Table Land (1995)
The installation Table Land originates in the landscape of Gros Morne National Park. The Tablelands and the geological formations at Green Point are of great significance to the geological history of the earth's continental plate tectonics. On the surface of the Tablelands is rock from the upper mantle of the earth called peridotite. The mountains of peridotite were deposited on the west coast of Newfoundland during the formation of the North American Continent. Once the floor of the ancient Iapatus Ocean, the Tablelands are slowly eroding and flowing back to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
Everything flows; nothing remains.
Heraclitus
The exhibition Table Land utilizes the panoramic traditions of photography instrumental to 19th-century photographic surveys of North America. The relationship of memory and time which exists in the photograph is set in contrast to the geological phenomena of deep-time and the processes of stratification and sedimentation. From this perspective, the site is viewed as a temporal landscape from a variety of physical and metaphorical vantage points.
"From this moment forward all my writings are fish hooks:
perhaps I know how to fish as well as anyone?
If nothing was caught, I am not to blame.
There were no fish."
Friedrich Nietzsche.
Robert Bean @2020