A poem and interpretive essay on Natasha Harvey’s Layered Landscapes: Landscape Art, Politics, and Love

I. milkweed ram tree

Building wrap
Tar paper
RAM board RAM board RAM RAM RAM BOARD BOARD BOARD
Wall Guard
Wall Guard
Wall Guard
TYVEK TYVEK TYVEK TYVEK
milkweed milkweed milkweed milkweed milkweed milkweed
Fire textures Glen textures Milkweed textures Glen mixtures Milk fixtures
GLENMORE GLEN GLEN GLEN GLEN GLEN
MORE MORE MORE more more More MOre MORe MORE MORE MORE
Clear cut clear cut debris texture
Texture / purple / aster archiTECtural drawings architextural dRAWings
She has a construction business a collapsing willingness
She feels guilty she feels concrete she feels concrete guilt
She feels textured she feels RAM board she feels love and milkweed
Loveweed lovemilk milkneed lovemilk clouds become lovemilk smoke

Rather than naturalizing the houses to the ponderosa pines left standing, one draws attention to the vulgarity. Rather than slathering houses in glittering christmas thighs, one draws attention to the suffering. Rather than overpapering ramboard with tyvek, one peels skin from tree corpses.

A framed house from sky a painting framed, weighted by bags of guilt
She hired a photographer with a drone
On RAMBOARD she hired a RAMBOARD she hired a BAGS OF GUILT
Gesso and gack on ramboard
Ramboard to hold it all / to hail a photo of a totally gone forest / to gone a hail of lost rest
houses make kitchens make a second fridge in the garage
a basement sectional for kids for a closet of towels folded
Drywalling plaster plaster drywalling
Firesky snow sage oldsnow sage leaves
Fresh water / realm of potential being
Snow water / them of desired feeling
Fire water / femme of weeping painting
She owns a construction company : she feels guilty : people born of the COMPANY

We wonder what the walls know,
memories of a pine plateau,
language of bird loud mornings.

We wonder what the ram board
knows, being a breathable floor
paper, dreaming of the boreal.

We study at the university of things.
Every made object everywhere leaves
a hole in ground, a corpse trail
of insects and animals. Natasha
paints the sorrow of materials.

*Layered Landscapes: Landscape Art, Politics, and Love* in the Main Gallery, November 3 - December 16, 2023.

II. Contemplation on Natasha Harvey’s Exhibit

Natasha Harvey’s exhibit of five works expresses the desire and sorrow of her lifelong relationship with the unceded land of the syilx Okanagan territory. A mixture of acrylic painting, spray paint, collage of found building materials, linocut print, drawing, and photography, her layered, complex, airy canvases create a ghostly landscape of lost forests, half-built wooden houses, patchy snow, torn fences, and oversized undergrowth.

Rather than romanticising houses in the woods, these works draw attention to the vulgarity of wooden houses built over the scraps of a razed forest. Rather than hiding the process of clear-cutting, excavation, and construction, Harvey’s compositions seem to peel the skin from the body of built suburbia, showing the violence of ongoing colonial land capture.

But don’t people need to live somewhere? And what of Harvey’s family business - they build houses, don’t they? Harvey told me that the found building materials come from construction sites of her family’s successful contracting business. Artists should be able to live on their work, but she doesn’t, she can’t, and she lives, like most of us, off the wealth generated from the uses of trees, water, and land for expansive capitalism. Harvey leans into both her adoration of ponderosa pines, milkweed, sage brush, and the Cascade mountains, and into the materialities of the construction industry that surround her life here.

The largest painting, 19’ by 7’, “Okanagan Landscape,” is composed on a long continuous piece of canvas, layered with RAM board, Tyvek, coral spray paint, Prussian blue acrylic, and patches of iron ore black paint. RAM board and Tyvek are breathable but dust proof paper used to protect house floors during construction. In the foreground Harvey applies torn pieces of magnified photos of milkweed and bunchgrass, the spiky five petalled milkweed blossoms the size of a child’s head, and the bunchgrass clustered like animals, all running into the Tyvek paper. Tyvek Is an airtight building barrier paper; the words “the miracles of science” printed on the Tyvek paper about milkweed blossoms, as if the Tyvek seeks to smother their fecundity.

Across the middle ground, long strips of dun coloured Ram board adjoin torn pieces of architectural drawings, all atop a horizontal field of Prussian blue paint scraped across the raw canvas. Could this be the blue of a lake, a river, a pond? The sense of struggle, of the water pressing against the compressing construction paper and the linear architectural drawings, deepens with nearby patches of iron ore black paint. As if carved from the water, grass, and flowers, these black spaces exist without construction, without growth, without water; they speak, to me, of the totalizing nature of wildfires that regularly tear through the Okanagan lands.

*“Okanagan Landscape” from Layered Landscapes: Landscape Art, Politics, and Love* in the Main Gallery, November 3 - December 16, 2023.

Across the background, against a creamy sky layered with pale construction tissues, the stark jet black shapes of ponderosa pines, spruce trees, and leafless birch trees mingle with hard black spikes of burned trees, their trunks the last note to a lost forest. But all is not grey and black - ablaze between a stand of spruces and a stand of pines, a bright coral cloud extends perhaps 90 cm across and 40 cm high through the trees. This shock of colour, applied with spray can, is the only bright hue in this otherwise sombre, almost gothic painting. I can’t help but wince at the brightness and at my own memory of forest fires. The same colour peeks out along the bottom edge of the painting, suggesting an underground fire beneath the bunchgrass cover.

