Canadian artist duo Daniel Young & Christian Giroux are recognized internationally for their work critical­ly exploring the built environment. Moving away from domestic and urban settings, their recent proj­ect, Infrastructure Canada (2010– 2012), ventures into the vast and often remote geographies of the Canadian landscape. Traveling from the Yukon to Labrador and southern Ontario to Nunavut over a three-month period, Young & Gir­oux have captured on super-35mm film one hundred physical forms built into rock, soil and water. Ex­hibited in random sequence across three video channels, these imag­es represent a broad cross-section of structures that have facilitated access to the environment while also shaping Canada’s national expansion and federalist ambition.

Young & Giroux’s project reshapes the common interpretations and aesthetics of a “natural landscape” by revealing an alternative repre­sentation of landscape through the depiction of infrastructure, a concern that is at the heart of the Ground/works project. The work reflects on issues of land use, sov­ereignty and jurisdiction over the country’s land-mass through an aesthetically-minded contempla­tion of the often under-considered yet substantial forms that mark it: the expansive system of roads, bridges, ports, dams, and energy corridors that have accompanied Canada’s modernization and pro­vided the foundation for its econo­my and society.

For Ground/works, Young & Giroux’s video installa­tion was installed in the CCT Parking garage, a site that connects the infrastructure of the campus with exterior transportation systems and Canada’s national transit infra­structure, a system that Young & Giroux examine throughout their work.

Infrastructure Canada was com­missioned by Oakville Galleries with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Media Arts Commissioning Program. cura­tors7 is grateful for the loan of Infrastructure Canada, which is borrowed from the collection of Oakville Galleries.