“There wasn’t much napping,” says Kym Greeley, as she makes us espressos as we begin our interview. She has just returned from driving across Canada, from Vancouver to St. John’s, via the Trans-Canada Highway. Greeley shared the mileage with her sister, Joann.

When her sister was driving, Greeley took photographs using a dashboard-mounted tripod, which was constructed to capture the driver’s perspective through the windshield. Then, when it was Greeley’s turn to drive, she asked her sister to press the shutter upon her request.“You were kind of forced to always pay attention to what you were looking at and what you were seeing, which was really fun,” says Greeley.

This attention is central to Greeley’s work. She is a landscape painter who observes the ways we interact with nature every day, and reflects this complexity back to the viewer. At the centre of her work is a relationship to Newfoundland and Labrador, which is continuously evolving.

Physical and visual access to the landscape changed significantly in 1966 when the Newfoundland portion of the Trans-Canada highway was completed, spanning 900 kilometres between St. John’s and Channel-Port aux Basques. Previously, the most accessible way to travel was by boat, but road access created an entirely new set of sightlines and approaches to some remote communities, carved through the wilderness.

While representations of this place can linger in a bucolic aesthetic calibrated for sale in souvenir shops—picturesque harbours, windswept cliffs and impossibly bright jellybean houses—Greeley’s paintings offer another view.

Greeley uses the car windshield as a frame, and the highway as a major compositional element in her paintings. Objects often cropped out of tourism brochures, such as road signs, guardrails and lane markings, become significant features. The aesthetic of the highway is reflected in her refined style. Like the graphics used on highway signs, each element is clear and readable. Layered together, however; they create intricate compositions and complex, open-ended narratives

Common Occurrences, Greeley’s most recent exhibition at Christina Parker Gallery, was created during a long winter. In Be Real, a reflective speed bump sign is illuminated against dark woods. There is a sharp curve in the road and snow on the shoulders. While you are reminded of the fragility of human bodies, and the destructive power of speeding cars, the hazards here seem to extend further than road safety.

Sometimes her colours are an exercise in subtlety, where a flat expanse of water meets a pale expanse of sky. Drama happens in bright white snow drifting across dark rock, or ice piled up along the shoreline. Sometimes I Feel Too Much is a stomach-fluttering vista where the ground seems to drop straight down to the North Atlantic just below the bottom of the frame. It’s the kind of image that only seems possible in winter. There is the ever-present danger of slipping, but also the delicious solitude of travel after tourist season.

Common Occurrences also focuses on another site of human intersection with the landscape – the lookout point. It Doesn’t Mean Anything at All features a rectangular sign, in silhouette at the centre of the frame, in front of a vast bay, punctuated by a pale strip of land at the horizon. There is no text visible, yet its presence indicates some interpretation, or mediation of this landscape was deemed necessary.

Greeley describes lookouts as places “that the community has designated as their optimum viewpoints.” Located conveniently off the highway, these locations present an idealized, camera-ready view of the landscape that never includes the road itself. “Most people when they get to these lookouts, don’t even exit their vehicle,” says Greeley. “They just feel satisfied by taking a picture out the windshield or out the side, and then Instagramming it or Facebooking it, to prove that they’ve visited that place. It is enough interaction for them.”

But lookouts also serve a practical purpose for those living and working in rural areas.

“The lookouts are the highest points, so those places are where you have cell service and so a lot of people travel to the spaces from their cabins, or just stop to check their phone,” says Greeley.

“We’re guilty of it, too. We go up the big hill to watch the sunset and check our emails, take a few snaps and drive back down to put the kids to bed.”

This visual mediation between human and landscape provides another framework for Greeley.

“I’m kind of interested in the technological connection through another object. The fixed compositional frame mimicking the compositional frame of your phone or your iPad, and what you’re looking at through that.”

Greeley’s frames take in more than most. They foreground interpretive panels, retain walls, view platforms and handrails. Her work illustrates more markers of human presence and human perspective on the landscape. It is these markers that remind us of our own subject position within the places we inhabit.

