Walking and No Walking, Alberta 2000

medium: 40 azo dye (Cibachrome) colour photographs.
dimensions: each 9½ inches high x 14 inches wide (24 x 36 cm), hung in two grids, one on each side of a corner.
installed dimensions of each grid: 76 inches high (from floor to top of frames) x 79 inches wide (193 cm high x 201 cm wide).

Walking and No Walking, Alberta 2000 is one of the works I completed during a decade of photographing found public signs. As a visitor to Alberta, travelling north by car from Edmonton to the Northwest Territories, I was interested in the different signs that constrained my access to the land itself. I found that the places where I could stop to walk were often rigorously regulated. It seemed paradoxical that the most open, expansive terrain with the most inviting vistas often had signs posted that prohibited me from walking there, such as POSITIVELY NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY, and KEEP OUT. Consequently, much of my walking took place in more secluded, often wooded, terrain. (And it turned out that the further north I travelled, i.e. from the USA, there were fewer and fewer regulatory signs.) I like what Thomas A. Clark wrote in his In Praise of Walking (Cairn Gallery, Nailsworth, UK, 1988), "There are things we will never see, unless we walk to them."

Marlene Creates, 2013