One Place as Good as Another
Subsurface Development. 2022. Oil canvas. 30 x 30 cm.
A version of this text was originally circulated as a curatorial addition to Paul Nadeau's solo exhibition of paintings in July 2022 in Montreal.
Contrary to persistent stereotypes of wilderness and countryside, rural locations are media-intensive. What forms of mediation emerge when we foreground the “rural” in the function of media systems and technologies? How do these forms of mediation affect how we think about, inhabit, and relate to rurality?
In June 2022, the Grierson Research Group convened a group of international scholars to discuss these questions, and more, at the intersection of media and emerging forms and practices of rurality. Drawing from a range of humanities and social sciences fields and discourses that foreground rural media technologies and experiences, the Media Rurality project investigates the centrality of rural places and people within the media systems and technologies that shape daily life in and across rural and urban settings alike, in diverse global locations. We are grateful to Heliotrope for the opportunity to share these essays, the first to arise from this exciting collaboration.
Patrick Brodie, University College Dublin
Darin Barney, McGill University
Media Rurality is supported by an SSHRC Connections Grant
TEXT BY LAURA PANNEKOEK
PAINTINGS BY PAUL NADEAU
In the summer of 2021, Paul Nadeau and I traveled across the country to look for Canadian resource extraction, its infrastructures, and its waste—and found the Canadian rural, with its industrial hopes, and environmental anxieties. We skulked around the sprawling side-industrial landscape of settler Canada. We camped on the fringes of extraction: on slag piles, next to sinister-looking ponds, and on gravel access roads. We walked through blackened, fire-destroyed forests, or under the neat rows of reforested trees. In town, industrial promise buoys hopes for the future: a billion-dollar plant modernization here, rare-earth mineral prospecting there. Yet, in the urban centers, where intellectual foci are global and more abstracted from geography, these projects are criticised for causing planetary damage. The cultural rift between the Canadian rural and urban grows as the Canadian rural landscape transitions from resource frontier to environmental frontline. In One Place As Good as Another, Nadeau continues his investigation into the resource-extractive compulsions that shape the rural Canadian environment, and some of the lingering imagery attached to those compulsions.
One Place as Good as Another. 2022. Oil, acrylic and watercolour on canvas. 101 x 152 cm.
When You Get Older, Your Best Friend is Your Bank Account. 2022. Oil and graphite on canvas. 101 x 152 cm.
One Place as Good as Another connects three practices that condition Canadian rural settler identity: surveying, hunting, and mining. Surveying lays the groundwork for colonial expansion. Hunting provides food and initiated an exploitative settler economy through the requisitioning of Indigenous people to hunt for furs. Mining is the exploitation of the land, solidifying its economic value for the state, bolstering settler claims to land based on the Lockean principle of ‘land improvement’ in which the one who works it–makes it valuable–can rightfully, transcendentally, claim ownership to that land. This trifocal lens in Nadeau’s paintings, of hunting, mining, and surveying, traces the not-so-distant past in the cultural membrane of present-day rurality, which is characterized by anticipations of an uncertain environmental and economic future.
At best, we romanticise the Canadian rural as remote, wild yet peaceful, beautiful yet perilous. At worst, we imagine industrial, poisoned landscapes inhabited by oil-loving, beef-eating conservatives. Yet, Nadeau’s work draws us into the rural in a different way: foregrounding, instead of hiding the resource extractive and colonial impulses that define and build the rural landscape, while simultaneously laying bare its cultural density and its contradictions: the social force of a comforting fireplace, the beckoning light of a hunting cabin in dark woods, the dejected clutter of memories and trophies on a mantelpiece. We need imaginations of the Canadian rural that complicate, not simplify. Nadeau's paintings begin to do that work. The various intentions, desires, and constraints that motivate rural communities to shape their life and labour often run counter to one another, and neither vilification nor romanticisation of the Canadian rural help us to understand the complexities of a transition to sustainable and just co-inhabitation. As we anxiously try to move away from resource extractive activities that are so violent to the land and the Indigenous Nations living on it, we are also undoing the social fabric and economic infrastructure of entire settler-colonial communities. It is an uncomfortable thing to lament, but transition does not come without a loss.
The Beaver is the Bigness of a Water-Spaniel (Magnetic Survey). 2022. Oil on canvas. 183 x 175 cm.
Potential Remaining for Mineralization (Aerial Survey). 2022. Oil on canvas. 152 x 101 cm.
These paintings sit between extraction and community, between land and its technological mediation. Remember that the Canadian rural is a settler-colonial product, constructed by colonial technologies, aimed at providing resources to support urban industry. Through the technological mediation of land, the category of the rural functions as the production of nature as commercial space. Nadeau foregrounds that mediation, that the Canadian west and the production of the rural as such has been created through aerial survey, 3D mapping, and the grid structure that reminds us of the Dominion Land Survey: that abstraction of the Canadian West and its various forms of life into empty one-by-one mile squares. Ready to be packaged and sold off.
The phrase from which the title of this exhibition is taken, quoted from a BC hunting forum post, "One place as good as another" can be read as an expression of disinterest. It signals a kind of abstraction of the self from its surroundings. A 'whatever'. Perhaps this is the kind of mentality fostered by the technological abstraction of environment for extractive purposes… perhaps it is a resignation, a relinquishing of responsibility over that environment. What resonates in the title of this exhibition is the persistent image of the Canadian rural as the place where one leaves a trace. Nadeau's paintings are filled with traces of life, yet devoid of living creatures. In the month we spent with our noses pressed against the window glass of our car, we realized that future prospects for most folks in the Canadian rural are generally not happy ones. But it's somebody's home, a place to hang your hat. Or, to stash your guns.
Two Fingers of Textual Records and Trophies. 2022. Oil on canvas. 20 x 30 cm.
Laura Pannekoek is a writer, student, and scholar of environmental humanities. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Her dissertation project titled Settler Geology: Colonial Technologies of Subsurface Mediation tracks the convergence of geology and colonialism in Canada from the inception of the Geological Survey of Canada in 1842 to contemporary geological exploration for critical minerals.
Paul Nadeau is a painter. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Studio Art at the University of Guelph. Mixing informal fieldwork with archival research, Nadeau’s work critiques visual cultures of resource extraction and eco-tourism in Canada.
