in the Museum: Hannah Jickling’s FEATURED FEATURES

August 2014 | by Amish Morrell

For the past fifteen years, Hannah Jickling has been developing and refining her own style of socially engaged art that attempts to enrich and reorient how participants experience their physical and natural surroundings. Her works have included landscape interventions, ranging from a series of impromptu snow sculptures in Halifax that served various civic functions such as cordoning off residential streets from noisy through-traf- fic,1 a botanical cocktail made from the leaves of plants frozen in the “Snowpocalypse” that struck Oregon in 2008, a pumpkin boat designed as a model for outdoor education and a “canoedio” that functioned as a painting studio, mobile pinhole photography dark- room and reading room, during a six day trip on the River.2

Hannah Jickling, Pumpkin Boat Model for Outdoor Educa- tion. Nehelem Bay, Oregon, 2009. Image courtesy of Lexa Walsh.

One spring, while researching a potential trip for students at a school where she was an artist in residence, we canoed the murky waters of the Don River in during an adventure that we dubbed “Flush the Don” transposing an activity Jickling regularly uses to navigate the rivers of the Northern Canadian wilderness onto the waterways of Cana-

1 da’s largest city. As we paddled alongside rush hour traffic on the adjacent expressway, we discussed the ways that contemporary art and outdoor recreation might be com- bined to practice new ways of understanding and inhabiting the landscapes around us. Since then, she has developed a series of projects, enacted in institutions in the United States, Europe and , where she sets up orienteering events in art museums.

The most recent work in this series was conceived with Yukon Orienteering Associ- ation members at the Yukon Arts Centre (YAC) in Canada, where she worked with orien- teers to use the language and methods of orienteering to negotiate artworks in both the YAC and Yukon Permanent Art Collections. Transposing these two distinct forms of cul- tural activity has several effects. By bringing orienteers into the museum, a heightened bodily engagement is summoned in the interpretation of landscape-based artworks. Inviting these specialized viewers to use topographical cues depicted within, or described by artworks, enables aesthetic tropes such as metaphor and abstraction to influence their readings of the spaces around them. Jickling’s gesture also engages a public, pre- sumably one without expert art knowledge, in a formal exercise by which they collectively enact an alternate way of navigating the rules and conventions of the museum. As by- standers, we are invited to re-read the artworks and the institutions that house them.

Both art interpretation and orienteering are specialized activities that have their own language, shared among a small but dedicated group. To understand the methods and culture of orienteering I met up with the local orienteering club in Toronto to participate in one of their weekly events. Orienteering is a competitive sport that involves running a pre-set course and locating flagged control points using a topographical map on which physical features such as streams, earth banks, trees, and other characteristics of the terrain are marked. The route I took with the Toronto Orienteering Club led me off regular park trails, through a hydro corridor, an archery range and up a high brush covered river- bank. Using a map and compass as I ran, it took navigational skill and physical fitness to find each control point and finish the course before the point person went home.

The half-dozen or so orienteers, still standing around when I eventually finished the course, reflected a unique combination of nerdiness and athleticism. Wearing outdoor clothing that was practically shredded from running through the brush, they discussed upcoming orienteering events, the idiosyncratic tendencies of specific route designers and the technical details of various maps with the fervor, speed and precision that one might associate with a group of scientists running a half marathon through the woods with only a cryptic map to guide them. Most of them wore running shoes with ankle gai-

2 ters, the equivalent of pocket-protectors for outdoor enthusiasts. I made a mental note to pick up a pair.

Their style, as well as the nature of the event itself, reflects the evolution of ori- enteering. Invented as a technique for military land-navigation training during the late 19th century and adapted into a sport in Scandinavia during the 1920s and 1930s, it has evolved into a recreational activity for outdoorsy, cerebral people. It made its way to the United States during the 1940s3 and to Canada in the 1960s, leading to the formation of and the Canadian National Orienteering Team. The sport requires the careful study and memorization of a complex variety of symbols in order to negotiate rugged landscapes with speed and precision. Making the maps involves taking an exist- ing base map, thoroughly walking the area, and then using that information to create a much more detailed map that uses International Orienteering Federation specifications to indicate not just what features to expect, but their location, dimensions, and other details such as whether a tree is evergreen or deciduous, whether a hollow is shallow or deep, or a field is overgrown. Each orienteering course reflects the style and vision of the course planner, who can make the route especially challenging by including features that are hard to locate and map symbols that are difficult to interpret.

Orienteering involves the embodied translation of symbolic representation onto real space, enabling us to orient ourselves within the spaces around us. In turn, it maps the landscape onto our imaginations so that our physical surroundings shape who we are and how we think. We become absorbed by the landscape by moving through it – not merely “reading” space – but mapping it onto our minds, so that it shapes our thoughts, memories and the structure of our cognition. And, as we increasingly inhabit spaces that are entirely representational or virtual, that we enter without our bodies, questions about corporeal movement, or lack thereof, shape the relationship between space and thought, and take on renewed importance. It invokes us to consider not just how we orient our- selves within space, but how space orients us, and to what end?

