Portfolio
About the artist
Biography
I was born and raised in the Northern Rocky Mountains of Montana. This land until the 1940's was a benign paradise providing a diverse range of plants and animals, including man. By the end of WWII, mining and timber interests, with the blessing of federal and state lawmakers, began systematic cutting and digging. Whole watersheds were divided and framed in checkerboard square sections. Propaganda tells us that roads, strip mines and stripped mountainsides are halleujah signs, signifying economic growth and an ever-expanding standard of living. Consumption. Gary Snyder puts it this way:" We live in an addict's dream of affluence, comfort, eternal progress, using the great achievements of science to produce software and swill. True affluence is not needing anything. We have found the Holy Grail and it is the bottom line." In 1969 the filmmaker Michael Snow set a robotic camera deep within the North Ontario landscape for five days and five nights. Unattended, the camera scanned and recorded a people-less land. Michael hoped the film would become a kind of absolute recorder of a piece of wilderness... a record of the last wilderness on earth, a film to be taken into outer space as a souvenir of what nature once was.
Michael says, "I want to convey a feeling of absolute aloneness, a kind of good-bye to earth which I believe we are living through... it will preserve what will increasingly become an extreme rarity: wilderness. Perhaps aloneness will also become a rarity."
The majority of my paintings (the Nova Totem Landscapes) express my anger and heartbreak at the despoiliation of the land.
Michael Cadieux