Search Party

Abstract

Search Party is an installation and video exhibition that explores my identity—how it is constructed and consumed, and how representations of landscapes and discourses of ‘Canadiana’ play in its formation. Since moving to Southern Ontario from Alberta, I feel lost without the Rockies. Attempting to comfort this disorientation, I developed the idea of an alter ego or a persona, a ‘stand-in’ fake for the real. The development of a persona allows for an examination and questioning of the troubled relationship that I have with my own identity. Throughout this body of work, my alter ego attempts to navigate the landscape in search for a place of comfort and a relationship with space. Through the guise of memory and souvenir, the exhibition uses personal memory, strategies of re-enactment, and various familiar display methodologies to explore the aestheticization and commodification of identity, land, and nature.