Lynn Richardson

Lynn Richardson’s Inter-Glacial Free Trade Agency.ca is a sculptural installation crammed into the small rectangular space of Gallery 1C03 at the University of Winnipeg. Richardson’s work, on this side of the Great Plains, was recently seen in the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s group exhibition, “Supernovas,” where her minimalist and collapsible Red State hinted at her capacity to generate metaphor and sculptural novelty. The monumentality of Red State, a towering and suspended plastic sheath, was all sham and seductive illusion—a tidy reference to both art and politics.

The look of the Inter-Glacial Free Trade Agency.ca is more fraught. The installation highlights Richardson’s penchant for mixing stand-alone sculptural analogues and models in the service of what Clement Greenberg euphemistically called an “extra-aesthetic” program. Curator Jennifer Gibson notes: “The artist’s environmental concerns have been integral to her three-dimensional works.” True enough. Richardson’s fabulous and funny kinetic sculptures of 2002 invited viewer participation and provided wry commentary on Canadian icons and symbolism. Raising environmental awareness in the context of American- Canadian relations, trans-national capitalism and global warming has catalyzed the artist’s production. The press release for the current University of Winnipeg exhibition provides the premise: “Richardson anticipates a future ice age resulting from global warming.” No simple metaphor, that, for minimalist sculptural reduction.

How do you suggest the Arctic? What is the shape of a nautical mile? In the rectangular gallery, a simulated and disjointed landscape confronts the viewer. It is a depopulated, dystopic scenario. A fibreglass railing snakes along three walls of the installation, containing simulated industrial and natural landscape elements. There are ornate metal facsimiles of the oil and gas industry. Their white, swinging arms hypnotically simulate extraction, triggered by the viewer’s motions. The motorized and mechanical parts creak and hum ominously. Weather-beaten wooden posts, encrypted with numerical code, indicate nautical mileage. The posts jut and rake at precarious angles, and signify the kind of vast geography that, for comprehension, requires maps and mathematics. Moss-like texture creeps up the wooden lengths, a resonance of weird climate change. Much is eerie, evocative and otherworldly. Transparent plastic pillows in varying number mass up behind the railing to simulate the Arctic environment. Their surfaces distort light, contributing to a sense of muted, dull fog. Snow, ice and an inhospitable, intractable place are suggested. Some of the plastic skins are imbued with an ethereal green light whose source is the video monitor near the entrance. On the screen, a benign suburban scene unfolds: green lawn, domestic architecture … yes, it’s the south or evil incarnate, I presume.

There is a feeling of excess, even hyperbole. Yet, unlike the shop window, the seasonal vignette, or early installation from the 1970s— practices with which Richardson shares a strategy of model making based on resemblances—the expected continuities of space and coherencies of scale do not apply. There is an overwhelming sense of fragmentation and discontinuity. There is a certain obsolescence as well, found in the mechanical arms and the life-saving vests at the front of the gallery, whose guarantee of survival and safety has been nullified by the addition of furry fashion. There ain’t really no way out.

On the floor, to the back of the gallery, sits a life-size, brand-name canoe, in man-made materials. This feat of contemporary industrial engineering, computer design, made with by-products of the oil and gas industry, contains several rhinestone-studded caribou. The symbolism is clear. The animals necessary for survival in the north have been displaced and are adrift. Their lingering presence is nostalgic. These magical caribou recall earlier warnings. Farley Mowat’s People of the Deer is a case in point, written about the famines in the Arctic where northern expansion, changing weather and shifting migratory patterns were all mitigating factors. At Richardson’s free-trade agency, the beleaguered herd also represents a kind of sacred truth—an ethical presence by which to measure human folly and the degree to which habitat has been destroyed and eroded.

It is understood that this particular arrangement is contingent and local, a further iteration of Richardson’s 2005 installation of the same name. Inter-Glacial Free Trade Agency, without the Canadian suffix, was installed in Austin, Texas, where the artist completed her MFA in 2005. Richardson, interviewed by Gibson, relates, “With each technological step forward there seems to be a corresponding slip backward in the struggle to preserve our fragile habitat. One by one ecosystems fragmented by a ruthless industrial agenda fail in their capacity to support life.”

Richardson’s sculptural solutions involve multiple strategies— corporeal, optical and imaginative. She makes models of the world with an artful hand. The installation is both a semiotician’s playground of sculptural versatility and an earnest political campaign that emphasizes a grim view of competition for control of the Arctic, world trade and the new globalism. As a student commentator in the guest book asked, and I paraphrase, “Why so much plastic?” Why indeed? I love this question, like I love the staunch old vulgar Marxists who thought that art and life were totalities that could be separated by reflection theory. Everything is shot through with by-products from the oil and gas industry, whose rapaciousness is the target at the centre of Richardson’s critique. Is there a coherent political thesis here? Maybe. Can art motivate shifts in political attitudes and values? I remain optimistic. Is Richardson in control of her materials? Absolutely.

One senses that above/beyond/ before/in advance of any political motivation, Richardson is a sculptural thinker. Her work engages with the body through her use of life-size proportion; the invocation of light, sound, colour and movement; and, in a more subtle way, through demonstrations of excess and notions about bursting. It’s hard to walk away from this show and, conversely, hard to walk into it. Perhaps, it is all that contained air, sculptural compression of objects in the gallery, or an unsustainable way of life about to implode. It’s an imperfect fit all the way round. ■

Lynn Richardson’s Inter-Glacial Free Trade Agency.ca was exhibited at Gallery 1C03 at the University of Winnipeg from November 2 to December 2, 2006.

Amy Karlinsky lived in Kaminituaq and Iqaluit in the mid-1980s. She teaches art in Winnipeg’s inner city.