Mark Lewis

Algonquin Park, Early March

Mark Lewis

The sublime, seductive landscape in Algonquin Park, Early March 2002 takes shape through a slow zooming out of the camera, starting with a monochromatic white screen (in fact a pure projection of light) and only revealing the full picture at the end. Location, subject, and especially the viewer’s position (a cliff high above a lake), evoke the effects of C. D. Friedrich’s Romantic painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818. The sequence of revelations moves from the pure abstraction of the film’s beginning to the actual scenery and culminates in the final scene of a group of skaters on a small, distant oblong of ice. Even as the movement of the skaters disrupts the contemplation of the motionless landscape, their position off-center reminds us of the background in Pieter Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow, 1565.