Deanna Bowen’s interdisciplinary installation derives its name and overarching narrative from the National Film Board of Canada’s 1952 film adaptation of Gweneth Lloyd’s seminal ballet Shadow on the Prairie: A Canadian Ballet. Commissioned and performed by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet Company in 1952, the dance tells the story of Canada’s western settlement by means of a tragic tale of a once hopeful woman’s desperate struggle with the harsh landscape. Isolated by a long bleak winter, the young bride’s dreams of a new life with her pioneer husband fade away as she descends into a madness that leads to death.

 Finding affinities between Lloyd’s portrayal of the challenges of pioneer life and her own family narrative, Bowen’s Shadow on the Prairie re-imagines the young bride’s life by delving into the history of her great uncle, whose own life unfolded upon a differently unforgiving terrain. Inspired by the rediscovery of a scrapbook of her great uncle’s that was given to her as a child, Bowen’s work marks the career of the closeted gay actor & nightclub singer who played in all-black revues of Vancouver's supper club circuit in the 1930's through 50's.  Rejected by an over-religious and homophobic family, the fate of Bowen’s uncle echoes Bowen’s own estrangement from her family. These autobiographical details inform her telling of Shadow on the Prairie and allow her to consign her family’s story to the ballet’s tragic heroine and narrative.

 Bowen’s installation is comprised of two single channel videos and floor mounted vinyl text.  The first video, a looped 6 minute, floor to ceiling projection appropriates, animates, and beautifully melds together roadside footage taken en route to her family’s (now abandoned) homestead in Amber Valley, AB with the “Mad Solo” scene from the NFB film, her uncle’s first fan letter, Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s 1911 Order of Council that bans negroes entry into Canada, immigration posters, newspaper clippings, and tarot imagery. These elements are all set into a rich backdrop that evokes a prairie landscape that is visually arresting while simultaneously severe and indifferent.

 The second video containing a looped 10-second clip of an empty sound stage plays across from the larger one on a wall-mounted monitor. Taken from a William Alexander’s 1946 Harlem Hot Shots,[i] the clip highlights actor Charles Keith as he impersonates screen legend Bette Davis. Devoid of characters yet still redolent with shadows and haunted memories of her uncle’s contribution, the projections mark absence as much as they do presence. The final feature of the installation, a 15 ft. x 20 ft. scaled dance notation of the ballet’s final scene – is installed on the floor between the two projections, reiterating the existence of mapped or socially prescribed steps that can involuntarily move one to tragedy.

 There is a tone of solemnity in Bowen’s work that operates on many levels. Initially drawing from Holocaust trauma theory, her work explores the relationship between history, memory, trauma and its intersection with personal testimony, while simultaneously making use of Southern Gothic inspired themes of hauntings, reclusive spinsters, and damsels in distress. Evidence of issues of visibility/invisibility are present in Bowen’s work and can be seen in the incongruous nature of the appearance of documents that simultaneously erase, as if to say, they too have shadow selves (the ominous potential in a fan’s promise “I will be listening,” and Laurier’s shadowy targeting of black immigrants are examples of this). Historical and personal references help re-frame romantic images of Canada’s westward expansion, while narrative layering of the fictive young woman and the artist’s uncle highlight disparate but similar sites of spiritual struggle. The work makes reference to the challenges of Canada as new homeland by calling up a notion that an ill-defined though ever present shadow has been cast on the prairie.

 Natalie Wood