Leslie Reid

After the Cryogenic (Snowball Earth) 2021
Site-specific installation / Installation in situ
Site 23 – Coaker Factory Building, Port Union

Disappearance 2021
Light boxes / Boîtes lumineuses
Site 18 – Sealers Museum, Elliston

Inversions 2021
Light boxes / Boîtes lumineuses
Site 18 – Sealers Museum, Elliston

Leslie Reid is one of Canada’s pre-eminent painters, known for large luminous landscapes. However, she has turned almost entirely to photography-based works in recent years. The Biennale presented examples in two new (to her) formats: light boxes at the Sealers Interpretation Centre, Elliston; and her first outdoor installation, 10 photographs on aluminum plates, at ground level behind the Coaker Factory Building, Port Union. 

Ice—as both symbol and evidence of climate change, especially in its unfolding impact on Northern peoples—has become the fulcrum around which Reid’s research and artwork revolves. After the Cryogenic (Snowball Earth) took viewers back to the Cryogenic period between 700 and 600 million years ago, marked by two Ice Ages. “Snowball Earth” refers to a theory that ice then completely covered the planet, creating conditions in which complex life forms developed. 

Fossils at Mistaken Point on the Avalon Peninsula have been identified as the first multicellular organisms. Reid’s photographic plates reference her deep response to standing among those Ediacaran biota, 565 million years old. The loosely ordered plates invited viewers to walk among them, watching changing light veil or reveal the intricate forms. Low tides at the waterfront site revealed actual Ediacaran fossils: Port Union sits within the new UNESCO-designated Discovery Global Geopark, encompassing the Bonavista-Trinity area.

The light boxes included an excerpt from Reid’s new series on Arctic ice, and two landscape images shot through a Fresnel lens at Cape Race Lighthouse, near Mistaken Point. That process inverts the distant headland, creating, in the artist’s view, a poignant parallel for the natural world increasingly upended by human interventions. 

PG