Groundings is a new body of work by Sam Cotter that addresses connections between the transportation industry, resource extraction, and histories of landscape art in Canada, exploring their respective roles in economic expansion and in bolstering Canadian cultural identity.

Through experimental 16mm films, photographs, and digital video works, Groundings opens a space for considering landscape, industry, as well as the structural properties and hallucinatory potentials of cinematic representation. The film and video works deploy long takes, fixed perspective, extended camera movements, hand dying and flickering afterimages in response to industrially mediated landscapes.

Together the works weave parallel narratives from the late nineteenth century, including the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, implementation of standardized time, and the development of major industrial and hydroelectric projects as a way to examine both real and idealized visions of the Canadian landscape.

Through implicating the patronage of early landscape painting and photography as necessarily tied to these layers of extraction, Cotter unpacks the role that the image of the natural landscape plays in creating a shared sense of place, fostering connection, and promoting a national cultural identity across settler-Canada. Implicated within these colonial processes is a flattening of time and space in which mountain ranges are blasted and cleared to allow linear movement, time is harnessed and abstracted, and the violence of the displacement of peoples and stealing of labour is obscured by images of pristine and uninhabited landscapes.

Groundings was on display in the Main Gallery from April 8, 2023 to May 27, 2023.