Dykhui, Peter. “Mackenzie Land.” Essay in Landon Mackenzie – Parallel Journey: Works on Paper. A 192 page full colour book covering 1975 to 2015, with four essays on Mackenzie’s rarely seem works on paper. Black Dog Publishing, London UK, 2014. Pages 45-48.

The Lost Map

I will never forgive myself for being so negligent. I saw a map in the Globe and Mail many years ago that, after viewing only once, was burned into my consciousness. Being lazy on that long-ago Saturday morning, I never bothered to clip out the image and mindlessly folded up the paper and put it in the recycling pile later in the day. Never to be seen again. Nor, many years later, was I able to find the map back on the Internet since it was still ‘early days’ for the world wide web when the map was first produced.

I seem to remember that the newspaper arrived on a Saturday in the autumn of 1995 during the weeks leading up to the Québec sovereignty association referendum of 30 October. The YES side was ahead in the polls and it appeared that Québec would ‘separate’ from the rest of the Dominion of Canada. Many questions were in the air about the proposed sovereignty association: would the Canadian dollar be the shared currency? How would the federal armed forces, both as material and human resources, be extricated, or shared with a new Québécois military structure? Would passports be required to enter the province if you were non-Québécois? Who ‘owned’ federal assets and investments spent on provincial infrastructure, particularly as it related to large resource-based projects such as northern dams for generating hydroelectric power? And that was where the conversation became very interesting.

Still angry over the fallout over the land claim battles of the Oka crisis in 1990, many First Nations peoples declared, ahead of the referendum, that they would have no truck or trade with an independent Québec nation. But there was also zero desire on their part to ‘leave’ Québec and ‘join’ Canada, as the land, particularly that associated with northern energy projects, was theirs in the first place. This was the subject of the Globe and Mail article with the map that I never clipped out. Although many maps exist that depict the loose boundaries between First Nations peoples before European settlers arrived, my lost map projected what North America would have looked like in 1995 if settlers had never ‘discovered’ the continent and the indigenous peoples had thrived rather than faced death, disease, assimilation and near extinction at the hands of the Europeans. Territories on the lost map were irregularly shaped and followed natural borders of rivers, lake and sea shores and mountain ranges. The vastness of the plains was filled with multiple, organically shaped zones. The Arctic was the same; it was not viewed as a vast nothingness devoid of human culture or territorial interest. Of interest was the fact that the 3,500 kilometre-long straight-line border between Canada and the United States, named the 49th parallel, was not marked. Also not evident were three rectangular American states and a Canadian province, Saskatchewan, each with four more-or-less straight borders—as defined as closely as possible by the superimposed European matrix of longitude and latitude. Maps, or so it seems, create the graphic illusion of stability between peoples and underscore agreements about territorial boundaries and political and economic pathways. Whether or not they are backed by a military presence to maintain the line or edge.

In 1995, I purchased an Iranian map of the world that did not recognize the State of Israel—it, and its borders, simply were not marked nor named since Israel was not part of the Iranian ‘world view’. At the same time, mid-90s maps of Europe no longer indicated the single state of Yugoslavia. Conscious of these world events, the spectre of a pending map of North America that illustrated Québec, in a colour not affiliated with that of Canada or the United States, seemed ominous. It was profoundly unsettling, then, to view the Globe and Mail’s conjectured, contemporary map of the continent without a Cartesian, European, settler presence.

The Officer’s Sketchbook

The modern political map, particularly of large parts of the world, is the boundary making, visualizing tool of colonising, military empires. Occupied territories require graphic spatial representations in order to be defined, defended, administered and hence economically useful. Although the paper map is less and less evident in this contemporary process, national political and economic interests on terra firma are now influenced and shaped by patrolling overhead satellites. Indeed, GPS systems and digital communication networks are the information-full glue in the ether. And the ‘First World’ owners of these technologies, in effect, rule the world. Hence, every cubic inch of our planet is scrutinized, mapped, recorded on the surface, in the air and, with penetrating radar, beneath the surface. To summarise a recurring motif in the work of French theoretician Paul Virilio: if military leaders can ‘see’ desired territory with the prosthetic vision of enhanced weapons systems, one can, at best, assert influence on peoples and territory and, at worst, destroy it all.

By the early eighteenth century, all British officers, particularly those in the navy, were trained to acquire basic sketching and drawing skills. Not to make expressive representations of exploits and travels, but to record what was observed on the field of battle, to identify the terrain and note the markers of military interest. Or to map shorelines from naval vessels seeking entrance to rivers that penetrated unknown lands. And, always, to create shareable, functional records of what was ‘discovered’ in the new lands that were then claimable as their own.

