[Winter 2025]
Light and Fog
by Didier Morelli
[EXCERPT]
At the Reford Gardens (or Jardins de Métis), there is something captivating about the crisp light coming off the St. Lawrence River meeting an unusual English-style garden, somewhere along the winding coastal road to Gaspésie. This all shifts when the maritime wind brings fog that quickly envelops the land, creating a moody scene of cool greys and stony blues. Capturing the energy behind this transient space through the strokes of a paintbrush or the lens of a camera demands a certain eye, patience, and an immersion in the elements.
In Light and Fog, the contemporary photographer and poet Ewa Monika Zebrowski is paired with the watercolourist Anna Lois Dawson Harrington (1851–1917), who walked the storied paths of the Reford Gardens over a century ago. Curated by Hélène Samson, the exhibition is a thoughtful coupling of two artists for whom landscapes take on a new and vibrant life through acts of visual creation. At the beginning of Samson’s introductory essay, we learn that Harrington painted watercolours of Métis for more than forty years, leaving behind correspondence and other ephemera to round out the story of her time there. Through her curatorial premise, Samson asks who the woman behind these incredible watercolours was and how a present-day reinterpretation of this land by Zebrowski might give us new insight into this history.
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Ewa Monika Zebrowski and Anna Lois Dawson Harrington, Light and Fog – Didier Morelli]
A Postdoctoral Fellow in art history at Concordia University, Didier Morelli has published in Art Journal, CBC Arts, Canadian Theatre Review, C Magazine, Esse Arts + Opinions, Espace art actuel, RACAR, Spirale, and The Drama Review. In addition to his curatorial research role for Evergon’s retrospective at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (2022), he curated Artletics, an exhibition on the intersections of art and sports, at Artexte (2024).