[Summer 2025]

Traces: Earth’s Memories
by Christian Roy

[EXCERPT]
Montreal photographer Linda Rutenberg’s exhibition Traces surveyed the second half of her thirty-year career, juxtaposing three bodies of work related to the theme of fragile traces of threatened environments, whether they be natural, cultural, or a combination of the two. The instal­lation that viewers reached after walking through a series of separate spaces, with a title that was both literal and evocative – On Thin Ice – displayed this hybridity in both content and form. The expression is utterly apt for the precarious predicament of ice-fishing huts, previously featured by Rutenberg in 2011 in her winter views of the Gaspé. The stretch of time every year during which these structures can be used has shrunk over the last five years as climate change threatens to make ice fishing extinct.

In the exhibition, the life-size wooden hut beached on the varnished floor stood as a surrealistic vestige of a vernacular activity from the postwar period. Evoking the beach cabin in Giorgio de Chirico’s The Mysterious Bath, the hut contained photographs of these incongruous structures, reminiscent of de Chirico’s Furniture in the Valley. Rutenberg’s close-ups of their colourful walls superimposed their quirky details over those of the gallery, suggestive of Joseph Cornell’s boxes of found objects and John F. Peto’s trompe-l’oeil bulletin boards. The images of cabins against a snowy white background and oblique lines with bright-hued or­thogonal planes gave the impression of rustic constructivism. Similar formalist echoes could be seen in the distance in the first gallery, glimpsed beyond the middle room that viewers had to cross as they retraced their steps.

[…]

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 129 – FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Linda Rutenberg, Traces: Earth’s Memories]

Christian Roy, cultural historian (with a PhD from McGill University), translator, and art and film critic, is the author of Traditional Festivals: A Multicultural Encyclopedia (ABC-Clio, 2005), and numerous scholarly articles. A regular contributor to the magazines Vice Versa (1983–97) and Vie des arts, he has also published in Ciel variable, Esse, and Espace.