Hi, I'm Mitch Kern, a full-time associate professor, administrator, and advisor at the Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and an artist who engages in open-ended research—to which this site is dedicated. My current work, Wild Suburb, explores the relationship between wilderness and community as a social construct.
Wild Suburb plays with power relationships between humans and animals, and the power of a mask to possess me to do things I wouldn't normally do. It's about trust, working for it, earning it, and not betraying it. It investigates belonging, not necessarily restricted to the human experience. And it is play, in my community, and the natural landscape. It's also a metaphor for my own assimilation and acculturation into Western Canada.
I identify as a bi-coastal, Judeo-Christian, dual citizen. I was born in New York City—but moved to Los Angeles when I was eleven (I've lived in eight US states). I was raised in a Jewish family—but married a Protestant (we're both agnostic). And I spent the first half of my life living in the United States—but am now living the second half in Canada (as a dual citizen).
The seeds of Wild Suburb were planted in 2019 when I used a wild animal in my work for the first time—by literally smashing a deer head onto a mannequin for a pop-up art show. Arming him with a toy rifle and projecting him upside down and backwards inside a camera obscura—I liked the way he shifted the power dynamic between animals and humans, but also the way he represented the other, which felt eerily familiar.
He made a few appearances in my work over the next few years as I began contextualizing him within the southern Alberta landscape. Then in 2023, I decided to embody him. My idea was simple, to invert the common practice of humans photographing wildlife by having wildlife photograph humans—using a camera as a weapon instead of a gun. Months earlier I'd begun constructing my first animal mask choosing the deer as a creature I knew I could be trusted not feared—having worked with him in the past.
On May 8, 2023, immediately following a talk I gave about power relationships in photography at a conference in Lake Louise (appropriately named the Troublemaker's Conference), I walked down to the water's edge, put on the mask, and began making photographs of tourists, who in turn photographed me—and posed for pictures with me. From the conference room facing the lake where I'd delivered my talk my colleagues watched the scene unfold.
The opportunity to perform at the iconic Lake Louise and Victoria Glacier is what galvanized my thinking. The irony and absurdity of placing a camera in the hands of wildlife here. The experience motivated me to go further, as I began staging photographs in my own neighbourhood, knocking on doors, asking for permission to stand in a neighbour’s yard or garden. The mask became a vehicle for creative inquiry and a paradox in its own right in its power to, through concealment, reveal.
Wild Suburb is a portrait of my neighbourhood—its eclectic mix of natural and social ecology in northwest Calgary, southern Alberta, the Bow River Valley, the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and Western Canada—where prairie grasses meet cul-de-sacs, and the mighty Bow River flows past suburban strip malls.
As an immigrant, artist, teacher (and runner), I'm grateful to live and work here, and I'm thankful to the people of Canada, and the traditional stewards of this Blackfoot territory for accepting me. I mention running because it's a practice that connects me to this land.
On my route I pass familiar sites—houses, bus stops, a community centre, an elementary school. I drop down a hill into a park with rolling hills, a creek bed, bike paths, a cemetery. Depending on the season I pass cyclists, golfers, cross-country skiers, jackrabbits, skunks, and coyotes. Birders twice a year, with cameras and binoculars looking at Warblers, Redstarts and Cooper's Hawks. I'm only ten minutes from downtown—but I'm running on the edge of the Canadian Wild.
The use of masks in ritual performance is nearly as old as culture itself, dating back to prehistoric times in virtually every civilization. Early masks have been found in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
The most common theory for ancient masking rituals ties them to spiritual belief. That by masking, one can channel or embody an ancestral spirit—and become possessed by it. Covering the face allows the spirit to enter the body, transforming the masker with ancestral power. Belief in the power makes the transformation complete. There is also a corresponding loss of inhibition, where things one might not normally do, they suddenly have the power to do (1).
In Mask and Masking: A Survey of their Universal Application to Theatre Practice, 1984, Inih Ebong writes, “Masks are profound universal statements on the metaphysical paradox of being and existence.” Quoting the anthropologist Elizabeth Tonkin he states, “…at its most fundamental, the act of masking is an embodied paradox: the wearer has a face and a not-face (2).”
The influential Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman blurred the line between performance and reality by suggesting that everyday social interactions are akin to theatrical performances occurring on a main stage and a back stage. On the main stage, individuals reveal what they want others to see about them, while on the back stage, they keep other parts of themselves hidden. Goffman essentially proposed a theory of self where individuals, motivated primarily by the desire to avoid embarrassment, strive to control impressions others form about them (3).
History is replete with stories of hybrid creatures known as chimera. The original chimera from Greek mythology had a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. Today the word commonly refers to any hybrid creature made up of different animal parts. A horse with wings, cats with eagle heads, or fish with fur.
Jackalope
A jackalope, or jackrabbit with antlers, is a mythical creature of North American folklore. By most accounts, the earliest documented case of a taxidermy jackalope dates back to 1932, when two amateur taxidermists in South Dakota made a hoax mount by smashing two animals together.
In the century that followed, the jackalope became a symbol of western kitsch and Americana found in local bars and roadside attractions across the American West.
According to jacka-lore, jackalope mate only during a lightning storm, their milk is a powerful aphrodisiac (although they’re notoriously difficult to milk), and it’s the only animal that can throw its voice. They say if you’re out camping and you sit by the fire and sing, the voice of the jackalope will harmonize with you (4).
In an American west that has been endlessly objectified, commodified and parodied, the jackalope is a fitting symbol of folk humour. But the mythology dates back further to ancient drawings of horned rabbits from Europe, Africa and Asia, and one described in an early Buddhist text (5).
Three Doors Down
My neighbour to the east has been building an elaborate train set in his basement in the evenings after work. One day he let me smash a tiny deer head onto one of his railroad figures so I could explore his tiny town.
Transformation
On October 20, 2024 I posed for a portrait with the royal family. Shortly afterward I went horseback riding with Richard Prince. Since then I've been searching for a sense of belonging with some of my formative photographic influences.
References
1. Dr. Gwilym Morus-Baird, Celtic Source: Exploring the Myths of the Celtic Nation, Celtic Source Online, 2024
2. Inih A. Ebong, Mask and Masking: A Survey of their Universal Application to Theatre Practice, Nomos, 1984
3. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Doubleday, 1956
4. Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, Penguin Press, 2006
5. Michael P. Branch, On the Trail of the Jackalope, Pegasus Books, 2022