Christiana Myers

Roadside Attraction

Curatorial Text + Collaborative Support

Presented by Connexion ARC at Gallery on Queen

Fredericton, New Brunswick

Artists: Christina Thomson, Chantal Khoury, Todd Fraser, Alana Morouney, Nathan Cann, KC Wilcox, and Hailey Guzik.

In the 1960s the Trans-Canada Highway spread across the country and through New Brunswick, joining the province’s disparate communities and solidifying connections to populations to the west. Combined with an international rise in travel and the increased popularity and accessibility of photographic mediums like Super 8 and colour film, a way was paved for a new breed of tourism—the road trip. Further lubricated by advances in the auto-industry, moto-tourism accelerated quickly, and both natural and constructed sites like lookout points, kitschy attractions, and natural oddities began to populate promotional maps, brochures, and postcards. This drive, park, and shoot mentality was so apt that it made it to provincial license plates—New Brunswick, the picture province. Twenty years later, as this sun-soaked age of highway rubbernecking waned, it left behind dilapidated attractions, crumbling roadside mascots, and trampled natural sites. And, as the family photographs faded, so too did the provincial moniker—now New Brunswick, the drive-through province. 

The Roadside Attraction exhibition drew attention to the remains of this tourism infrastructure, the visible and invisible impacts it has had on communities and the landscape, and how these impacts continue to manifest in the ways that provincial identity is grappled with under the still-looming shadows of “World’s Largest” sculptures—the laughable, endearing, and sometimes sinister monuments to the heyday of New Brunswick highway travel.