[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.

[…]

[ 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.