Curated by Pan Wendt

This exhibition sets up a conversation between two paintings depicting a waterfall in the foothills of the Alps and brought to Ellershouse, Nova Scotia around 1870, as well as the recent work of seven contemporary artists based in the Atlantic provinces who seek to articulate attitudes to nature that grapple with and offer alternatives to a difficult inheritance. The two 19th century paintings play the role of a source or spring, in the generative sense; they embody ideas of the landscape as both a lost Eden and a boundless resource imported by settlers from Europe whose contradictory attitudes about the land are still with us. The waterfall in the pictures, famed for its beauty, was the so-called Perte du Rhône, a point near the French-Swiss border where the river plunged into a great roaring fall that penetrated rock and disappeared underground for several kilometres.

The German industrialist and art lover Franz von Ellershausen bought one of the paintings and commissioned the other for his Nova Scotia manor, built in the 1860s, in a town he founded and named after himself. He clearly valued the beauty of these works and what they depicted. But perversely, he also dreamed of harnessing the river’s power for industry, and even made an application to the Emperor of France to build a dam that would have flooded the falls, destroying the beautiful site forever. Eventually, a post-World War II hydroelectric project achieved what Ellershausen had proposed and now the Perte du Rhône can only been seen as the faint underwater shadow of a once dramatic cascade.

The word channelling suggests the capturing of nature’s power, for example by diverting or harnessing a waterway. Or, in this context, by framing it as an aesthetic event. But it could also make reference to the spirit world, to the ghostly persistence of ancestors, or to the possibility of becoming that which haunts us, in order to redirect it. The seven artists selected for this exhibition are haunted by the destructive impacts of settlement of this part of the world and are motivated by a desire to articulate a more reverent and receptive relationship to nature. They draw inspiration from the possibility that nature cannot ultimately be captured or consumed—just as it continues to spring from the now drowned Perte du Rhône—in the afterlife of an image.

-Pan Wendt, curator

Artists

D’Arcy Wilson, Eye to Eye, 2025

Archival Inkjet Prints, Edition of 5
(Left Print: 52.5 x 40 cm, Right Print: 52.5 x 60 cm)
Courtesy of the artist

Doug Dumais, A Landscape for Construction (Return), 2020

Inkjet print on Entrada 300 White
60 x 80 cm
Background image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Dutch, 1525–1530 – 1569), The Return of the Herd, 1565, Oil on wood, 117 cm × 159 cm (46 in × 62 1⁄2 in), Gemäldegalerie, 1018, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna