ARTIST’S WORK BRINGS CEMETERIES TO LIFE FISH GRIWKOWSKY
Photographer’s show highlights beauty in city’s final resting places
For 10 months, Candace Makowichuk strolled amid our dead and buried, breathing in their stories.
As the first artist-in-residence for City of Edmonton Cemeteries, the inventive photographer collected wildflowers nestled between the tombstones, photographed wreaths left by mourners and made rubbings of otherwise forgotten names and symbols which once waved on flags overseas in theatres of war.
Her resulting photography show, Time Passes Love Remains, is on display at City Hall through May 21 — a diverse collection of images including hand-coloured prints, double exposures shot with a Diana camera and cyanotype prints of flowers and historical insignia among other experiments with emulsions and rare paper.
“I’ve always had an interest in history and cemeteries,” she said at the opening Tuesday. “I remember as a child heading out on a bike to the little local cemetery and trying to spook friends, but even then noticing all those details.”
Particularly drawn to the symbols — be they religious, military or otherwise — her full-time position gave her an education in the ebb and flow of life and death in the city.
Speaking of the tombstones, she notes, “In the past they were much more ornate. The design was very important.”
Over the years the style of epitaphs changed.
“Up to about the ’30s it was really popular to have the date down to the ninth degree. So, for example, died January 7, 92 years old, 10 months and two days.
“In the Dirty Thirties, people wanted to leave a permanent marker, but didn’t have a lot of money to do that. So you have really nice examples of homemade headstones.”
Some were made of cement, writing names and little else with their fingers before it hardened.
Various stones are sandstone carved into the shape of tree stumps. One at Mount Pleasant Cemetery where Makowichuk was based depicts a pile of rocks with a Latin inscription about stargazing — its subject an astronomer who climbed Mount Edith Cavell. A heart on top is for his wife, who also scaled the mountain.
Makowichuk spent her time in the seven cemeteries and one traditional burial ground maintained by the city, researching how we dealt with our dead in the past.
She notes down by Rossdale Burial Site, things weren’t always handled delicately as the city grew.
“Bones — how many stories of when they were developing that area, the guys were dumping the dirt, how many bones were falling out.
“When the big flood happened in the early 1900s it wiped a lot away. Most headstones were temporary. It was almost a way of forgetting all that and rezoning.”
She notes, historically, Indigenous people weren’t the only ones burying their dead down by the river.
“Settlers, everyone who came into this area was buried basically from the Glenora Club all the way to where the Epcor building is.”
Research aside, it was walking around the cemeteries with her cameras that told stories she didn’t expect.
“You could really tell when the Spanish Flu came through. The springtime was a hard time for the settlers in terms of losing children. Women mortality — childbirth — you see that, too.”
Makowichuk is in a line of artists-in-residence throughout the city’s various departments in the past four years, starting with painter Jeff Collins’ stint with the city’s forestry department.
Subsequent residencies have been at the Mennonite Centre for Newcomers, the Indigenous Relations Office, the city clerk’s office in city hall — and Leanne Olson is embedded in the City ’s waste management centre.
Stephen Williams of the Edmonton Arts Council noted at the opening, “It allows the people who work at those places to see an artist at work, and it allows them to see their own work in the work of the artist.”
Around 100 people applied for the jury-selected cemetery residency, Williams noting of Makowichuk: “Her specializations in alternative photography, historical photography and past experience of taking photos in historic contexts really interested us.”
The artist noted she pushed to have the residency extended from six months to 10, “To allow me to go through the late fall and also the winter — just to get that life cycle of season rather than just human mortality.
“We all have real connections to cemeteries and death — it’s a part of our humanity and it’s a part of our mortality. It was definitely not an easy subject to deal with — I had some really rough days.”
Not that she was afraid of ghosts or anything like that — she dismisses the idea of cemeteries having negative energy.
“It didn’t spook me. There are people who wouldn’t visit me in my studio space, I’m in a niche building which houses cremated remains.
“That really got me thinking, the energy around cemeteries isn’t scary or evil or bad, because most of the people who come there come out of love.
“Everyone I met was so thrilled to see that the cemetery and the City of Edmonton was doing this, sharing the beauty of the cemeteries. What resonated the most with me was all the conversations I had.”
One final observation?
“I love those older tombstones because they’ve aged. And the newer black ones are almost a reflection of our current thinking,” she says with a laugh. “That we have to stay young forever.”
Lindi Ortega is back in town May 26, headlining the 9th annual Artists for Life event.
The night of music and entertainment also features the Canadian premiere of I Am Harvey Milk — a concept opera directed and conducted by Daryl Price — originally commissioned by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus.
CTV’s Stacey Brotzel will emcee the evening raising funds and awareness of HIV/AIDS and its caregivers. DJ Queerbait and MAN UP! will also spice up the night.
Over the years, Artists for Life has raised almost $300,000 for beneficiaries including Little Warriors, HIV Edmonton, Camp fYrefly and YESS.
Tickets starting at $30 are available at winspear.com.
And a perfect channel for all our rage, Smashing Pumpkins are back Sept. 9 on their Shiny and Oh So Bright Tour, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the band’s formation.
One of the heavier and more melodramatic of the grungeera acts, the Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness were especially groundbreaking albums of angst, full of headbanging earworms and musings on emptiness pushed into Lollapalooza skies by the distinct growl and wail of Billy Corgan.
That’ll be a busy time for Edmonton concerts, with Foo Fighters, Chicago and Sonic Field Day appearing the same week.
Tickets are from $45 to $149 for the Smashing Pumpkins’ Rogers Place concert and go on sale 10 a.m. Monday through livenation.com.
When the big flood happened in the early 1900s it wiped a lot away. Most headstones were temporary.