About the Exhibition

Retreating Agassiz – exhibition essay by Romy Straathof

In searching for what underlies the visible, Jeanette Johns’ series of prints Retreating Agassiz, reveal how the unknown and unseen can give context and meaning to ones sense and experience of place. Taking the widest macro-view in both a physical framework and through the concept of time, Johns traverses millennia, and discovers ways to insert something of herself into a collective history of place that she asserts belongs to “all of us.” It is a collective history of a time that would not be named or marked until the recent past; nonetheless, it is an inherited history whose relics and traces remain to impact the lives of those who take care to notice.

The (six) prints of Retreating Agassiz communicate through the languages of mapping, asking to be read, however, it is soon realized that the information presented is at the same time recognizable through map-like symbols and obscure, – there are no reference points. Each print is what Johns refers to as a ‘snapshot’ of time (although in this case each ‘snapshot’ encompasses time periods of 300 to 1200 years) that show the presumed movement of ancient glacial Lake Agassiz, during its 4,500-year existence.

Emerging as meltwater from a monumental sheet of ice that was in some places nearly 4 km thick, the lake at its peak, was the largest glacial lake in North America and covered all of Manitoba, as well as several neighbouring provinces and states. The provincial landscape in which the artist grew up, had emerged from a series of glacial advances, retreats and subsequent drainage of the lake. Each glacial period partially erased the wounds and formations of the previous; each of the prints in the series Retreating Agassiz attempts to separate the layers of this palimpsest.

The languages of printmaking allow the artist to work in layers; photo-etching, screenprinting, hand-drawn marks, and application of gold leaf, reflecting layers of geophysical process, layers of time, and layers of understanding. In looking for patterns that connect place, time, purpose and identity, Johns’ maps become pattern, geographical elements become forms, and the shadows of what no longer exists is rendered in goldleaf, as if to mark their presence as recorded, preserved, eternal and precious. It was not until 1879, that Lake Agassiz was named and accepted in scientific circles as having formerly existed. But, to the artist and fellow inhabitants of the province, the traces of Lake Agassiz are familiar, and the story  of the lake is a legend embedded in their inherited past. The vast movement of the lake is revealed strikingly through the six views, animated and glistening.

Through observation and connecting, Johns closes a gap between what is seen and what exists in traces and myth. By inserting the ancient lake into her work, she decodes the familiar landscape, and becomes documentarist of the vast history, bringing to those of us who observe her work, an understanding of our place and identity in this history of place. In revealing the foundations of place the artist inserts something of herself into the records of the past, and brings the past to our present. In finding Lake Agassiz, Johns finds context in place.