Ian Forbes in the Fringe Gallery

by Gilbert A. Bouchard

    Artist and teacher Ian Forbes is fascinated with the complicated and often disconnected relationship new arrivals to the Peace River region have with the area’s history and culture.

    A relative newcomer to the region himself – the longtime Edmontonian moved to Grand Prairie a few years back to teach visual arts at Grand Prairie Regional College – Forbes decided to explore the tension between history and fantasy in a multimedia show called “Morbid Anatomy.” The installation project, currently on display at the Fringe Gallery, documents the life of an epic (and fictional) Grand Prairie poet called W.T. Morris.

    “I have this feeling that half the people living in Grand Prairie wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for their (resource-sector) jobs. They really aren’t connecting with the city past the ugly, big box stores and the new developments, and you sometimes get this sense that there is no history at all here,” says Forbes, 39.

    “I have to say that I have a real love-hate relationship with the city.”

To comment on that disconnect, Forbes decided to specifically create a cross-media project that would be totally centered on the Peace Country and its cultural history, but would do so in a total fictional manner.

    “I found these photos in a pawn shop on main street and decided to base the work around them. One in particular (a World War I-era photo of a grim-visaged man standing in a typically northern Alberta field) really moved me and became the center point of the work,” he says, adding that all the component physical pieces of the show are recycled artifacts recovered from the Peace River region.

    Springing forth from that initial found image arose the personage and poetry of the newly-minted Morris. Forbes would ultimately go as far as to outline a major, three-volume work (“Ophelia or Cantos Ophelia”) for the made-up poet and create an elaborate website – http://homepage.mac.com/bolundin/morbid.htm – documenting the poet’s fantasy history and his equally fictional “discovery” by Forbes. (The artist has created elaborate fictional set-ups for other exhibits including “The Drowned Queen's Gambit”.)

    Forbes was also inspired by a rather morbid if not haunting image of a drowned girl (partially based on Hamlet’s Ophelia) rising from a farmer’s field, an image which he worked into his fictional poet’s oeuvre.

    “The website came first and was intended to help fully embody this character I was inventing as well as supporting the imagery I was seeing. As for the Ophelia reference, I didn’t want to have the image of the drowned girl become too real and make the piece too sad, so I decided to connect it up with Hamlet to give it some distance.”

    Adding the Shakespearean angle allowed Forbes to not only skirt sentimentality, but to also focus in directly on the larger theme of the interconnection between truth and fiction.

    “I’m looking ultimately about how fiction makes truth more palatable and how important storytelling is for all of us as human beings. People live in their stories.”

In a way, Forbes sees the show as a way for him to invent his very own trail-blazing artistic predecessor.

    On another level, the fictional nature of the poet Morris and the idea of creating a false biography speaks to the long list of partially (or completely) fictionalized Canadian autobiographers that Canada seems to love producing. Seminal fake biographers include: Gray Owl, Frederick Grove and John Glassco (the latter being directly cited in Forbes website as a contemporary to Morris).

used with permission