This artistic research project is a speculative account that reflects on the artist-as-witness to the de-enchantments and re-enchantments of a feral terrain in post-industrial Montreal, Canada. Taking advantage of the confluence of this research and a renewal in the city's interest in the site, called the Falaise Saint-Jacques, the project calls into question the stark binaries that the idea of a separate "nature" implies. It builds on the work of art educators and academics who have resisted the siloing of art, focusing on the merging of public policy and place histories into an environmental art project. Content provided by implicated community members, the author's own experience, and scholarly and archival research coalesce into mythologies, articulated through visual arts. Artworks, used in this way, act as filters through which the viewer's understanding of geological scale may be shaped, translating the stories of millennia into decades, years, or moments. Finally, following from Indigenous Canadian knowledge, this research aims to model how mythologies that foreground connections to the land may offer a literal framework for seeing and relating to urban forms of nature. A field guide and zoetrope installations function as an analogue augmented reality machine that superimposes geological and mythological time onto the immediate present, literally and figuratively animating the landscape for the viewer, and creating a space for a mythological contact that introduces different, even opposing, conceptions of time to one another.
Keywords: Research creation, Anthropocene, deep time, urban nature, environmental art, mythology, zoetrope, fieldwor
