APEX: Interloper | Intrus, 2020

APEX: Interloper | Intrus consists of 11 of 17 photographs of a panoramic set shot in Apex, Nunavut, at 63°43’28.5”N 68°27’00.6”W. On public view in Ottawa, home to the largest population of Inuit outside Nunavut, this work spans 70 linear feet. The repeated and offset views seem to present a remote, picturesque and largely pristine environment. However, each segment contains either overt or subtle evidence of various incursions into and onto this landscape at the top of the world. Visible are the historic buildings of the Hudson Bay Company, established in 1670, military and public infrastructure, crisscrossing snowmobile trails, and endless horizons at the edge of the unknowable arctic landscape.

In her introduction to Northrup Frye’s The Bush Garden (1971), The Sugar Rush of the Sublime, Lisa Moore states: “Frye poses a terrifying conundrum: the refusal of the Canadian landscape to be fettered or framed or coaxed into submission by perspective or cliché. We cannot hide in a garrison from “out there.” The best we can do, Frye suggests, is look; but perhaps we need to squint. (…) We hold the terror of the unknown at bay long enough to make art of it.”

”Art within art: 2019 Karsh Award winner Andrew Wright offers an homage of sorts”
Artsfile.ca, Jan. 23rd, 2020

”In Andrew Wright’s world, the beauty’s never skin-deep”
CBC News - Posted Jan. 19, 2020

Photos below courtesy The City of Ottawa