Annabel Howland - Selected work since 2000

Selected Exhibitions CUT LAND / TERRE TRANCHÉE

Centre VU (solo exhib. & residency), Quebec, Canada (2002)

Cut Land/Terre Tranchée by Mireille Lavoie (2002)

Some people need a drink when they’re flying (they can’t bear the feeling of
their bodies floating above water or cities). Others, like Annabel Howland,
take pictures. From the skies above she gleans what she can with her
camera: clouds, fields that lie fallow, deserts and motorways.
For those of us who remain on the ground, the landscape is not as
spectacular. When travelling by car, folding the map properly may be the
least boring part of the journey. The landscape that rushes past us seems
insipid. The recurrence of cracks in the asphalt, of fields, pylons and fir trees
creates a monotonous rhythm. In the background, houses, gas stations and
restaurants follow the same pattern. If the journey seems interminable, you
can isolate and frame a part of the landscape in which you can then mentally
project yourself. You may feel that this appropriation singles out this section
of landscape, but in reality, it is a sample of a familiar geography that
differs very little from any other.

We find such landscapes in the photographic installations of Annabel
Howland. However, they have acquired a singularity in the way their quality
shifts from that of an object to that of an image. The images used by
Howland are aerial photographs that have been cut up into a fragile network
of lines. Only the roads, the outlines of fields and the clouds remain intact.
The portions of land in between these elements have been removed from
the photographs. With skill and a sense of economy, Howland constructs
from these photographic residues an ethereal diorama which spreads across
the walls of the gallery. In Cloudgrids (2001-2), the alternation and
recurrence of images of clouds and their shadows creates a lateral
movement that pushes the clouds along the wall, as if they had been
dispersed by wind. The same images are used at different scales,
sometimes repeated, sometimes inverted. The artist stabilises the
precariousness of this assemblage by insisting on the irregularity of the
outlines through a very precise cutting of this outline. By remaining intact
and whole, the exterior edge of the photograph also emphasises the
construction of the work. The links between the different images are
interrupted by jolts, syncopations and undecipherable moments, not unlike
an old film that suddenly blocks or accelerates for a moment to eventually
bring us back to where we were. We are reminded of when we were children
and discovered that a film is actually made of sequence shots filmed
randomly and then edited to create a narrative continuity. The shock of this
discovery eventually brings us closer to film and makes us understand all
the invisible actions and decisions the author had to make for the work to
exist.

Howland’s photographic installations are also very similar to drawing.
The repeated motifs, their regular arrangement evokes a glide-reflection
system used to draw plans of architectural friezes. Juxtapositions,
annexations, intersections and liaisons between the objects that have been
photographed and cut up alter their image in a way that refers to drawing
differently, by creating an almost abstract image that evokes the exalted
lines of a nervous drawing. But Howland doesn’t disfigure the original image
in any way. Her intervention in the photographs is a positive action despite
the fact that it is done by taking away parts of the image. The photograph is
stripped of any critical moment, but reveals traces of many moments.
Howland accentuates the existing configurations of the landscape by cutting
around them. She underlines them as would someone reading a book,
literally underlining passages that are important, incomprehensible or simply
moving.

What has been disfigured here is not the appearance of a bucolic
landscape, but rather the autonomy and quality of wholeness we tend to
attribute to images in landscape photography. The photographic fragments
of Cloudgrids suggest a vast background, a spatial depth, an action that that
continues beyond their edges. Annabel Howland’s work keeps us at a
distance from these images, but it is not a great distance; we seem to be
just above them, able to go where we would normally not be able to. This
spatial experience enables us to fly above our own trajectory without fear, without boredom, and with no maps to fold.

(Montreal/Quebec City, 2002)

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French and English text
by Mireille Lavoie (pdf)