THE ENDURANCE | Text by Tricia Wasney | 2009

I'm sitting by the river where a pair of geese and their goslings paddle and forage. Beside me tulips are blooming where only five weeks ago the river had spilled its edges and covered the now recently emerged vegetation. Although still high, the river has receded to almost its normal level. Two weeks ago the shore of Lake Winnipeg was littered with huge slabs of ice, the final spring push of the great body of water. People of this city are accustomed to the drama of water. We live on a floodplain but fight continuously to keep the water at bay. This year the spectacle was heightened as ice jams threatened to cause flooding that could have been the worst the city had experienced in over fifty years. Emergency crews using Amphibex ice breakers worked furiously to mitigate the danger. Now, all is calm.

Collin Zipp's new installation, "The Endurance", uses footage of breaking ice moving on a lake projected onto shards of drywall nestled into the corner of the gallery. On an adjacent wall are two monitors that hold the story of a ship sailed by Sir Ernest Shackleton on the 1914 Trans-Antarctic Expedition and crushed and sunk by ice in 1915. Zipp has reformulated the text so that one never gets the full story; he has removed references to people, place, times, and dates, and placed separate excerpts of the tale on each monitor. What the viewer experiences, with the looping and disjointed text and the moving images from three projectors on a ragged surface, is an evocation of the story and, more compellingly, a mysterious meditation on human interaction with the forces of nature and with each other.

The landscape has often figured prominently in Zipp's video works where footage would be recorded to disks that the artist would then burn, scratch and otherwise alter. What resulted was a beautiful moving painting, characterized by muted colours, pixellation and digital drop out. In digital collages exhibited recently at Semai Gallery, Zipp deconstructed found images of the landscape, tearing and reconfiguring otherwise recognizable worlds. The landscape was in there somewhere, but at a remove that we as viewers had to work at to understand. It is changed by him and by us just as many of the seemingly "natural" landscapes we inhabit are altered by our actions and even just by our presence.

At the Living Prairie Museum, where Zipp was Artist-in-Residence in 2006-07, he shot video of the prairie's flora and fauna in different seasons. Again the footage was altered, giving an impressionistic and dream-like perspective. In that work, entitled lost_landscape, Zipp created a great number of separate videos, without text or sound, and installed them in a permanent display where viewers can interact with the video imagery through a touch screen. The story plays out in a distinctly non-linear way; one never knows where they will end up, and actually, there is no end as the images glide and move in unexpected yet connected ways. With forty-two videos, there is an abundance of choice. Zipp says that the impetus for visitor interaction grew out of a childhood fascination with the Choose Your Own Adventure storybooks where the reader becomes part of the story, taking on the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character's actions in response to the plot and its outcome.

In a recent exhibition at ace art, Zipp presented "Archive", a piece that reflected on the effects of communication technologies "specifically wireless signals" on animals and insects. Zipp used the installation form more thoroughly here "the videos were a small part of a larger work that included wrapped bee hives, photographs, a taxidermy bird, jars of honey, bound objects and a series of small sculptures resembling cell phone towers. The items were displayed in grid-like wooden structures, on cantilevered tables and on floating walls. Although representing the lively world of these creatures, the elements were still, bound, silent; videos being the only animated part of the work. Experimenting with the form of installation art and with the tradition of museological displays, Zipp created a layered work that held clues about human impact on other species and on our propensity to collect and categorize, order and separate.

In "The Endurance" Zipp brings together deconstructed images, elements of museological presentation and text but has simplified the installation, ultimately giving the work a greater degree of power and poignancy. Although the projected images of ice are less physically altered than in past works, their inscrutability derives from the projection itself. Three projectors mash unconnected but similar images together on a screen that is two-sided, as a result of the corner presentation, and three dimensional. The experience is of a scene both calm and disjointed, recognizable yet impossible.

The found text presented on the two wall monitors was modified by Zipp but retains the drama of the sea story: "She finally sank bow first; the last ship of her kind." With references to Shackleton's expedition removed, the story becomes a more elusive and universal one exploring, as Zipp suggests, "the haunting beauty of failure and consequence." The imagination of the viewer fills in the blanks, much like in Zipp's childhood adventure stories. The compelling thing becomes not the ship's specific story but how one may bring their own experience to bear.

These recent works by Zipp bring to mind the work of American artist Mark Dion who uses the devices of the scientific world to make his art. In one project he dredged a Venetian canal with a crew of hired assistants using the methods of a bona fide archaeological dig. Every item retrieved was cleaned, catalogued and displayed in curiosity cabinets and each item, new and old, valuable or not, was given the same rank. The act of retrieval was the main point, not a particular discovery. Like Dion, Zipp places humans and the evidence of their activity squarely in the natural realm while at the same time recognizing that nature is a construct that is constantly being reshaped and reinterpreted.

Human experience is embedded in the landscape in subtle and in obvious ways, caused both by intentional change and unknown actions. The landscape becomes a place that we not only physically alter through our actions but where we project our own wishes and desires. With "The Endurance", Collin Zipp has made this concept manifest.

Tricia Wasney manages the public art program at the Winnipeg Arts Council. She has a background in art, film and landscape architecture.