Dawit L. Petros

The Idea of North aligns landscapes of North America with those of Africa as a basis for an array of objects, all of which are similarly staged in a matrix of intercultural reflexivity, appropriation, citation, and recuperation. The work is anchored on a found photograph of two Tanzanians on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro and Glenn Gouldʼs 40-hour train ride on the Muskog Express from Winnipeg to Churchill, Manitoba in 1967. The project takes multiple forms; a reflecting pool, video installation, photographs, temporary sculptures, and a wall painting and these link my travels to the austere frontiers of northern Canada and western California. By conjoining disparate cultural and geographical places as overlapping, contingent spaces whose features blend into one another, the project unmasks the seeming inauthenticities that divorce an African locality operating as a conceptual generator for aesthetic systems through which North American landscapes can be articulated.