It is the gathering of visual information, not the production of fine art objects that makes this drawing process interesting. Early in his naval career, British explorer James Cook showed a talent for sketching, surveying and cartographic record keeping that proved to be most useful after the capture of the Fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia in 1758. And then again during the siege and eventual capture of Québec City in 1759. During these naval actions, Cook was responsible for mapping much of the Gulf of the Saint Lawrence and then the entrance to the river itself. In doing so, he provided the nautical information that he, in concert with the ships of British General Wolfe, used to navigate past the Citadelle of Québec City in the cloak of night and launch the early morning sneak attack on 13 September 1759 on the French garrison via the Plains of Abraham, the unexpected rear flank of the Citadelle. Cook’s cumulative and precise drawings and observations of the naval territory of the St Lawrence River helped to change history, one favourable for the British at that strategic point in time. The referendum of 1995 attempted to undo this historical event.

Mackenzie Land

Landon Mackenzie’s large-scale mapping Trilogy, the Saskatchewan Paintings, 1993-1997, Tracking Athabasca, 1998-2001, and Hobart’s Hope, 2001-2004, are legendary and firmly fixed as constellations in the night sky of relevant contemporary Canadian artwork. Not just for their sheer size but for their conceptual intent. And scope of content represented through multiple layers of observational, experiential, historical, cartographic and geopolitical reference points.

These paintings remind me why I had an initial discomfort with the lost map from the 1995 Globe and Mail. As a child who is a product of the Canadian elementary school educational curriculum in the 1960s, as was Mackenzie, I and others of my generation, were indoctrinated into the meta-narrative of the British colonizing process that brought order, in tandem with the Americans, to the continent and opened up the golden West and the great white True North, strong and free. No one questioned why Saskatchewan was shaped as a rectangle—there was ‘nothing’ on or in, the landscape to interfere with nice, clean, rational straight lines as borders with other territories.

And we all believed that maps represented empirical evidence of geo-political truths. In this scheme, Canada enjoyed a huge northern and polar land mass footprint because the Mercator projection, used exclusively in commercially popular Rand McNally maps of the day, showed us how big our “true north strong and free” really was. Due to the exaggeration caused by the grid matrix at both polar zones, we never paid attention to the reduced size of continental land masses at the equator and the inequity of the oversized ‘North’ versus the comparative undersize of Africa and South American.

Critical postmodern thinking in the 1970s and 1980s helped to establish new frameworks of understanding for us as adults. Mackenzie’s painted works embodied this critical thought. She did not present a dominant map in her work, nor was there a single voice of authority or male bravado, nor a single point-of-view that trumped others. The layers of painted ‘data’—word, images, glyphs and symbols—bled through each other. Consequently, a mark squeezed from a small bottle or an aggressive, paint laden brushstroke had as much authority as a scraped-down zone that revealed meaningful materials beneath.

Mackenzie (bearer of a good settler name) was also aware of the exploratory routes of previous generations in her family that were part of the colonising record. This, too, became subject matter for her. The territories alluded to in her paintings were contested and fraught and looked beyond the imported English and French battles on the continent. As with my lost map of 1995, we were no longer looking at a map of Cartesian certainty, with straight-line borders, and territories that were fixed in time and space. Everything was up for grabs. Nothing was to be believed. Mackenzie Land was female and the territories were layered and smudged and woven together.

Her mapping Trilogy (numbering 21 paintings in all), and other series of paintings done after these, such as Neurocity, are labour-intensive, time-based works that start on the floor and then finish on the stretcher on the wall, often taking a year each to complete. Usually working on at least three at once with no fixed outcome or plan, Mackenzie alternates the use of archive research with intuition and analytical observations. There are also the hundreds of works on paper in her oeuvre, resembling diagrams, tracings, small maps and other pictures she executes in short time spans, on tables or outdoors, in ink and watercolour. These she makes while travelling or exploring—like my ‘officer’s sketchbook’—or when temporarily living in Berlin, Paris, or on the Cardigan River in Prince Edward Island.

Mackenzie draws with her brush quickly, precisely and economically in execution, wether on cinematic scale paintings, in sketchbooks, or sheets of paper. She ‘captures’ what she feels or sees optically in front of her, or she materializes the images that are in her mind’s eye and imagination. As with the trained naval officers on voyages of exploration, Mackenzie is rendering in line, texture and colour the details of her psychological coastlines, highlighting the mental markers of personal battlefields, making an inventory of the detritus of her emotional state of being. But, ultimately, making send out of the world by making images. Ones filled with notations and observations that operate as legends within her larger emotional and intellectual landscape. But also pictures that honour the multiple histories embedded in the terroir beneath her feet.