This research project focuses on the representational links between modernist constructions and imaginations of the Middle Ages and their translations into the social, historical, and geographical forces that have helped shape contemporary understandings of the Canadian wilderness. Through an examination of modernist Canadian art, including but not limited to Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, and through a reading of many of the critical discourses that surround the Group’s influence and legacies, this project places Canada’s wilderness discourse within a framework of medieval influence that continues to have a lasting effect on our modern nation-state. Building on research into the multiple and interdisciplinary forms medievalism can take, my research charts its various conceptual functions, ideologies, and mythologies, and follows the transfer of those concepts onto Canadian settlement and national imaginaries. By looking at artistic productions that have become foundational in the formation of the Canadian nation and an identity forged upon a reverential treatment of its fabled wilds, this project builds upon Professor Kathryn Brush’s Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier project (2010) and research conducted for that project by Rebecca Gera, which explores European medieval influences on twentieth-century Canadian artists and squarely places the linguistic roots of our current concept of the term “wilderness” or “wildernisse” in a medieval European imagination carried forward via the literary conventions of the Gothic novel.

 

Furthermore, by exploring the notion of the “primitive” through the lens of European medievalisms that took shape in the Middle Ages and were then expanded upon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, my research situates the primitivist desire of “becoming animal” and the return to a “natural” state within a growing postcolonial discourse surrounding many of the restrictive and enduring features of Canadian nationalism, namely, the urban versus rural ethos; whiteness; a denial of the colonial present; the negation of class; and a persistent blindness to issues of gender and sexuality. By looking at the treatment of the “other” within a universalized Western culture and the presuppositions of Canadian identity that have become inherently expressed within it, this project seeks to address the reasons why many of Canada’s landscape-based artworks continue to secure and inspire restrictive and exclusive forms of Canadian nationalism, nature tourism, and an apparent tolerance to romantic and anthropomorphic appropriations of nature religions and Indigenous mythologies. In doing so, this paper references a discourse that considers “wilderness” to be an underlying principle of Canadian identity through an exploration of the historical legacies and power relations that are embedded deep within what has become an increasingly obligatory deference not only to the modern concept of wilderness, but also to contemporary (re)imaginings of our colonial past and the politics of the projected future nation.

 

While acknowledging that many artists have begun to look critically at the colonial legacies and current multicultural practices at play within Canadian culture, thus challenging many of the presuppositions of Canadian identity expressed in the landscape, it remains painfully clear that tensions between the iconic and domestic nation have become deeply embedded within Canada’s nature/nation discourse. As such, issues around “wilderness” and the “modern primitive” explored by a new generation of Canadian artists continue to traffic in a distinctly traditional, colonial representation of the landscape. Given the history of interventionist work by artists such as N.E. Thing Co., Michael Snow, Joyce Weiland, Rebecca Belmore, Adrian Stimson, Lori Blondeau, and Jin-Me Yoon, among others, and its resulting effects on rendering the asocial landscapes of influential artists like the Group of Seven as particular rather than universal, my research explores the reasons why the contemporary movement to “nature” continues to involve the adoption of a non-white “primitive,” pre-modern lifestyle. In other words, given the current postcolonial discourse prevalent in contemporary Canadian society, I ask why contemporary representational practice continues to privilege and empower a symbolic use of nature that for many artists, young and old, has come to be nothing more than a romantic lament for an earlier, unspoiled time. In order to answer that question, I explore the historical reasons why Canada’s wilderness has come to symbolize the freedom of an alternative community, one outside the rapidly growing urban culture we find ourselves living in and one that enables us to connect to the collective myth of a medieval-inspired settler past that has become so central to Canadian identity. For, as I continue with my research, it is clear that the problem behind many of the representations of Canada’s continuously evolving nature/nation couplet is that, when presented within the enduring colonial discourse seen in much Canadian art, whether intended or otherwise, we see a promotion of a naïve “primitivism” in which the artist and viewer are invited to cast off history and inhibition in order to celebrate a return to a “pristine” state of nature unfettered by politics and the past.