Terra Economicus, 2017-2020
Installation with painted wood, single-channel video, 37 minutes, looped, black and white, sound
Installation view, Terra Economicus, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada, 2020. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Terra Economicus engages with two threads of visual and material culture enmeshed in Canadian settler identity—Group of Seven landscape painting and cottage paraphernalia of southern Ontario—tracing them to ways of seeing and being in the natural environment that are fundamentally tied to ownership and private property. Despite the Group of Seven’s waning importance as an artistic reference point for generations of increasingly diverse artists in Canada, the group’s landscape pictures continue to occupy an outsized footprint in museum collections and in the permanent galleries of major Canadian art institutions. Group of Seven artists are the subject of intermittent and nostalgic exhibitions that resurrect the artists’ reputations and prices at auction. Most pernicious is the discredited imaginary of terra nullius that Group of Seven pictures perpetuate on a popular level, bolstering a shallow notion of “Canadian identity” and permeating the banal sphere of outdoor lifestyle marketing. Art historians locate many of the Group of Seven’s wilderness scenes in the Muskoka and Algoma districts of Ontario, areas that are today known for their recreational cottage properties. Like so many of the “unoccupied” Group of Seven landscapes, cottage recreation is similarly predicated on the fantasy of the uninhabited and the untouched—land and vistas purged of people and history—an erasure that is lauded and monetized through the mechanism of private ownership.
Terra Economicus consists of a video projection installed behind a large berm of dismantled Muskoka chairs (known as Adirondack chairs in the northeastern United States), wooden outdoor seating that has become an insipid symbol of cottage recreation in Canada, a conspicuous symbol of affinity and an apparatus for the appraisal and consumption of a view that one ostensibly owns. The wooden chair parts in the installation have been painted in colour palettes taken from two Group of Seven paintings—The West Wind, 1917 by Tom Thomson and Lake Superior, 1924 by Lawren Harris—and arranged in pools of colour that invoke the paintings on a subliminal level. Suspended above this barricade of fragmented wood and colour is a video comprised of drone footage produced by real estate agents for use in virtual tours to sell cottage properties. This type of online video conforms to an established narrative arc: opening with the drone soaring high above the lot, then diving sharply toward the entrance of the main building. The drone then weaves its way through manicured pathways, the boathouses and docks, the verandah, and a Muskoka chair-lined patio. The camera eventually moves inside, gliding through one staged room after another. The spaces are well-appointed but empty. The footage is cold, disembodied, and transactional—a distinctly contemporary form of terra nullius.
Terra Economicus is held in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Exhibition history
Terra Economicus, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada, 2020, curated by Leila Timmins.
Installation view, Terra Economicus, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada, 2020. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Installation view, Terra Economicus, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada, 2020. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Installation view, Terra Economicus, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada, 2020. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Installation view, Terra Economicus, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada, 2020. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Installation view, Terra Economicus, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada, 2020. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Installation view, Terra Economicus, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada, 2020. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Installation view, Terra Economicus, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada, 2020. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Installation detail, Terra Economicus, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada, 2020. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Installation detail, Terra Economicus, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada, 2020. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Digital study for Terra Economicus (Superior), 2017.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.
Video still, Terra Economicus, 2017-2020.