Dreams of a Place We Have Lived

Lisa Klapstock’s Dreams of a Place We Have Lived explores the human relationship with Nature through intimate landscape portraits made in an Ontario forest where she has a small log cabin. Over many years, Klapstock became acutely sensitized to this forest eco-system. She began the work reflecting on the ways the natural world is often depicted in contemporary culture — as a decorative backdrop or a digitally enhanced fantasy — and how this ubiquitous representation compounds our alienation from Nature at the same time it is disappearing. Klapstock set out to make portraits in which the details of Nature, often overlooked or invisible in landscape pictures, are the focus of the photographs.

There are two kinds of pictures — unpopulated landscapes, and those inhabited by various solitary female characters. Scenes move between seasons and meteorological conditions in a non-linear way, with the same characters appearing in different settings over time. Standing, sitting, or lying down, their backs to the camera or faces averted, the women are engaged in something not immediately comprehensible. It gradually becomes clear that through their interactive postures and their dress — reflective of patterns, colours and tempers of Nature — the women are seeking communion with Nature.

The characters are Klapstock, both subject and photographer. Alone in the forest, she set out daily with boxes of clothing and wigs, and her photography equipment. She dressed and undressed at each location, choosing outfits to resonate with the environment. We don’t typically dress up for Nature. In Klapstock’s photographs, dressing up is a kind of ritual, and a performative engagement with Nature.

As the natural world is increasingly altered and diminished by human activity, it’s becoming a source of nostalgia — something recalled in a fragmentary way, like a dream. Dreams of a Place We Have Lived is a portrait of a cherished place. It is also an invitation to look, and to consider how we perceive and engage with Nature before it is only a distant memory.