Marlene Creates
Places, Paths, and Pauses
"... I was able to make a simple gesture which left no permanent mark on the land."
In 1979 Marlene Creates signaled her intent. In contrast to the monumental earthworks of that time, she revealed that her interest in the intersection of art and the natural world was with the ephemeral, the small scale, and the non-monumental, and with place, "not as a geographical location," she writes, "but as a process that involves memory, multiple narratives, ecology, language, and both scientific and vernacular knowledge." Supplementing the impermanence of her artistic gestures with the technology of photography, Creates found an audience and created a body of work without peer.
Creates has sensitvely probed the relationship between human experience and the natural world for almost four decades. From her early works that record traces of the human body on the land to her later explorations of poetry in situ in the boreal forest and photography as an active medium — where the rush of water over the lens transforms the artist's own image — Creates leads us with an environmental and cultural consciousness to a greater understanding of the language of the natural world and our "places" in it.
It is no easy task to sum up, in a single book, a career that privileges the act over the artifact, the moment over the monument. But under the direction of curator-critics Susan Gibson Garvey and Andrea Kunard, Marlene Creates: Places, Paths, and Pauses offers not only a broad view of her work in photography but also a critical appreciation of her multi-disciplinary approach (assemblages, memory-map drawings, and video-poems) through essays by Gibson Garvey and Kunard, art historian Joan M. Schwartz, nature writer Robert Macfarlane, and poet Don McKay.
Marlene Creates: Places, Paths, and Pauses accompanies a major retrospective touring exhibition organized by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in partnership with the Dalhousie Art Gallery. It will open in Fredericton in September 2017 and thereafter will be shown at galleries in Halifax, Charlottetown, St. John's, and other venues in central and western Canada.
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"This is the sort of book that will repay repeat reading and most especially repeat viewing of the unique images that comprise its bulk." — Atlantic Books Today
"Creates’ ‘places’ are open to poetic, scientific, amazing paths." — The Telegram
"As a whole the images, commentary and essays of Marlene Creates: Places, Paths, and Pauses create a richly woven tapestry that enable the reader to gain insight and understanding into Creates’ ‘discreet’ oeuvre; an oeuvre that I am pleased to have encountered and feel deserves greater recognition." — Eco Art Scotland
For over forty years, Susan Gibson Garvey has been active in the Canadian visual arts community as an artist, educator, critic, curator, and gallery director. She was the Curator and later the director of the Dalhousie Art Gallery from 1990 to 2007.
Andrea Kunard is Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Gallery of Canada. She holds a PhD in Art History from Queen’s University, a Master of Arts from Carleton University, a Diploma (Hons.) in Interdisciplinary Studies from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, and a Bachelor of Arts (Hons.) from the University of Manitoba. Since 2013, she has been an Adjunct Professor at the University of Ottawa, and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she was a frequent sessional instructor on Canadian art and photography at Carleton and Queen’s universities. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including Fred Herzog: Street Photography, Anthropocene, Camera and the City, and her articles have been published in The Journal of Canadian Art History, the International Journal of Canadian Studies, Early Popular Visual Culture, and the National Gallery of Canada Review.
Winner: Governer General's Award for Visual Arts and Media
Melva J. Dwyer Award
