Lindsay McIntyre: Distance Between Objects, Time Between Events

Opening Reception
Thursday, April 3, 7 – 9 pm
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Text by Godfre Leung

Lindsay McIntyre conducts her filmmaking as a material practice, often shooting on film stock made with handmade emulsions and subsequently processing her film by hand. In its laboriousness, her filmic enterprise stresses responsiveness as its foundation. Her manipulation of celluloid’s material properties disposes the image’s grain, surface texture, tonal range, and structure to the impacts of physical and environmental factors such as temperature and humidity. Rather than trying to solve or eliminate variables or “flaws” in the filmmaking process, McIntyre generates new visual possibilities from them, as the landscape shots in her films index the land itself as a catalyzing agent.

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, McIntyre presents her solo exhibition Distance Between Objects, Time Between Events. Its central work, Tuktuit (Caribou), is an experimental film about the interconnections between Inuit, caribou, lichen, and land use. Large passages of the film, which includes footage shot on film stock made with caribou gelatin emulsion, document McIntyre’s processing of a caribou hide to a rawhide state. Presented at CAG as an installation, the film is projected onto the hide itself, hung in shallow relief of a cinematic screen. In the gallery, the holes inadvertently made by McIntyre while scraping flesh and fat from the hide – her “mistakes” – become apertures through which cinematic light passes, landing in fragments on the screen that the hide partially eclipses. 

McIntyre uses the same word “process” to describe both her material work developing and fixing film and her preparation of the hide. She narrates in one of the film’s subtitles, referring to her great-grandmother Kumaa’naaq, a familiar subject of her award-winning works over almost two decades: “She could skin a caribou before it hit the ground. I cannot.” Reflecting on the distance between her great-grandmother’s expertly prepared hides and her own hole-riddled one, these sentences point to practical Inuit ancestral knowledge that was not passed down. They also allude to larger systems of colonialism echoed in the unspoken backstory of Kumaa’naaq’s permanent displacement from Inuit Nunangat in 1938, what she endured, and the pressures that faced her in her new life in Edmonton, resulting in McIntyre’s cultural loss in the present. At the same time, McIntyre’s expert and resourceful processing of film complements her underskilled processing of the hide, the artist honouring the memory of Kumaa’naaq’s handiwork with her own.

In a carousel-like succession of mostly still shots, McIntyre depicts the land in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake, Nunavut), moving from close-ups of lichen to picturesque long shots of the landscape. Ultimately, these images chart the intersection between human activity and changes to the climate and natural environment: an oil drum piercing the horizon next to a discarded Gatorade bottle, and, midway through the film, former caribou grazing sites in states of decay in the wake of devastating Arctic wildfires.

Tuktuit reveals a network of interconnections: the reliance of caribou on slow-growing lichen, its primary source of food, and in turn the importance of caribou to Inuit sustenance and ways of life. Unravelling from this are the downstream climate effects of human activity, which register especially acutely in the North. Wildfires, warming, and rapid freeze/thaw/freeze events in the Arctic all impede caribou’s access to lichen, leading to devastating declines in herd populations. In addition to depicting these interconnections, Tuktuit also dwells within them. McIntyre’s caribou gelatin film stock is susceptive to the same environmental variables that the film is about. The caribou’s diet and the impacts on it by Arctic warming affect the chemical makeup of the emulsion, subsequently generating the image’s unique contrast, intensity, and clarity.

McIntyre describes her work as a collaboration with her materials. What we see in her films and how we see it result from her studied manipulation of material variables that depart greatly from the consistency – and transparency – of industrially manufactured film. Introducing the stakes of her enterprise, McIntyre relays the story of a batch of photographic plates in 1882 that didn’t properly register images, resulting in the near ruin of the Eastman Dry Plate Company (the precursor to Kodak). When it was discovered decades later that the defect was due to a lack of mustard greens in the diet of cows – a deficit of sulphur in the gelatin sourced from those cows to produce the plates’ photographic emulsion – Kodak developed a rigorously controlled livestock enterprise to perfect the standardization of its film manufacturing process. In contrast to Kodak’s reliably fast and “clean” film emulsions, McIntyre’s film stock is not a means to a predetermined end. It responds. In a sense, it functions similarly to lichen itself, which as a bioindicator organism is often used by scientists to monitor impending ecological shifts.

Analogue film is a responsive medium: the latent image registers when silver halide crystals suspended in emulsion react to light. Influencing visual variables she cannot totally control, McIntyre manifests the registering of images not as a given but as a process. She builds her films’ aesthetics from the idiosyncrasies that result from their unstable, analogue, handmade medium – that is, from not shooting on readymade, industrial film stock and not having it processed at a commercial film lab. When shooting, McIntyre notes, there is always the possibility that nothing happens; with her handmade emulsions, or amid the climate variables of the Arctic, sometimes the image doesn’t register enough, or at all. By analogy, this is what is at stake in Tuktuit’s ecological subject: in the aftermath of Arctic wildfires, it can take lichen decades – some estimate fifty to one hundred years – to regenerate, and studies show that burned ranges need over sixty years to become attractive again to caribou for grazing. Ecology is a process and has its own temporality. It is ultimately beyond our control, though our actions can influence it. More than half a century into the future, when the presently burned grazing sites have grown back, will there still be caribou to return to them?