The greening of a bombing range
David Trautrimas finds inspiration at a military site turned nature refuge
Can war sometimes save the environment?
David Trautrimas explores the effects of military intervention on the landscape and how its destructive nature can lead to the preservation of nature.
Trautrimas, an Ontario College of Art and Design graduate, excels at printmaking, photography, sculpture and installation. Recently settled in Hamilton, he has been exhibiting locally and internationally for 15 years.
His exhibition, “The Lake Dives Where The Earth Curves,” at The Assembly, offers prints and a wall sculpture that entwine his personal history with the history of a southern Ontario military base.
Trautrimas grew up in Belleville and spent his summers in Prince Edward County, the site of CFB Picton, closed since 1969. He recently returned for an artist residency.
“While researching the history of how warfare training and military technology influenced Prince Edward County, I found a pronounced duality: destruction and preservation,” he tells me.
“The ultimate purpose of those war-based endeavours was destruction, such as the training of fighterbomber pilots or the development of the Avro Arrow, a fighter jet.”
Bald Head Spit, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, “was used as a bombing training run during the Second World War, and after the war, thousands of pounds of unexploded ordnance was left behind.
“Due to the potential of these bombs going off, access to this area is now forbidden. This has led the area to become a wildlife refuge, as well as one of the few grassy sand dunes left intact in southern Ontario.”
In “Echo Spit,” a wall relief almost four feet high, 29 green bomb profiles are arranged in a pyramidal formation. A pyramid traditionally conveys order, which the destructive nature of the objects belies.
“The objects are based on schematics of unexploded ordnance,” he says. “To make them I first recreated the shapes digitally, then etched the patterns on acrylic using a laser cutter. Once etched I painted in the lines, then cut out the forms.”
He painted the wall yellow to evoke sand, since the bombs are buried in a sandy spit.
Trautrimas’s silkscreen prints are similarly stark, spacious and stylized.
“I worked primarily with printmaking the first few years as an artist, and I wanted to revisit the medium after a decade-long hiatus from the process,” he says. “A big part of the attraction is the challenge of the medium as well as its visual warmth as a medium.
“I’ve worked primarily in digital production techniques, and while satisfying, the uniformity often has a cold or airless feel. The inherent flaws and manual nature of the process lends a richness that digital just can’t produce.”
The eight prints mix architecture, technology and landscape associated with the military presence in Prince Edward County.
In “View of the View,” Trautrimas divides the composition almost in half. Both halves contain curved yellow, white and black shapes that meet near the middle. The yellow shapes are embellished with black stripes and dots. A red L-shape unites them. It terminates in a small black triangle and echoes the black triangle topped with an antenna-like line.
An architectural landscape comes to mind. But it was, Trautrimas says, “inspired by the cockpit of a Fairchild Cornell, a prop plane used in training pilots at the Picton airbase, as well as the antenna arrays found around the county.”
In “Falling Water Falls,” Trautrimas took a cue from some buildings near the airbase. He reduced them to a variety of straight-edged geometric forms. The fins of a dummy training bomb also served as inspiration, he says.
“The green and blue are colours found on the military barracks at Picton airbase, the yellow is the colour that training planes were painted, and the black and white is taken from the livery of the Avro Arrow.”
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator, YouTube video maker and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com