Jeanne Randolph

Winnipeg’s vacant parking lots gain visual presence during the pandemic.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has made it so that parking lots are suddenly on display. What went unnoticed in our daily lives before the pandemic is now apparent. Whether or not we choose to focus attention on these now-visible aspects of life is up to us as individuals, but Winnipeg artist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jeanne Randolph heeds the call. 

Inspired by a moment of being visually struck by the presence of a vacant parking lot in Winnipeg, Parking Lot Pandemic, on view until Oct. 2 at Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto, comprises 27 digital photographs of Winnipeg’s Exchange District, printed and displayed in plastic sleeves.

This newest body of Randolph's work provides a sustained reflection on the parking lot as infrastructure and symbol, as psychoanalytic object of study, and as philosophical fodder for understanding the present moment. Like her previous body of work, Prairie Modernist Noir, displayed at Paul Petro in 2020, Randolph used her iPhone camera to take these photographs. A flaneur of sorts, she strolled the prairie city, now riddled by the pandemic and stay-at-home measures: Manitoba was hit particularly hard by COVID-19, and authorities have been proactive with strict measures to flatten the curve. 

As one might expect, parking lots in business, entertainment and tourist districts were, and remain, virtually empty. Those able to work from home and self-isolate continue to do so. Randolph, in the writing that accompanies the photographs, observes: “But there never had been time or energy to flatten and smooth these wilderness surfaces, especially ones that will be hidden under car bodies when everything is normal again.” This statement reads like a fantasy in Randolph’s conceptual storybook – the return to a “normal” that resembles the “before,” when parking lots of office towers teem with workers back to the grind in nestled cubicles. Yet humming below the surface of these images are many tensions in our zeitgeist: the future of work and automation, climate change, ecological erosion and the Anthropocene – the latter describing our current epoch, in which no part of Earth is untouched by humans. 

The parking lot becomes a symbol for the myth of the tabula rasa or blank slate: far from untouched, it bears the traces of cars, trucks, buses, the many “bodies” that have moved over its surface and have left contaminating traces. Through the lens of Randolph, the storyteller, we can see the parking lot as a canvas that is splattered – or better yet, soaked, in the manner of modernists like Helen Frankenthaler – with oil, gasoline and other “waste.” I wonder if oil spilled on pavement becomes more interesting over time, like oil paint? Or is it like acrylic paint, which might crack, without retaining shades the same way? 

In Prairie Modernist Noir, Randolph was a detective, self-placed in an anachronistic noir film. In Parking Lot Pandemic, she is a witness. As with the disappearing telephone booths of Prairie Modernist Noir, which took on anthropomorphized pathos in her capable hands, the parking lots also take on character aspects. 

They are flat, unspeaking, non-human entities, that become like beings: I feel for their plight, existing for no purpose other than to hold something – vehicles – which they no longer have purpose to hold. How can they live with themselves, now? Especially after years of being seen as the antithesis to beauty and life? As Saskatoon-born songstress Joni Mitchell croons, “They paved paradise, and put in a parking lot.” ■  

Jeanne Randolph: Parking Lot Pandemic at Paul Petro Contemporary in Toronto from Sept. 3 to Oct. 2, 2021.

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