I Hope Today Was Worthwhile and the Weather Was Pleasant/Tracking Joyce Wieland in the Tar Sands

Kirsty Robertson presents an illustrated lecture inspired by the discovery of letters Joyce Wieland wrote to Petro Canada in the early 1980s about a new body of work she planned to develop. From incomplete archival evidence documenting a planned trip to the Alberta tar sands, Robertson presents her attempts to find the resulting paintings as she imagines Wieland’s visit to Alberta and how she might have approached the site given her feminism, politics and concerns with the environment. Weaving a narrative that documents the project, Robertson offers the chance to imagine Wieland’s practice from the space of active potential, transporting the illusive paintings into the current ecological and political realities of 21stcentury extraction practices.