The Snow Is Salt - Greg McCarthy

The Snow Is Salt examines the role played by William Notman, a photographer based out of Montreal during Canada’s formative years, in shaping the country’s national identity. In the work, his photographs are cut, duplicated, restaged and redacted to create new images, ones more telling of how Notman’s archive functions in a contemporary context.

When reproduced as digital prints, the tape and other alterations no longer function as additions or subtractions from the image. Integrating with the source material they create a unified surface, one of an image in conflict with itself, a trompe l’oeil waiting to fail. The reworked studio setups and installations become sites displaying their own performativity , their own artifice and their own inability to function as their predecessors once did. The works seek not to denounce Notman’s images or notions of national identity, rather they call for a reappraisal of their functionality today.