The Other End of the Rainbow

From October 2017 to September 2019, I made five journeys to the region around Highway 16 in Northern British Columbia, Canada. This infamous stretch of highway is known as the Highway of Tears due to the inordinate number of women and girls, most of them are of First Nations descent, who have gone missing or been murdered along its length. This totals over 40 cases since 1969. The artist book, The Other End of The Rainbow presents my subjective photographic experience as that of an anonymous traveller in the region and is combined with three distinct texts throughout. The first presents those facts - names, dates, places, etc - readily available from online media and other sources concerning the disappearances and murders. The second text is comprised of various excerpts from a journal I kept while on the road. These are dotted throughout the book at different places and are variously mundane or anecdotal. What strikes me with hindsight is the sense that, as a lone female traveller, I was a potential victim myself. The third textual voice is made up of excerpts of recorded conversations with local people who I met throughout the region and all of whom had direct connections with the tragic events of the highway. Often these encounters were the products of chance, which highlighted the pervasiveness of the highway’s violence. There is a raw, cathartic quality to these testimonies, as if, by agreeing to be interviewed, these people would purge themselves of an unenviable burden. As a Canadian artist who normally specializes in the creation of fictional worlds, I felt it was important to focus on a present-day situation of an often-ignored national tragedy with deep roots in colonialization, racism and misogyny. I wanted to render a subjective and artistic interpretation of my journeys to the region to highlight an outsider’s experience of such a complex place. The banality of the sites I photographed both hides and hints at the presence of sinister events. These fragments capture unintentional details and imbue the places with a sense of disquiet. Their mundane qualities are magnified through the highway’s dark past, adding a sense of dread to the otherwise indifferent landscape.