Melissa Magnuson

For several years I’ve been visiting Trail, a small smelter town in British Columbia, Canada and to Red Mountain, the ski resort a short distance up the road. The two places sit a few miles apart and live in completely different economies – one built on heavy industry and a century of metalwork, the other on tourism, recreation, and the landscape itself. The contrast isn’t subtle, and yet the two communities are closely entwined. People move between them. Histories overlap. The mountain holds both.

 

The project began with the smelter — with the people who built their lives around it, the progressive social ideals that shaped the town in its early years, and the environmental questions that the industry has left behind. Working as a participant observer, utilising photographs and video of the community and its inhabitants as they hold onto the industrial landscape as heritage, while also living with what it has cost.

 

I’m an outsider here, and I keep returning. The work is interested in how a place shaped by different economies – industry and leisure, extraction and recreation – find a way to be one place. Or collide.