Jonathan Van Elslander
Winnipeg, Manitoba
ARTIST BIO
Though Jonathan Van Elslander will always call Winnipeg home, he currently lives in British Columbia where he works as an ecologist. His research focuses on how organisms’ behaviour, bodies, and lives are shaped by their habitat at both the macro and microscale, while his day job teaches him the advantage of the connection and knowledge that can only be gained through mundane,repetitive visits to the same location over time. His writing and photography, which have been featured in The Tyee, Fire Season, Torment Mag, and The Snowboarder’s Journal, gain insight from that same practice and focus on much the same ideas.
PROJECT STATEMENT
Every photo herein was taken within a hundred metres of The River.
There are four named rivers in Winnipeg, none of which are the Winnipeg River, which flows no closer to the city than 70 kilometres to the east. But the rivers within the city limits, ranging from less than twenty metres wide to more than two hundred, snake throughout the city, demarcating neighbourhoods and segregating communities.
Though their names are found on maps and on fading metal signs, to most people in Winnipeg they are simply all “The River.” At the riverfront, the city’s wealthiest buy mansions to tear down and rebuild. Down by the river, the city’s poorest build what homes they can. In their free time, birdwatchers gather at dusk to catch sight of nighthawks swooping over the river while couples sit on blankets to watch the water flow and the evening pass. Children, the fear of rip-currents driven into them, build bike trails and catch frogs on the riverbank. Bodies, caught in the current and lost to the river, well up months or years later.
There is a myth in Winnipeg that everyone is on level terms. A belief that the city stretches out away from the river and over the prairie and its enormous flatness means we all stand eye to eye.
But in almost all of Winnipeg the sun sets upwards. With no relief to be found, the horizon sits too close. When midday’s hard sun fades, all light’s clarity is made milky by the trees and buildings. Only by the river, where the city’s only steep slopes turn to ice in the winter and mud in the spring, is it all laid bare like the cracked summer clay. Only by the river, hidden from view, can all of Winnipeg be seen.
