Spring 2000

Randy Adams

Artist's Statement

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Beyond anno Domini - The Grave Millennium

For reasons hard to explain, I have spent many years photographing the cemeteries of western Canada. When asked why, I have no slick answer: I did not set out, initially, to pursue such a study. Nonetheless, I have traveled thousands of miles of highways and gravel roads, mud and dirt trails. If I had to choose a place where my journeys began, it would be on my grandmother's farm, a quarter section of land homesteaded by my maternal great-grandfather, Colin Lennie, son of William Lennie, a blacksmith at Fort Edmonton, as early as 1865.

My grandmother was raised on the farm but, after marrying a railway foreman, spent the rest of her life in Edmonton, Alberta (one of Canada's three prairie provinces). Still, my grandmother managed to keep the old homestead and arranged for the flats to be sharecropped by a local farmer. There were several relic buildings on the top of the north hill, including a plank barn, a tiny one-roomed cabin, a shed, and a small stable. When I was a boy, my family drove to the farm for Sunday picnics, and every year in late summer and early fall we'd go berry picking.

I remember asking my grandmother about her life on the farm, and she'd tell stories about growing up in a large family. About riding in a horse-drawn sleigh to school in the winter. About how her father played the organ at country dances.

What she didn't mention was that her grandfather, William Lennie, had been married to Annabella Fraser, a Métis (half-breed) daughter of Colin Fraser, bagpiper for George Simpson, governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Nor did she speak of her mother, Clara Grant, an illegitimate daughter of HBC trader Johnny Grant and a Métis woman named Lily. My grandmother was born at the turn of the century, a mere sixteen years after the Métis Rebellion, and prejudice against First Nations and Métis people was at its height. She thought that she was protecting her family.

I can't remember any single event that got me traveling. Maybe I was trying to reconnect with those feelings of mystery and possibility felt as a young boy sitting at the loft window. But I also believe that my curious wanderings were prompted partly by a desire to see beyond the veil of secrecy that my grandmother had drawn over the family's heritage — a searching for where I fit within the vast landscape that I call home. Regardless of the reasons, I left school at 17 and began to travel. During the decade when most of my friends were in university, learning one trade or another, or establishing businesses, I was rambling from landscape to landscape, never settling anywhere for long.

I wandered up and down the spine of North America, working in the orchards of British Columbia, on farms and ranches in Alberta, and a gemstone mine in the Mojave Desert.

Eventually, I moved back to the city and turned my hands to other things. But my decade of itinerant work influenced all attempts at customary or steady employment, so I decided to become a writer and a photographer. The subsequent years of self-study and research were supported through taxi driving, bartending, freelance writing, and a decade of employment with the Edmonton Public Library.

The land lying east from Edmonton, along either side of the North Saskatchewan River, is shaped by gentle rolling hills, with cultivated fields and sheltered pastures. It was there that I began my photographic study. I found dozens of deserted homesteads — some original log houses being used as granaries or storage, and some places simply abandoned. There were many large wooden houses built in the thirties and forties, with farmyards heaped with broken machinery and automobiles. From the outside, the deserted houses appeared wholly rundown, with sad gray walls and broken, gaping windows. Sagging porches were often strewn with old washing machines or chairs or cupboards. Sometimes there was no porch, and grass and weeds grew wild right up to the house. Doors often hung open or ajar.

Curiosity soon got the better of me, and I began snooping through the deserted houses. What I found still haunts me. Entering the forsaken homes was like walking into another world, one of wreckage and bittersweet artifacts: a single coat hanging in tatters over the edge of a door, ties and belts still suspended from hooks on a wall, a set of false teeth resting in a glass on the ledge above a window. Pigeon droppings were splattered everywhere down the walls, and swallows nested in the corners. Ironically, in some cultures, having a swallow build a nest in the eaves of a house is meant to bring joy, happiness, and children. But, in these sad, relic homes, birds and a few rodents remained the only occupants.

Sometimes the interiors were strangely beautiful, even in decay, with brightly colored rooms — yellow or orange — transformed pastel in the diffused window light. I'd often find memorabilia: a solitary cardboard icon or a flower cut from a tin can, an old wooden chest full of moldy keepsakes, a faded calendar compliments of a garage in some nearby town, with notes scrawled over the dates: such and such a cow was sick; another cow had just calved; there were nails to buy in town; or a funeral to go to. There were other things: children's toys, old magazines and catalogues, scrapbooks, half-completed loan applications. In some places it felt as if the residents had one day simply decided to leave, never to return. Memories hung like spirits in the stale air, clinging tenaciously to the forsaken objects. I found myself oddly attracted to the places, yet disturbed by the evidence of lives somehow abbreviated. Such moments were always unnerving. And always the question: what had happened? How could so many once lovely homes be reduced to shambles?

It didn't take long to find the cemeteries.

At first, my work was based in the long tradition of documentary photography whereby the artist, objectively and without extensively manipulating or distorting the image, records what is. Keeping within the confines of the medium I didn't try to create special effects to make the work look like a painting or reproduce an etching. I worked within the physical and technical limitations of photography. This work resulted in several public exhibitions of large color prints, an extensive collection of color slides now housed at the Alberta Public Archives, and a non fiction book entitled Eternal Prairie.

My particular interest in crucifixes began one spring day in a Greek Orthodox cemetery. The entire cross, including the crucifix, had been painted blue. But the color had faded and some of the paint was peeling. Nature had worn smooth the body of Christ. Although small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, viewing it through the macro-lens made it seem larger than life. It brought to mind the lives of the homesteaders buried in the cemetery, shaped by faith and long labor on the land. How often had some poor soul looked up to heaven for strength enough to finish a task? And now the crucifix was left to face the elements — so small in the landscape, yet so large in the minds of the faithful.

I began to focus on crucifixes. The variety seemed endless. Hand-carved from wood, or shaped in cement molds brought from the Old Country. Fashioned from wrought or cast iron, lead, plaster, plastic, marble, granite, and sandstone. And, sometimes, in examples where people obviously could not afford to buy a grave marker, traditions and memory combined with necessity, and they simply scrawled a crucifix into cheap cement.

As the portfolio of prints grew, I began to feel a need to do something more than merely record the artifacts. After studying the work of many artists — painters, sculptors and photographers who worked in the tradition of religious symbolism — I finally stumbled upon a unique method of expression. The impetus behind this collection was to fashion small devotional images based on Mexican retablos. I wanted the crucifixes to be crude, rather like primitive folk art. My method was to etch the photographs with an exacto-blade and use them as contact negatives, creating reversed-tone images. These were then re-photographed and printed on 50 year-old Kodabromide fiber paper found at a garage sale. The resulting images are a personal interpretation of iconographic art, presented here to honor the original homesteaders who came looking for the Promised Land, and to mark the millennium.

     Able Muse

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