The Tree Planters: Rita Leistner
Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, BC - To May 31
It is an irony not lost on North Americans alert to the consequences of colonization’s transformation of the natural landscape: how the unsustainable extraction of forest timber by earlier generations of loggers laid the groundwork for more recent generations of tree planters. Sunshine Coast author Charlotte Gill’s Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe (2011) brought this passage to light in words; Scarborough-born artist and documentary filmmaker Rita Leistner has done something similar, but in pictures.
Organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and curated by the McMichael’s John Geoghegan, The Tree Planters is a series of large-scale photographic portraits of tree planters at work on variable terrain, from land broken and cluttered from past logging and forest fires to lush and welcoming idylls. Unlike the Early Renaissance, when portraits were commissioned by idle subjects to flaunt their possessions, Leistner’s subjects are pictured in action, demonstrating their wealth in its commodified form, as labour.
Notable in Leistner’s portraits is the sense that her subjects are not numb workers driven to reach their quotas, but human beings with rich lives for whom planting is as much a lifestyle as it is a job. Both pleasure and determination can be seen in Russell Robertson (2017), where the subject appears closer to a 17th-century buccaneer than a planter leaping over a fallen fir. In Sally Enns (2017), the viewer is given a range of contrasting signifiers to work with, from a leather- tough, dirt-smudged body to the pink-handled shovel and the Beatrix Potter bunny tattooed above the subject’s well-developed forearm. Real people, doing back-breaking work.
