ARTISTS
Artists Kerry Langlois, Kayla Eykelboom, and Emily Beaudoin with their original works at Lake McArthur.
@VIKTORIANORTH
ROCKIES REFRAMED Artists explore climate, culture and our shifting landscape words :: Meghan J. Ward It was a blisteringly hot week in late June 2021 when a group of artists set out for plein air painting on the Icefields Parkway in Banff National Park. Their mission was to paint scenes captured a century before by Banffbased artist, Catharine Robb Whyte. By revisiting locations frequented by Catharine, these artists could bear witness to the changing mountain landscape and offer their own interpretations. Their experience will be chronicled as part of Rockies Repeat, a documentary, exhibit, and digital storytelling capsule—and brainchild of Canmore filmmaker, Caroline Hedin. At Bow Lake, the temperature reached 37 degrees Celsius—something unheard of at this location 1,920 metres above sea level. Cheyenne Ozînjâ θîhâ (Bearspaw), a Stoney artist, sat on the lakeshore, sweltering in the sun, and thought back to Catharine. “She probably had very peaceful moments here. I sat there wanting to recapture her work, but I couldn’t take the heat.”
It turned out to be the town of Banff’s hottest day in recorded history, smashing the previous record for that day by nearly four degrees. Caroline didn’t set out to create a film about the climate crisis. Instead, she thought her project would explore cultural themes and look at the landscape through a different lens. The perspectives of women and Indigenous Peoples have been largely left out of history-keeping. So, Caroline assembled an all-woman group comprised of three Indigenous and three non-Indigenous artists. It quickly became apparent that bearing witness to a changing landscape also meant staring the climate crisis in the face. It meant coming to terms with the gravity of disappearing glaciers and looking at once vibrant scenes through the haze of summer wildfires. On location, the group of artists held up a print of one of Catharine’s paintings and spent time discerning where exactly she would have stood to paint it. Once they oriented themselves, they could compare the print with the current scene. The differences were startling, particularly the shrinking glaciers.
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