The camera shows only what it sees, but it can uncover dreams if you know how to use it. Meryl McMaster did not come into her own as a fine-art photographer until her daydreams began to shape the self-portraits on view this year in a national touring exhibition, two other solo shows and several group exhibitions in Canada and abroad.
The 29-year-old from Ottawa appears in her own photos in imaginative disguises, her face sometimes painted or speckled, her clothing festooned with feathers, her head concealed in a bird mask or topped with a fantastical nest-like orb. She poses alone and on the land, often at the edge of water in a wintry scene.
"When I look at the images, I see myself, but in another world," she said, during an interview in Montreal after the opening of her latest solo show, at Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain. "They're a different person, though they're me and related to my feelings and thoughts."
McMaster has been interested in photography ever since she was given a toy camera as a girl, but couldn't fully relate to the straightforward photo technique she learned at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. A sculpture course helped her see that she could tell more personal stories by bringing hand-made objects into her photography.
In 2010, the year of her graduation, she made a black-and-white image of herself standing near a snowy shore on Toronto Island, her body wrapped in a tarp, her bare feet lashed to bunches of twigs. That portrait, which appears in her current Montreal show, was a turning point.
McMaster's iconography and feeling for the land owe much to her Indigenous background: Her father is Gerald McMaster, a former Art Gallery of Ontario curator who spent his boyhood on a Plains Cree reserve near Saskatoon. But her current work is also linked to two month-long treks she made as a teenager with Outward Bound Canada, and particularly to a couple of brief solo adventures – in the deep woods, with a map but no phone or GPS.
"I was in charge of myself," she said, "and I think that influenced the aesthetic of these solitary figures in the landscape."
She acknowledges the influence of Cindy Sherman and Frida Kahlo, who also pictured transformations of their own bodies, as well as of Indigenous artists such as Rebecca Belmore and Nadia Myre.
There's a mythic quality to McMaster's images, but they also show the burden of history, sometimes literally. In one photograph, she faces the camera with rows of heavy bound books arrayed on her outstretched arms. It's as though her body were a library for the many wounding words and statutes written about Indigenous peoples since before Confederation.
Aphoristic Currents, 2013.
Meryl McMaster
A portrait made near Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta shows her in a coat appliqued with footprints of the nearly extinct prairie chicken. Her feathered top hat alludes to the European fashion that decimated beaver stocks in the New World. She plans to make portraits in other places of historic or familial significance, including locations important to her European-Canadian forebears.
"I'm still not completely comfortable in front of the camera, performing," she said. "But for me right now, it's important for me to be the subject, in a sense, of these photographs, while I tell the stories I want to tell."