Margaret’s Mountain

Margaret’s Mountain is a stop-motion video animation made with articulated cutout drawings. The imagery brings together mountain and forest landscapes, domestic interior spaces, and the log cabin of Yukon poet, Robert Service. The four female characters are loosely based on Elisabeth Belliveau’s grandmothers who incidentally, were mostly all named Margaret. Other characters include Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, both iconic poets/musicians of the 1970s, and various animals. The sound-scape weaves a collection of field recordings, remixed folk music, and poetic broken narrative spoken in English by a woman with a French accent. The spoken text is assembled from fragments of Belliveau’s writing that primarily centre on themes of biography, representations of women’s live, poetry, and romantic love. In the suspended world of Margaret’s Mountain a cast of disparate characters congregate to conjure memories of love, longing, and loss. Here, imagery and text bend towards the ineffable, the poetic, and the surreal. The animation is haunted by romantic heroes employed throughout the animation as ‘messengers and promises’. The Margarets inhabit this space as timeless figures sounding out their hearts.

This exhibition presents a 13:06 minute video looping and 4 larger shadow boxes with the cutouts of the characters used to make the video, as well as 3 small shadowboxes with the embroideries used in the title introduction of the video.

Curated by Todd Schaber.

Margaret’s Mountain is made possible by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the TREX program.