ERASE ME | F. LESLIE THOMPSON
22.01.2005 | 06.03.2005

The images in Erase Me were made along the southwestern Saskatchewan-Montana border, in lands that include Grasslands National Park. This terrain is one of the last remaining examples of the central North American plains. F. Leslie Thompson’s series of large panoramic photographs give us a sense of an ever-changing prairie, its illusionary emptiness coming to life with the changing light. Thompson is sensitive to natural processes that through time alter the view of the landscape: the seasons, the wind, the weather and the light. 

She comments: 

In this space, I sensed no boundaries between myself and the wind and the grasses. The concept of duality, separating me from the environment, seemed to blow away. My camera was part of me. Thus, at dawn and dusk, with the vantage point of a coyote, I stared into the horizon and sniffed the air.

The absence of colour, the dark tones of the earth in some of the images, and the tension-ridden clouds in others, show a nature that does not reveal all for the eyes to see. The dark, black-and-white photographs mark and mask the violent human and natural history — the blood and sweat of native Indians and settlers, as well as nature’s own history — the prairie’s coming into being through millennia of erosion by wind, ice and water.

Len Gasparini writes:

We measure distances short and long with time — a ten-minute walk, a four-hour drive — but on the prairie, time is subordinate to space. There are no landmarks — buildings, trees — with which to measure distances. Between the flat landscape and the unending sky there is nothing but the line of the horizon which remains always the same distance ahead…

Born in Regina, F. Leslie Thompson currently maintains a studio in Toronto. She holds an MFA from the University of Illinois and an Honours BA in visual arts from York University. She has been a resident artist at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Fotofies — the Scottish international Photography Festival. Her work has been exhibited widely in Canada, the USA and Japan.