By Sea

“By Sea” is half an expansive meta-project about the westernmost front of Western civilization. It traces a geographic contour around the cultural bloc that is Canada and the United States; its partner project “By Rail” follows lines of infrastructure throughout it. Both series are entered in this competition. These works negotiate a rift between the discourse of critique and wide-eyed wonder. Images Selected for Submission: “Loop, Biloxi MS, 2010”, “Cruise Ship, Portland ME, 2009”, “Econoline, Ketchikan AK, 2010”, “The Mona Lisa, Squamish BC, 2010”, “Sled Dogs, Iqaluit NU, 2011”

Stretching from arctic to sub-tropical waters and straddling the world's longest non-militarized border, Anglo-America is a geo-cultural bloc of a Cold War superpower and an outpost of the British Empire. By Sea surveys the coastline perimeter of Canada and the United States. It evokes contradictory narratives of romantic expansionism and post-colonial, post-industrial malaise. It anticipates nostalgia for this historical moment when climate change could be quibbled over and a re-orientation of global power still only likely.

The conceit of this project is North America commenced when Europeans stepped ashore to control the land between three oceans. They became We. Oceans evolved from something daunting into a distance for gazing soulfully into. Every inch of territory is accounted for and satellites surveil us from space, but the deep remains mysterious; it remains a metaphor for Mystery itself. Now, in the twilight of Western preeminence, as our grasp of events shifts and seas themselves breach established thresholds, the frontier between realms of pedestrian certainty and a plane of suspicious wonder is newly contested. By Sea inventories scenic tableaux from a civilization's edge; within each matrix of scenery and vernacular architecture are subtle allegories of anxiety and flux. In Cruise Ship, Portland ME for instance, the holiday liner's scale and sparkle dwarf everything in its orbit; the image depicts a once crucial shipping centre gentrified into a stop for chowder and tchotchkes and photos. Loop, Biloxi MS illustrates how much the Gulf accommodates an ethos of oil and refineries. Taken three months before the Deepwater Horizon spill, this image shows a freeway exchange jutting across a tract of “sugar sand”; beneath it a boardwalk has been constructed in a way that forces even beach strollers to follow the Interstate's course.