On a well-ridden dirt track, against a backdrop of hand-nailed fence, railing, and open sky, a young woman stands up on the back of a horse galloping. She is wearing an adorned full-body performance jumpsuit, her hands are raised to the sky, her hair is waving in the wind, and despite the motion blur in the photograph, one can make out that she has a smile on her face.
This photograph of Alberta trick rider Mackenzie Jensen is a recreation of an old picture of my mom doing the same stunt—called a hippodrome—near my granny’s family farm in Swanson, Saskatchewan. It’s part of Two Rivers, a body of work in which I recreated dreams and memories across the country.
While making Two Rivers (2020), the body of work this photograph of Alberta trick rider Mackenzie Jensen appears in, I was concerned with recreating the past and dreams in order to hopefully come to some kind of understanding about them. I primarily deployed the visual language of cinema but also used that of documentary to communicate that although most of the photographs are stylized reproductions, their roots are in actual events. Ultimately I drew few conclusions from this exercise but one became dear to me: that the zig-zag of fate is arbitrary and meaningless. Bolstered by research into the slippery nature of memory and dreams, that idea felt liberating—relationship, perspective, style, and poetry can be as important in work that strives toward truth, if not infinitely more so, than fidelity to facts (whatever that might mean or look like). I’m no pioneer, obviously; long ago, filmmaker Werner Herzog named this idea “ecstatic truth.”
Of course, in my photojournalism work, I hew as close to consensus reality as possible (a more difficult task than one might expect, even before the ubiquitousness of A.I.). In the personal work I’ve been making since Two Rivers—thinking on questions about the transformative nature of desire, fluidity of self, and concepts of ‘home’ and ‘away’—I’ve been engaging mostly with ancient and medieval poetry as departure points. But I’m no longer interested in replicating. I’m seeking these resonances that span millennia amid the circumstances I find myself in—on this earth, in this century, using this body.
Explore the other stories–Matt Horseman was born and is based in Winnipeg on Treaty One Territory. His multimedia work blossoms out of questions about desire, relationality, and fate.
