Title: Glimmer
Artist: Jocelyne Belcourt Salem Exhibition year: 2000
"...Jocelyne Belcourt Salem's Glimmer is a series of 80 stainless steel markers, etched with text and attached to trees. It is a meticulously researched collection of archaeological fragments, a collage of identity located in, and specific to this site. This meticulous, scientific based ordering and codification of information, is a major component of Belcourt Salem's work. As in previous works, she uses this information to engage with the location and in the process transform the site.
The construction of landscape as a genre of visual art in the twentieth century is one that shifts and disappears, to reappear in a new form. In the second half of the 20th century significant changes occurred in our thinking about landscape, and the role landscape has in human history. From a cultural framework of a specifically European pictorial tradition at the start of the twentieth century, artists have turned their focus on social and cultural issues, and the politics of location. Not only are artists producing work on location in the landscape but the location itself has become the theme of the work.
In Glimmer, Belcourt Salem address the geographies of location and explores themes of identity, history and continuity as they relate to this specific space. Glimmer links the past and the present, and the sequence of events' that form the social and natural history of the site. It would be a mistake though, to see Glimmer as only documentation. The mirrored surfaces of the markers reflect and capture the changing light. They become a transformative element, shape shifters that harness sun and moon light. They (the markers) catch your attention, pull you in to the woods, sirens in a sea of trees."
Anne O'Callaghan
Jocelyne Belcourt Salem graduated in Fine Arts from McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario. Since that time her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions throughout Canada, Australia, Italy and the United States.
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