Patricia Deadman

Mar 20

"...it's reminiscent of what you actually see in the camera lens, which is a very small and very compact image. The mountain is always there, maybe a quarter of an inch big, but I'm saying that the mountain is here, it's always with you."

Canadian Artist Patricia Deadman

Original black and white photograph signed P Deadman, A/P. "From the series In Search of the Perfect View" by Patricia Deadman is Lot 26 in our current auction.

Patricia Deadman was born in Ohsweken, Ontario and currently lives and works in Woodstock, Ontario. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Windsor, Ontario and has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout Canada and the United States since 1985. Recently her work was included in AlterNative: Native Photography, McMichael Gallery, Kleinberg, Ontario, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa, Ontario as well as Be It So It Remains in Our Minds, group collaborative installation, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario.

Patricia Deadman is currently Curator of the Woodland Cultural Centre, Brantford, Ontario. Her work is in permanent and private collections throughout Canada, the United States and Great Britain including the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Alberta, Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Thunder Bay, Ontario, and the Indian Art Centre, Ottawa, Ontario. Her work has been documented in books such as Lucy R. Lippard, The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art, New York, New York, 1995; and Aperture 139, Strong Hearts: Native American Visions and Voices, New York, New York, 1995.

From an interview (dev.cushing.org) she says: "This was a series of twenty-eight images and it was again a response to the landscape, only a little tongue-in-cheek was happening within the series. It was done in Banff as well. The whole premise is that it's such a tourist area and people are always in quest of the ideal photograph when they go to Banff. It was a response to seeing the tourist buses come, pull up to a site, people would run out with their cameras, take their shots, and twenty minutes later they'd be gone. This was their experience with the land. I thought that was so amusing. When you're hiking, the maps have "you are here" signs and along the trail they have little benches strategically placed in front of the scenic vistas. You walk along for a while and you have another bench, and this is their idea of what you're supposed to be seeing. I found that absurd.

The response to that was a series of images, which is actually a documentation of a hike, a very short hike, but it shows the scenic points in between the benches. In each shot the mountain is always in the center, it's always the focal point, and the reason the images are only 2 x 3 " is because it's reminiscent of what you actually see in the camera lens, which is a very small and very compact image. The mountain is always there, maybe a quarter of an inch big, but I'm saying that the mountain is here, it's always with you. If you really observe the series, you'll notice the trees getting higher and once you get to the top, there will be a vista. Then when you're coming back down the trail, the trees are getting lower. At one point in the images, if you really catch on, you realize that it's the shot where you just came from. But the mountain is always there."