In our day-to-day lives, orientation is largely structured from outside of us by spac- es designed to move us to certain destinations, by maps that ensure we don’t get lost, by what objects and others ask of us, by scripts that we follow. There is little room for renegotiation or subversion, and in highly structured or familiar environments, orientation is rarely conscious. In art galleries, for instance, movement is structured so that we have access to particular spaces within the museum and not others, we are presented with didactic panels that place the artwork within a sanctioned history, the exhibition follows a

3 certain narrative, and more often than not we exit through the gift shop, where we might be induced to purchase something to remember our visit.

To put it in different terms, we are “oriented” in relation to specific systems of social reproduction, knowledge production and forms of economic exchange. How to go about getting lost, however, is difficult when we’re constantly being told where we are, who we are, and what we should want. Unpacking the language of orientation in Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed writes that we fall “in line,” or we might collectively choose to go in a particular “direction.” But we also “turn,” choosing one direction over another. And “depending on which way one turns,” she writes, “different worlds might even come into view….” Further, “…moving in this way again and again, the surfaces of bodies in turn acquire their shape.”4 Orientation is spatial and embodied, externalized and internalized, describing both how we inhabit space and how space inhabits us, the two woven togeth- er in dynamic exchange.

The sport of orienteering provides a specific method for engaging our surround- ings. One has a map that indicates where certain features exist in the landscape, and the positions of controls that one must locate in order to complete a predetermined course. It’s a system for reading and navigating space that Jickling has imposed on an unex- pected context – the collections and sites of art museums – involving orienteering club members in exploring their institutional spaces, as well as the representational or figu- rative spaces of artworks themselves. In her 2009 project, Portland Orienteering Museum, at the Portland Art Museum in Portland Oregon, Jickling had members of the Columbia River Orienteering Club set up an orienteering course in the museum, creating a map and organizing events where museum-goers searched out landmarks and other topographi- cal features within two and three-dimensional artworks.

Using a similar strategy as part of her 2012 project with orienteers, Featured Features at the Rauma Art Museum in Finland, she set up an orienteering course in and around the museum. The course often presented interpretive jokes: a symbol that simultaneous- ly referred to a bridge in a painting and to the actual bridge which happened to exist just outside the museum, or using the symbol for a copse of trees to designate a commercial display of light fixtures installed on the outside of a building.

These projects use the methods of orienteering to enable an examination of our orientation within art institutions, and more profoundly, to practice new ways of occupy- ing and relating to the spaces and objects around us. In Featured Features, Jickling takes an existing script, consisting of the maps, symbols, and activities of a competitive orien-

4 Hannah Jickling, Portland Orienteering Museum, 2010. Photo by Motoya Nakamura, courte- sy of Portland Art Museum, Oregon.

teering event, and uses it to structure participants’ engagement with the museum’s col- lections, a form of transcontextualization, where actions are carried across disciplinary realms or social sectors to destabilize existing meanings or to produce new ones.5 Mov- ing through the museum, the viewer consciously decodes the landscapes it contains – they must look for topographical features that are often buried in metaphor, or more closely at artworks, and imagine themselves inhabiting their landscapes in quite different ways. They must think of how they move through them and around them, and how they move through the space of the museum itself. The orienteering map serves as a score for choreographing visitors’ movement, and cumulatively, the event combines these two distinct disciplinary realms, bringing the viewer’s body back into the scene of the artwork.

In these earlier projects in Portland and Rauma, Jickling created courses with orienteers that remapped how visitors move through the museum. More recently, in , she involved members of the Yukon Orienteering Association, as well as local artists and curators, in a series of mini lectures and demonstrations where they looked at exhibition practices and orienteering side by side. Members also held beginner clinics for artists who wanted to learn about orienteering. Jickling then invited indi- viduals from the Yukon Orienteering Association to take on a curatorial role, selecting works from the Yukon Arts Centre and Yukon Permanent Art Collections, which include numerous works that depict landscapes of the Canadian North. The orienteers chose fourteen pieces, which were placed in the gallery alongside a brief text from each per-

5 Hannah Jickling, Mole Knoll and Noble Boulder (A black triangle. Moles as knolls. Other topo- tattoos and a noble boulder extracted as an embroidered badge from ‘Sea- scape,’ a painting by Berndt Lindholm, late 19th cent.), 2012. Produced as part of Featured Features with support from RaumArs A-i-R and the Rauma Art Mu- seum, Finland.

son, describing what attracted them to the artwork they selected. In each text the writer imagines themselves moving through the landscape the work depicts, and how this feels, starkly contrasting how an art historian or critic might discuss the formal aspects of the artwork, the biography of the artist, or relevant aesthetic movements or histories. One orienteer, Kerstin Burnett, describing a drawing by former Yukon artist Ingrid Kaldor, wrote: “When I look at the work I find myself immediately choosing the best line through the trees and the bushier shrubs just behind them….” Katherine Sheepway, respond- ing to a watercolor by Jackie Ziehe wrote “My legs feel heavy thinking about running through the sand and I start to feel hot from the sun beating down on the bare earth around me.” Similarly, some orienteers described a feeling of being lost when they look at certain artworks, or a state of disorientation, in one instance caused by the image being a reflection, that they needed to overcome in order to regain their bearings.

