Marc Losier

Narratives of Loss

Growing up outside Toronto in the 1980s, my experiences with ‘nature’ were mediated by billboards, magazines, movies and institutions like the Royal Ontario Museum. Like many kids, I was drawn to the ROM’s exhibits of dinosaurs and other fantastical animals. My reference for these animals became the landscape of the museum.  When I moved to Newfoundland in 2016, I learned of nine blue whales that died in the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence two years earlier. Victims of climate change, they had been trapped under sea ice, hunting for food further north than usual, and drowned. Three of those whales washed ashore in Gros Morne National Park, near my new home. The ROM sent a team to recover the bodies for their collection, eventually mounting a blockbuster exhibition of their skeletal remains. Like many natural history museums around the world, the ROM was prioritizing the exhibition of whale skeletons, in much the same way they had focused on dinosaurs in my youth. My proximity to this event felt peculiar. Without the mediation of the museum, I was now living on the other side of this experience economy. Canada imposed a commercial whaling moratorium on Newfoundland in 1972, but the ROM’s collection of the whales still recalls the process of extracting resources for distant marketplaces. After the exhibition, the whales were moved to a storage facility where I photographed them. I lit their massive skeletons with images from Newfoundland using projectors. Magic lanterns and still life canvases illuminated by oil lamps came to mind. And although blue whales do not belong to this place, these images reference their transformation after that point of contact.