Greeley describes herself as “somebody whose most comfortable language is image.” She has developed a distinct vocabulary of form, texture and colour that she employs with precision, like an iconography for this place. But hers is also a poetic sensibility—using formal structure and exacting detail to explode layers of connection and meaning.

What does art have to do with the price of fish? The answer is not obvious to those who have never depended on a fishing economy. The collapse of the cod fishing industry in the `90’s was disastrous to the inhabitants of Fogo Island, Newfoundland, causing need for a new vision of prosperity. In response to this need, social entrepreneur Zita Cobb has developed Shorefast, an organization which oversees a cluster of social businesses and charitable organizations on the island.

On November 12, 2018 Art Speaks hosted a public talk at Concordia University featuring Cobb. Cobb, who formerly worked in finance, moved back to her home of Fogo Island in the early 2000s. Along with her brothers Anthony and Alan, she set out to apply her professional skills in a place where inhabitants work from the principles of social and ecological logic rather than the logic of money. Cobb’s presentation focused on the ways in which she has envisioned and implemented programing that centers art as a means of developing lasting prosperity for the people of Fogo Island.

Her methodology, although globally networked, is deeply committed to a geographical and embodied conception of community, “where people understand that they have a shared fate.” She opened the talk by saying: “Every time I say Fogo Island, I expect that you’re going to fill in the name of a community that means something to you. And if you don’t have one, I highly recommend that you get one because community is a kind of lens through which we can see hope.”

Poignantly, she stated that humanity is experiencing a “crisis of belonging,” generated by the privileging of financial value over intrinsic value. The answer to this dilemma, according to Cobb, is through art.

Cobb explained that the relationship between art and economic renewal on Fogo Island began when Colin Low traveled there in the mid-sixties to make a series for videos for the National Film Board. When Low arrived, his novel perspective sparked constructive dialogue with the locals. These exchanges prompted the fishers to build larger boats to access mid-shore fishing, which eventually lead to the creation of the cooperative business, Fogo Island Co-operative Society Limited. The ability for art to facilitate creative problem-solving is foundational to Cobb’s current work in asset-based community development.

Unlike standard economic development, Cobb illustrates an arts-and community-centered approach can only move at the “speed of human trust,” which means that it presents unique barriers. When Cobb and her brothers pitched their proposal to the provincial and federal governments for funding assistance, they heard back that the idea was “not normal, practical, reasonable, or rational.” Cobb said that this was the moment that concretized her faith in Shorefast, which was formed in 2006 and has been an overwhelming success since.

To date, Shorefast oversees several social businesses which are Fogo Island Inn, Fogo Island Shop, and Fogo Island Fish. These revenue-generating businesses have been developed to work in concert with Shorefast’s other programing. They have a practice of “economic nutrition labelling,” inspired by nutrition labeling on food. These labels are a breakdown of revenue distribution, illustrating how money is circulated locally and invested in further development via Shorefast’s nine charitable organizations. Notably, one of these organizations is Fogo Island Arts which includes an artist residency program and exhibition venue located in Fogo Island Inn. All the work overseen by Shorefast, such as Todd Saunders’ architectural designs of the Fogo Island Arts studios and Fogo Island Inn, is incredibly responsive to the traditions of local craft and vernacular building. These initiatives are fully integrated into the social fabric of Fogo Island.

Artists in residence live amongst the community, engaging deeply with the local experiential, tacit, and oral knowledges, in a mutually beneficial exchange of ideas and skills. Similarly, Fogo Island Shop offers the opportunity for local craftspeople to create and sell their work in collaboration with designers, which included furnishing and decorating the entirety of Fogo Island Inn. What is learned through “the Fogo process” is shared internationally through Fogo Island Dialogues, a series of international conferences and publications that reflect on the happenings of Fogo Island Arts.

Although Cobb’s vision for the reinvigoration of Fogo Island is profoundly local, the lessons that can be gleaned from her approach can be implemented in other contexts. Through this method, leaders must remain focused on shared values and goals, remembering “the most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing.” It is with this deep awareness for one’s priorities and place that one may successfully serve their community through art. In closing, Cobb remarked, “the only place that can’t be saved is the place that no one loves.”