By Meg Walker
An oval of compressed grass, the shape of a dog or other warm body that nestled for a while into the leaf-scattered, unmown lawn. This is the subject of one of the first images encountered in Birthe Piontek’s photography exhibition The Idea of North at the ODD Gallery in Dawson City. Initially, The Lawn stands out because most of the other images are portraits of people. At First glance, the exhibition looks like a portrait gallery of long-term Dawson City residents. Each person is captured alone, posed in interior spaces flanked with low-lit backgrounds, inhabiting photographs that are named with th sitter’s first name—David, Palma, Newton, and so on.
But spending time in the exhibit allows a viewer to absorb connections among Piontek’s photographs. Gradually, the meaning of space and absence in The Lawn seeps beyond its singularity as an individual image until it embodies the subject of the exhibition—the relationship between the knowable and the unknowable.
This relationship is even more pronounced in The Idea of North. It appears as the malleable intellectual and emotional space between viewer and photograph. It exists as the endlessly editable, subjective relationship between people and their ideas of identity, both self-identity and the identity of “the North.”
A Vancouver-based artist who exhibits in Berlin, Toronto, and New York, Piontek composed the works for The Idea of North during a nine-week stint as artist-in-residence with Dawson City’s Klondike Institute for Art and Culture (KIAC) in 2008. She took more than 2000 photographs during that time. Piontek reflects that she wanted a place to explore ideas of identity. “I wasn’t looking for just the North geographically but the North as a symbol… [I was drawn to the] big open space, the quietness, that overwhelming sense of room to think.” During her time in the Yukon she made close relationships with many people, but she still returned south at the end of her residency.
Piontek points to Glenn Gould’s 1967 CBC Radio documentary The Idea of North as partial explanation for her choice. “Part of what Gould says is that you come North with the idea of trying to be an insider but you’re not really, because you eventually return South, and that resonated for me.” The North remained for her, in Gould’s words, “a convenient place to dream about, spin tales about.” And then she adopts his title as her title, as if the phrase is a found cultural object. This gesture of transposition invites viewers to bring their own projections to the photographs.
When people are her subject matter, Piontek frames her shots to highlight each individual’s face. She waits for stillness, which contributes to the almost factual feel of the work. Noting her early adulthood obsession with David Lynch and his visually lush, psychologically twisted worlds, Piontek composes vacant, unexplored and unexplorable areas in each image.
These areas are not completely blank, of course. Some are monochromatic textures and others are dark corners beneath furniture. In fact, it seems that Piontek uses these deeply coloured zones to introduce an out-of-focus fragment of another subject (a gold prospector painted on a pub’s wall) or object (the top third of a door frame, the head of a brass eagle).
These colour fields and blurred details hint that Piontek imagines a dark unconsciousness for each individual. Maybe this is a creator’s curiosity about humans’ limited capacity for self-knowledge. For example, in Newton an older man with unwieldy sideburns sits in a living room, staring beyond at something beyond our view. Nothing “happens” in the image yet the backlit orange curtain behind Newton is a threatening colour that alludes to ideas of an uncontrolled fire. Strangely, the hot tone is not reflected in the segment of mirror behind the subject’s head: the partially visible disc is only a subtle, tawny gold, and reflects nothing in the room.
If the mirror is empty, is it the artist’s unconscious or the viewer’s unconscious that Piontek invokes? Or perhaps she evokes both? Perhaps the contentless mirror is a space where viewers can creatively project ideas and moods onto Piontek’s photographs. If so, the relationships between the surface and the unconscious, the artist and the camera, the viewer and the photograph, can act as a secret theatre for multiple identities.
Birthe Piontek/birthepiontek.com
