Artist statement

I recently completed a short documentary for the National Film Board of Canada, entitled The Pinnacle and the Poet. This film chronicles a passionate seven-year struggle to save Pinnacle Mountain in Sutton Township, Quebec from private development as a resort.
   In creating The Pinnacle and the Poet , I coupled photographs that I made on and around the mountain with the voices of local people and the poems of Townships writer Richard Sommer.
   The activists that I portray in the film have been fighting to preserve not only a part of our shrinking natural environment, but also a traditional way of life, tied to the land and the seasons.

    In this exhibition, which incorporates stills from The Pinnacle and the Poet, I have tried to evoke this deeply rooted rural lifestyle. I have drawn inspiration from one of Richard Sommer’s poems.

Township is a small place among mountains,
inhabited by knuckles and mouths and big ears
and unwanted knowledges of evil,

along with the rivering veins in
the backs of slow old farmers’ hands
and their earned innocence of gesture.

There is no place like it, no place
different. It is a last stronghold
of Palatine Irish, a trickling stream

of shy night deer, startled by our sudden
standing up, coughing and stamping
obliquely away into the dark. It is

a place for Swiss, Norwegians, Alpines
from everywhere, mountain people and people
becoming mountain people, choosing

either to be troll or to be human.
The long lines of sons and daughters
already rooted here, have

already chosen, mostly, or been chosen.
Some choose to be enemies, some to be friends.
Either way, we are always becoming one.

                           Richard Sommer