How the first person to go over Niagara Falls and survive has become a lost feminist folk hero

On October 24, 1901, the day of her 63rd birthday, Annie Edson Taylor was rowed out to an island about a kilometre upriver from the Horseshoe Falls, where she entered her barrel. Its lid was screwed on tight, oxygen was added to the vessel with a bike pump and she was cast off toward the brink. 

The wood cask tossed and turned through the rapids, then paused, before the world beneath its brave rider briefly disappeared as she made the awful 50-metre plunge into the foam below. When the boatmen in the lower river pulled Taylor from the barrel semi-conscious, bleeding from the head — but alive — she was declared the first person ever to go over Niagara Falls and survive.

Today, Annie's name and likeness appear all over the famous tourist town, but her story, beyond the superlative "first to survive," has been lost somewhat to the mist of time. In a new exhibition at the Grimsby Public Art Gallery called To play a daredevil's advocate, Niagara-based video and performance artist Jordyn Stewart revives Taylor's amazing — but ultimately tragic — tale, recontextualizing the maverick stuntwoman as feminist folk hero who never quite got the recognition she deserves.

Taylor was a school teacher and dance instructor from Upstate New York, who was widowed at a young age and travelled widely to find work. Long before she made her trip over the Falls and into history, she'd been plotting for a payout that would secure her finances into old age. When she heard the 1901 world's fair in Buffalo, N.Y., would bring huge crowds to the nearby natural wonder — which had become a magnet for showmen and thrill-seekers looking to challenge the mighty Niagara — she thought she'd found her opportunity. Some had already braved the river rapids or walked a tightrope across the gorge, but none had attempted the most perilous feat and gone right over the top. So that's what she would do. 

In an experimental documentary film that's both the exhibition's title work and its conceptual backbone, Stewart recounts this story, as well as the deeper history of daredevils at Niagara Falls. With a whiskey barrel for her tabletop, the artist flips through a souvenir photo album filled with historical images, developing themes around man's desire to challenge nature, what bravery looks like and Taylor as an impoverished victor.  

"Even though Annie was the first person to survive going over the Falls," Stewart says in the film, "she wasn't the hero that the world wanted at the time, and it was her male counterparts that received more recognition."

On a large wall near the show's entrance, Stewart has gathered a dozen portrayals of Niagara Falls made from a wide range of media over the last 200 years that she's borrowed from area museums. Some show its sublime power, its mystical aura or its dominion over the landscape, while others capture the encroaching human presence, whether as burgeoning industry along the river or colourful tourist ponchos polka-dotting the scene. Selecting these artworks, Stewart noticed that not only were all the depictions of Niagara by male artists, but that the collections they came from were overwhelmingly male, too. As a professional artist who knows how hard it is to get her work into such a collection, she observed how the very same forces that diminished Taylor's efforts persist still today across many fields, including her own. 

"Women have to go to great heights for recognition," Stewart says. "Annie literally had to throw herself off a waterfall and that still wasn't enough."

After Taylor's record-setting act, she tried to profit from photo ops, public lectures and memorabilia sales. She'd hired a manager, which she calls her "great mistake," because he hired a young woman to impersonate her on publicity tours and absconded with her famous barrel (Taylor spending much of her savings in attempts to retrieve it). The daredevil later published a slim memoir about her stunt, which she sold from a souvenir stand near the Falls. Despite all her bravery, her brazen efforts and considerable gumption, Taylor died penniless at the age of 82.

In a short video, titled Honouring the heroine of the Falls, Stewart's camera hovers over the precipice of the thundering waterfall. Then, the artist's arm appears quickly in frame, throwing a blue rose into the water, which is swept over the edge, and out of view, by the powerful current. The artist's statement tells us: "Blue roses often symbolize aspiration and admiration in addition to mystery and the unattainable as they do not naturally occur." These flowers, the statement continues, are dyed by florists — they're a trick, a deception. The artist's gesture is a loving tribute that also acknowledges the horrible ways Taylor was defrauded. 

A third and final video, which Stewart calls "a quiet piece," features a Niagara Falls souvenir snow globe — its flakes in perpetual motion because all the shaking has been edited out. Stewart noticed that no matter how hard or how long you shake a snow globe, its glitter settles in about 20 seconds. Imagine, then, all the work it would require to keep it suspended? It's a meditation, she says, on the human folly in our attempts to control and conquer nature — a theme prevalent throughout her practice.

With the legend of Annie all around, however, the video gains another dimension. Just like the snow globe's gusting glitter, it takes much agitation and effort to keep a story from settling to the bottom, going dormant and becoming lost. But because of Stewart's good turn here, the tale of Annie Edson Taylor gleams once again on the surface.

Jordyn Stewart's To play a daredevil's advocate is on view at the Grimsby Public Art Gallery through April 13.