“Unnamed (with snow),” Harvey’s 8’ by 7’ work, hanging on an adjacent galley wall, draws the viewer towards a thick, gravelly middle ground patchy with the old snow of late spring. This narrower work draws the viewer towards a snowy, gravelly, middle ground. Across the foreground, Harvey has drawn a drywall scraper across large scale photos of wild sagebrush, leaving rough pixels of creamy paint and plaster over the velvety magnified leaves. Here the leaves are people, looking both into the gritty snow in the centre and outwards to the viewers. In the middle ground, behind the leaves, the same contrast of Prussian blue paint, grey-dun Ram board paper and iron ore paint moves the composition from the faces of the leaves into the snowy gravelly heart. I recognize the road as gravel, textured thus by drywall scraper and jagged collage, and also because these are the roads into the mountains of syilx territory.

“Harvey shows us the cooling might of these forests. But just as in “Okanagan Landscape,” this painting warns of violence. A blaze of coral paint behind the treetops is unmistakably a forest fire on the horizon, and though above the fire’s glow the sky is spattered blue with frothy clouds, the overall feeling is one of anxiety, loss, and sorrow..”

Harvey and I have hiked these mountains and forests together, and as in this composition, ponderosa pines crowd above the roadway, shading walkers from heat. Beyond the dark road, a spattering of white paint. Snow, tucked beneath pine shade, might last in these forests well into May. Harvey shows us the cooling might of these forests. But just as in “Okanagan Landscape,” this painting warns of violence. A blaze of coral paint behind the treetops is unmistakably a forest fire on the horizon, and though above the fire’s glow the sky is spattered blue with frothy clouds, the overall feeling is one of anxiety, loss, and sorrow.

The third work, 6’ by 3’, contrasts Harvey’s delicate linocut style with the rough and hasty materiality of construction. Nearly translucent white paint is smeared roughly over a strip of Ram Board. The original image is taken from a drone Harvey hired to fly over a new suburban construction. The bright white bones of a framed house, at the bottom left of the print, form a grid through which the forest floor appears speckled and bright. And although the lines of the framed house cross at diagonal as well as horizontal intervals, creating an illusion of sacred order and industrial grace, the ground just beyond the building is scattered with messy piles of lumber. Here is the contrast between the perfection of the newly built suburban house and the refuse left behind; throughout Harvey’s work one feels the conflict of admiration for the work of building houses and rage at the destruction such building necessitates.

“Harvey tells me that this forest is gone, and in this image I see the memory of a bristling, biodiverse, forest overwhelmed by the heady energy of construction, planning, development, roads, and progress.”

The second largest work in the exhibit, “Glenmore,” at 18’ by 7’, is named after a suburb of Kelowna. Glenmore backs onto mountains and forests, and as it expands, the forests are clearcut for development. Across the middle ground, a ghostly photo of a mixed ponderosa pine and spruce forest, sliced through with a tall industrial fence, the metal loops constraining the otherwise wild space of branch, needle, bush, leaf, trunk, and soil. As the fence moves from middle distance to foreground, the metal is obscured by layers of thick grey and white paint, applied as if by trowel, shovel, backhoe. Harvey tells me that this forest is gone, and in this image I see the memory of a bristling, biodiverse, forest overwhelmed by the heady energy of construction, planning, development, roads, and progress. Above the disappearing forest, a sky bleached by cloud - or smoke - and distant hills with sooty patches speak to a landscape of partially burned pines. Perhaps the bleakest single image in this exhibit, at the far right, as the middle ground of trees recedes, Harvey sets a horizontal triangular photo, about 2’ by 3’, almost spongy with greys and soft whites, of the blossoms of arrow leaved balsamroot. At the other far side of the painting, a photo of aster blossoms, which Harvey and I know to be lilac coloured, here in a buttery grey. Are these flowers here for hope? Or for loss?

*“Glenmore”* from *Layered Landscapes: Landscape Art, Politics, and Love* in the Main Gallery, November 3 - December 16, 2023.

For Harvey, construction of a painting is the painting. The material and the life of art is as much the art as is the image, and she is gleeful about the placement of her fifth work, which we can call “The Print Behind ‘Glenmore,” a black linocut print on white painted ram board. “Glenmore” itself is stretched across a 2 by 4 pine boards and is held in place by four sandbags; its installation shows the story of construction. And so, to access the final work in this show, one must step around the sandbags, behind the timber frame or “Glenmore,” to find an image of a lost forest. This print represents a forest without construction. It features only one kind of tree, the stately ponderosa pine, growing densely on a slope spattered by light. This forest, Harvey tells me, was cut down to make way for a new housing estate ironically called “Wilden.” This print, at the back of the show, hidden by the largest and most compositionally complex painting in the exhibit, the most tender image of the exhibit, tells of a grieving attachment to a lost forest. I have nothing but gratitude to Harvey for her work.

Norah Bowman is a writer living on the unceded territory of the syilx Okanagan Nation. Her recent book, Breath Like Water: An Anticolonial Romance, published by Caitlin Press in 2021, is a meditation on the complexity of settler colonial love and loyalty to land. Her next book, My Eyes are Fuses, coming out in the spring of 2024 with Caitlin Press, is about the life and art of Niki de Saint Phalle, Empress Agripinna, and Nicole Smith.

Contemplation on Natasha Harvey’s Exhibit // Norah Bowman

“Harvey tells me that this forest is gone, and in this image I see the memory of a bristling, biodiverse, forest overwhelmed by the heady energy of construction, planning, development, roads, and progress.”

Community built.
Artist run.