Mark Ruwedel | Along the Shores of Departed Lakes

Exhibition Dates: April 12 - May 31, 1997  

Opening Reception: April 12, 2 – 5 pm

Mark Ruwedel was born in 1954 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He moved to Montreal in the early 1980s to do an MFA at Concordia University where he is currently a professor of photography.

This exhibition will focus on his poetic records from the ongoing epic entitled The Ice Age, which is an exploration of ancient trails and related site, such as rock alignment and caves once occupied by prehistoric peoples. The sites date back thousands of years, suggesting the passage and occupancy by people long before the arrival of Europeans to North America.

Ruwedel says about his work: “I am interested in revealing the narratives contained within the landscape and am most attracted to places where the land reveals itself as being both an agent of historical processes and a field of human endeavor. My photographs depict sites where the geological record overlaps or collides with contemporary evidence our culture’s actions upon the land.” He has “recorded the collision between the mythical vision of an untrammeled perfect Nature and the human use of the and”.

Mark Ruwedel’s works are in many collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Maison Europeenne de la photographie in Paris and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, to name a few.