David Ellingsen – Days of Plenty: An Archive of Abundance

Canadian artist David Ellingsen confronts a century of environmental extraction via pictures initially made to have fun it, with a mission rooted in his circle of relatives historical past

In 1956, the final bear ever seen on Reef Point Farm on Cortes Island, British Columbia was shot and killed by David Ellingsen’s great-grandfather. Ellingsen found this a part of his household historical past whereas photographing the final old-growth stumps on his household’s land; tracing again the felling of those bushes, he found that they too had been destroyed by his great-grandfather. “So photographing and making images in this way is massively personal for me,” he explains.

This rigidity runs via his present Days of Plenty: An Archive of Abundance, on present on the Cowichan Public Art Gallery in Duncan, Vancouver Island, earlier than travelling to the 2026 Backlight Photo Festival in Tampere, Finland. The collection makes use of archival pictures sourced from establishments, on-line auctions and charity outlets to assemble collaged works confronting the historical past of useful resource extraction and trophy searching. And printed in pigment ink on cotton rag, hand-cut and completed with gold edging, the items are as materially thought-about as they’re environmentally pressing.  

Ellingsen was introduced up on Cortes Island, a neighborhood of round 1000 individuals on the sting of the wilderness; his household began logging there again in 1887, however Ellingsen additionally grew up alongside figures equivalent to Rex Weyler, a photographer and early Greenpeace collaborator. His complicated ensuing relationship with the land runs via his creative apply, and specifically on this collection. All of the imagery in it was made by another person, principally between the mid-Nineteenth century and 1970, the 12 months he set as his terminus.