In these accounts, the orienteers describe how they are physically affected by the artworks, and how they experience a sense of contiguity with the landscapes the art- works represent, as they imagine themselves moving through them. Using orienteering to navigate the collection, they become absorbed by the artworks and the spaces they represent, an experience that corresponds to an account described by the French sociol- ogist and philosopher, Roger Caillois, in a discussion of what he called “reciprocal topog- raphy” where the individual is possessed and displaced by space. In his essay, “Mimesis and Legendary Psychoanaesthesia,” published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure during

6 the 1930s, he discusses a scene from Gustave Flaubert’s 1874 play, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, where the hermit is overcome by a desire to become absorbed by the

Jackie Ziehe, Car- cross Dunes, 1986. Image courtesy of Paul Gowdie and the Yukon Permanent Art Collection.

space and physical matter around him. Flaubert writes that in this state “plants are now no longer distinguished from animals.... Insects identical with rose petals adorn a bush.... And then plants are confused with stones. Rocks look like brains, stalactites like breasts, veins of iron like tapestries adorned with figures.”6 While this account of what is known as psychoanaesthesia reveals how our experience of space and the objects around us are projections of consciousness, it also suggests how the collapse of a familiar system for ordering our surroundings can create a sense of spatial disorientation that allows for an opening up of the unconscious.

In this context, orienteering is a method for interpreting artworks as well as for sensitizing ourselves to an experience of physical contiguity with the spaces around us. As a curatorial strategy it opens up a different way of encountering artworks and the institutional spaces they inhabit. But the artworks also do something to the orienteers when they’re enlisted in this way. By making the artists themselves strange and inad- vertent mapmakers, Jickling’s interventions introduce new ways of representing spaces and objects to the orienteers, interpretive challenges which risk making them lose their bearings. They enable a playful sense of disorientation, at a time when it has become all but impossible, and also serve to reorient visitors and curators alike to landscapes, both represented and real.

7 Hannah Jickling, detail from Featured Features, White- horse, Yukon, 2013.

Members of the Yukon Orienteering Association view works from the Yukon Permanent Art Collection in the storage vault at the Yukon Arts Centre. Photo courtesy of Katie Newman and the Yukon Arts Cen- tre Gallery.

Sources

1. Hannah Jickling and Valerie Salez’s collabo- 4. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, rative project, I’d Rather Be Snow Shoveling, was Objects, Others (Durham and London: Duke UP, developed documented and exhibited from 2003– 2006), pp. 15-16. 2010. 5. This strategy of “transcontextualization” is 2. The Canoedio was a floating studio, in a canoe, described in Shannon Jackson, Social Works: during a 6-day trip down the Yukon River with Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York and Helen Reed, Eric and Stephanie Steen and Bob London: Routledge, 2011). p. 93. Jickling. 6. Roger Caillois and John Shepley, “Mimicry and 3. Bridget Wynia-Machacek, Orienteering in North Legendary Psychoanthesia” in October Vol. 31 America: A Geographic Perspective, MA Thesis, (Winter, 1984), p. 31. California State University, Fullerton, Department of Geography, 2005.

8 Amish Morrell is Editor of C Magazine, a quar- Hannah Jickling is an artist who experiments with terly journal on contemporary international art the possibilities of form, participation and mean- and teaches in the Criticism & Curatorial Prac- ing-making across disciplines and publics. She tice Program at OCAD University. He curated the grew up in Whitehorse and learned to orienteer exhibition “Doing Your Own Thing: Back-to-the- with the Yukon Orienteering Association. She has Land in Eastern Canada During the 1970s” at the collaborated on projects with the Columbia River Cape Breton University Art Gallery in the summer Orienteering Club in Portland, Oregon (2009, 2010) of 2014 and the public art project by Mammalian and Rasti-Lukko, the orienteering club in Rauma, Diving Reflex, “Nightwalks with Teenagers” in Finland (2012). 2012. He also curated “The Frontier is Here” in 2009, at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts in Inverness , where Jickling’s Rose City Garnish was presented.

Online catalogue for Featured Features, a project by Hannah Jickling hosted at the Yukon Arts Centre Gallery, August–September 2013. www.artandorienteering.com

Co-presented by:

© 2014 Hannah Jickling, Amish Morrell, the Yukon Arts Centre Public Art Gallery and the Yukon Permanent Art Collection. All rights reserved.

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