An Outdoor Site-Specific Art Exhibit
Sleeping Giant Provincial Park
In The Shadow of the Giant Artists’ Collective
July 15-18, 2004
If you go to Lakehead University’s Faculty of Forestry and the Forest Environment website you learn that “the unusual rock formation that lends its name to Sleeping Giant Provincial Park is surrounded by legend. It is said to be the formation of the Ojibwa Indians’ Great Spirit, Nanabijou, who had been turned to stone when the secret of a silver mine was discovered by white men.” And if you went to Thunder Bay this summer and visited Sleeping Giant Provincial Park on the July 15th weekend you would encounter one artist that chose to present an art piece that explored this secret, Catherine Kozyra.
Catherine Kozyra is an installation artist and founding member of the artists’ collective ‘In the Shadow of the Giant’. For one weekend this summer they presented their exhibition of outdoor site-specific art at Sleeping Giant Provincial Park. For her piece the history of Ontario’s first silver mine was still very much alive if you stood on the dock of Silver Islet’s General Store and looked over to a small outcropping of rock and vegetation jutting out of Lake Superior. It was here that nearly three million dollars in silver was extracted from beneath the water from 1868-1884. A breakwall was constructed around the islet, filled with rock, enlarging the islet to seven times its original size, eventually holding a shaft house, boarding houses for the miners and even a small library. But by 1884 with the best silver ore having been excavated, and the constant repairs to the breakwall that was besieged by the force of Lake Superior, the mine was closed, and the islet was returned to the lake and nature. Still visible, just below the surface of the water, are the dark shapes of the mine shafts. Fascinated by the watery presence of these structures, Catherine constructed a piece that mimicked these submerged shafts. Using two framed plexus panels that floated on the water’s surface, they both calmed the water and reflected the sky. These haunting pieces remind us that the results of human intervention in resource extraction can be reclaimed by nature. But is this trace of a promising past now gone or of a foreboding future?
This was the third exhibit at Sleeping Giant Provincial Park by the collective. In total twelve artists presented installations throughout the park, each responding to the park’s environment in their own unique way. Dolores Maki’s smoke-fired clay Lodestones, in tune with the natural surroundings, marked the trail along Perry Bay; and Renee Terpstra led visitors on a enticing promenade along the cliff lookouts while entrancing them with a performance that drew on surrealism, poetry and a new mythology of ecology. Along the Kabeyun Trail, tires cast from salt prodded out of the ground in Kelly Phillips’ installation, Salt Licks, alerting us that animals drawn to the highways in search of salt are often endangering their lives; while in another part of the park David Karasiewicz’s figures of metal spoke to a future where the dependency on biotechnology and technology have left us with a disdain for nature and mortality.
The intent of installation art has always been to activate place and context, dissolving boundaries, fusing art with life. In ecological settings as startling as Sleeping Giant, the landscape intercedes in each installation at every turn. Where the art ends and the ecology begins blurs. And that is when the politics of what we are doing in our parks, and beyond, cannot be escaped. •
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