Abitation
Abitation
Yvonne Lammerich and Ian Carr-Harris
This project arose from my discovery of Samuel de Champlain’s drawing of his Abitation, the fur trading for he founded in 1608, in a historical 1908 pamphlet celebrating the 1608 founding of Quebec (the fort represents the first enduring European building in Canada, and is considered the founding date of New France, and of French Canada). I was fascinated by the perspectival qualities of the drawing. A strange fusion of Cartography and projective representation. This led soon after to finding a copy of C.W. Jeffries’ drawing for Ontario school textbooks of the same fort, extrapolated as a ‘normal’ conventional illustration, an image that Ian Carr-Harris remembered not only studying at school but also making a cardboard model of for class. This initiated a comparative possibility. Given a subsequent invitation to me to mount an exhibition at the Trianon Gallery, I invited Ian Carr-Harris to join the project with his C.W. Jeffries’ version of the fort.
The Abitation project is an exploration of three-dimensional form in two images of the fort Champlain built at Quebec in 1608, and the different approaches to three-dimensional imaging between Champlain’s original cartographical-like drawing of his fort, (Yvonne Lammerich) and the drawing by C.W. Jeffries (Ian Carr-Harris) extrapolated from it for use in Ontario’s grade school history books of the 1940’s. For this project, real three-dimensional models were prepared to further extrapolate the spatial qualities of the image.
– excerpt from Yvonne Lammerich
To read more about the show follow the link here
To watch an interview with Ian Carr-Harris click here