Tom Thomson, The West Wind, 1916–1917. Oil on canvas. Art Gallery of Ontario. Gift of the Canadian Club of Toronto, 1926.
This focused installation positions Tom Thomson's The West Wind (1916-17), along with its oil-on-panel sketch and one of Thomson's earliest major canvases, in a wider social and historical context of Algonquin Park.
The setting is Algonquin Park; the subject is the lone jack pine. For many, the park embodies a “pure” and “untouched” ideal of wilderness, but even in Thomson's time, its landscape had been dramatically reshaped by colonialism, industry and wildlife management. The re-emergence of species and the growing presence of wildlife in suburban and urban areas are challenging contemporary understandings of nature and the wild. The roadkill remains of a fawn represented in Michael Belmore's Breadth reflect this profound encounter between human and animal. The installation's artwork are complemented by a selection of contextual photographs.