Louise Abbott is a longtime writer, photographer, and filmmaker. She is the author of three books: The Coast Way, The French Shore, and A Country So Wild and Grand. She has directed several films, including, most recently, Crisscrossing Space and Time.

Abbott’s photographs have appeared in more than thirty photo anthologies, including Hivers; Regards du Québec; Montréal au XXe siècle; Treasures of the National Archives of Canada; and Children in Photography–150 Years. Her work has also been exhibited in Canada, Mexico, and Europe, and it is represented in the National Archives of Canada, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the McCord Museum, and other public collections.

Abbott has received arts awards from the Canada Council, the Quebec Ministry of Cultural Affairs (now CALQ), the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, and other private foundations. In 2002 she won the Norman Kucharsky Award for Cultural and Artistic Journalism given by PWAC (the Professional Writers Association of Canada) and the Greg Clark Internship Award given by the Canadian Journalism Foundation.

Niels Jensen is an award-winning furniture designer and cabinet maker as well an award-winning photographer. In recent years, he has begun to collaborate with Louise Abbott on photographic projects. He and Abbott are based in the Eastern Townships but travel frequently on assignment, often on their Honda motorcycle. As a husband-and-wife team, they have produced photo-essays for newspapers like The (Montreal) Gazette and magazines like Heritage. In 2006 they held a joint exhibition at Galerie Arts Sutton entitled “A Working Landscape.” In 2007 they received a grant from the Townshippers’ Research and Cultural Foundation for work on The Heart of the Farm, a book about the Eastern Townships that is scheduled for publication by Price-Patterson Inc. of Montreal in 2008.

As part of the “Art and the Automobile” art show, Abbott and Jensen will exhibit a photo-essay entitled “Horsepower.” They will also assist Jesse Alexander in animating roundtable discussions during the photo rally.

In the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth century, horses played a crucial role throughout North America: they transported passengers and cargo, rolled the roads in snowy weather, skidded logs, powered threshing machines, and pulled ploughs, hay rakes, and other farm equipment. By the 1960s, however, with the ascendancy of automotive power, the number of horses had plummeted.

In recent years, there has been a remarkable resurgence of interest in horses and a boom in the equine population in rural areas like the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Most horses are now kept for riding or simply as pets.
But some farmers continue to use them for work in the fields or in the woods.

In their exhibition “Horsepower,” Louise Abbott and Niels Jensen will present photographs of horses and the people who ride them, train them, shoe them, doctor them, work with them, or simply delight in their presence.