The Unsettled Subject: Territory and Ambivalence in the post-Photoconceptual Landscape

This thesis mobilizes a psychoanalytically-informed conception of landscape photography to inform a close semiotic reading of contemporary landscape photographic works produced in the years immediately surrounding the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics by three British Columbia-based artists. These works, termed “post-photoconceptual,” serve to destabilize the spectatorial positions and mechanisms of subjectification delineated by historical forms of landscape associated with the imperial visual regimes European modernity and the settling of Canada, in turn provoking reflection on the unstable or “unsettled” territorial status of British Columbia’s post-imperial state. As they apprehend “unresolved ambivalence” as a formal operation of landscape photography, the works of this study take as a starting place the task of bringing into visibility the role of representation in failing to rectify the internal contradictions of place and belonging of the landscape photograph, in turn suspending spectatorial possibilities for visual, territorial, and psychic mastery