and is faced with a horrifying image of its own lack of totality.” And this gothic sublime, I believe spoke to the experience of COVID. And it spoke to my photos. In the year or so after COVID, I thought more about my photos and also about their location and I realized that the abyss I felt in Stanley Park during covid was not, of course, solely my own. It was also entwined with the history of the Coast Salish people, the original indigenous inhabitants of the lands now called Stanley Park. Before mounting this work, I went on tours with Coast Salish guides. I will not be sharing the stories the Coast Salish shared with me on those tours, that is their prerogative. However, I was advised by my Coast Salish guides that using the original Indigenous place names in the titles of the work would be a respectful way to allude to what has haunted the park long before me or COVID.

The exhibition tells an elliptical story; it begins with a Romantic portrait and ends with an evocation of Armageddon. It’s the culmination of the journey from the naïve and romantic to a gothic space where doubt and devastation reign supreme – personal, political, and environmental.

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