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Prince Edward Island(s)
Project (2004)
that I developed for the group exhibition, Littoral Documents, at
the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum in Charlottetown. This project
involved the creation of ‘fictitious’ documents purportedly produced
by the P.E.I. Department of Public Works in the early twentieth century.
These ‘documents’ stretched over a thirty-eight year period and
contained information on five proposed projects to correct and modify P.E.I.’s
natural geographical features and coastlines. To establish a narrative I
prepared a written account of my research with the Department’s archives.
The fictional elaboration was that I came across a musty box that had long
ago been misfiled amongst the plans and plots for the Island’s cemeteries.
In the unlabeled box, I had uncovered a number of rejected plans to alter
P.E.I.’s natural geographical features and coastlines to make the Island
not only more inhabitable and more hospitable but ultimately to make it
more profitable. A list of the proposed projects included (1) the creation
of an elaborate tunnel system connecting P.E.I. to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia,
New Brunswick and Quebec; (2) the filling in of the Northumbland Strait
resulting in the elimination of the island; (3) the replacement of the Islandís
road system with a canal system to make P.E.I. the Venice of North America;
(4) the construction of a continuous boardwalk along the coastline to make
P.E.I. an efficiently walkable island; (5) the physical rotation of the
Island by 22 degrees to align the North/ South road grid system with True
North instead of Magnetic North. For each project I stimulated ‘real’ architectural renderings, correspondence, documents and sketches. These ‘forgeries’ were labeled as found archives which I then used as a starting point for a series of five paintings that corresponded to each project and that further referenced both my fictional documents and the actual documents and maps from the archives. In the exhibition the paintings were the only part of the project that was credited to me. Prince Edward Island(s) Project, raised questions of the ‘literal’ nature of documentary records by introducing plausible fictions adapted from real documents. The work revealed that only out of the found and fictional comes the tangible and narrative. My intention in the Prince Edward Island(s) Project was to contribute to the complex dialogue between truth and history by revealing that histories may operate within their own agendas. |