Paper trail

WHAT IT IS: Copy Paperis a 2014 textile-based piece by Ontario-born, Winnipeg-based artist Kristin Nelson, currently on view at WAG-Qaumajuq as part of the exhibition Terra Cognita/Incognita.

Of the 125 works in the show — which uses historical and contemporary pieces from WAG-Qaumajuq’s permanent collection to explore how artists have represented the landscape over time and across cultures —probably the most attention-getting are the beautiful paintings of Canada’s lakes, plains, forests and mountains.

So, how does this seemingly modest, somewhat enigmatic work connect to Terra Cognita/Incognita’s larger themes?

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: In the middle of the exhibition, an antique desk holds several objects of beauty and utility, and this is where Copy Paper sneaks in, as something both “cognita and incognita,” known and unknown.

While Nelson’s work feels ordinary and familiar — resembling two packages of inexpensive all-purpose copy paper, the kind of thing you might pick up as part of your back-to-school shopping list — it is not that.

Nelson has made a realistic and detailed replica of a product that is uniform and mass-produced, that is readily available at big-box office supply stores. But she has done so using a traditional craft method, painstakingly weaving each piece of “paper” from cotton on a floor loom. The green packaging sleeve is made from digitally-printed polyester.

The results are just a little idiosyncratic in texture, just a little adorably off, which makes us look more closely.

By embracing the laborious, repetitive and time-intensive process of weaving, Nelson wants to make us more aware of the paper products we casually buy, use and toss. She has also made replicas of graph paper, yellow legal paper, three-hole foolscap, those disposable paper cups you get at the dentist and the thick brown paper towels you find in public washrooms. By recontextualizing these recreated objects within an art institution, Nelson concentrates our attention on everyday objects, asking us to consider the labour and resources that have gone into them.

And it’s by thinking about the resources used in paper products that Copy Paper connects to other works in the exhibition, by reminding us that paper comes from wood and wood comes from forests, bringing us full circle back to those breathtaking canvases of Emily Carr or the Group of Seven.

WHY IT MATTERS: In Terra Cognita/Incognita, curator Riva Symko brings together works that explore the natural world and the many ways we experience and represent it. There is an enormous amount of pleasure and beauty in this show, but also pieces that look at darker themes of climate change and environmental devastation.

There are works that show how landscape is bound up with national identity and cultural memory. There are pieces in which nature is seen as a place of retreat and recreation and others in which it is framed as a site of production, sometimes exploitation. This is a dense, rich exhibition that presents complex and contradictory images and ideas and then lets the viewer sort through them.

For me, a lot of these layered meanings come together in Copy Paper. My father was born in Fort Frances, Ont., a place of incredible natural beauty, surrounded by the lakes, rocks and trees seen in landscape paintings of Canadian Shield country.

Fort Frances was also, historically, a pulp and paper town. The mill closed in 2014, but I remember visiting as a small child, when you could still see log drives along Rainy River and Rainy Lake and smoke and steam from the mill, making visible the whole process of turning trees into paper.

For most of us, those processes are now invisible. We buy our copy paper without thinking too much about where it came from or how it was made. Nelson nudges us, gently, to remember.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com