Martha Baillie, Malka Greene, Alan Resnick Erratics

Erratics stages two archives where photography is central to exploring the tensions between memory and fiction in conveying personal stories. These collections reveal the impossibility of fully knowing the past and the effectiveness of literary imagination in grappling with history.

In His Father Over Time, Toronto artist/curator Malka Greene mines a store of materials belonging to the late Dr. Morris Resnick—a World War II reconnaissance photographer who avidly documented his life and times. Similar to an archivist, Greene pieces together this private story, working with Resnick’s son—television writer and satirist Alan Resnick—who explores his relationship with his father through personal texts. Where information lacks or memories fail to fill the gaps, literature takes over.

Toronto author Martha Baillie brings to life her recent book, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel, through a multimedia installation. In Baillie’s hypnotic novel, an archivist seeks the truth about Schlögel’s life through letters, documents, and photographs providing glimpses into his journey from a small German town to the Canadian North and finding himself lost in time. Hundreds of postcards, voice recordings, and a musical composition give material substance to this literary plot that addresses our fraught relationship to the historic past.

Curated by Mona Filip