Art and Industry

A show at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff looks at industrial activity through the lens of rivers. Many works offer humour but they are as much exorcisms as interventions.

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If the river ran upwards features installation, video and two-dimensional work by seven artists interested in sites of industrial activity. Inherent in all the work, on view until Aug. 26 at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, is a critique of notions of land value. Because the projects circulate around areas already impacted by industry, they read not as artistic interventions in specific locales but as exorcisms or reclamations.

The layout of the exhibition, the first by acting curator Jacqueline Bell, mimics a river. At its mouth are Carolina Caycedo’s fishing nets. Simultaneously art objects, craft objects, pragmatic tools and a means of livelihood, the nets – which can fulfill their original purpose only if they work with and within the river – are meant to stand in conceptual opposition to dams that stop the river, arrest its course and disrupt and displace life along and within it. In one, Undammed, 2017, the British-born artist of Colombian parents nestles an intrauterine device masquerading as a fishing lure within the netting. The conical net becomes a womb; the river becomes body and mother. The net’s emptiness immediately comes into focus.

Humour and satire run through most of the exhibition, whether the subtly clever or the full-on absurd. Ontario artist Diane Borsato’s Gems and Minerals, 2018, embodies the latter. In this video, museum docents activate the rock and mineral collection of the Royal Ontario Museum using American Sign Language and interpretive movements. As they interweave tales of geological formations with museum lore, their stories darken with the horrors of mining operations and stolen lands. They are acting out the atrocities implicit in the mineral collection, defying the invisibility of these histories within sterile museum displays funded by the energy sector.

Calgary-based artist Alana Bartol combines divining, mysticism and geological testing in her work. Bartol’s massive divining pendulum hangs in the gallery and is also featured in her video reading wild lands. In these latest projects from the artist’s satirical Orphan Well Adoption Agency, a field worker examines soil samples from contaminated sites in Calgary, drawing attention to the oft-ignored overlap of industry and urban settlement. Bartol’s divination process carries echoes of environmental remediation and her work embraces the inchoateness inherent in both divination and remediation. This work plays with the idea that remediation is not only a scientific process and, like divination, is as much about a feeling as it is about seeing concrete proof; in this case, a feeling of safety or confidence in a site’s cleanliness rather than actually being able to determine the presence or absence of toxicity.

The show also includes Genevieve Robertson’s drawings of the Fraser River, heavily industrialized as it moves through Vancouver, and documentation of Argentinian artist Silvina Babich’s journey along the Uruguay River. On Aug. 4, the exhibition’s final work, Soundtrack for the Radical Love of Butterflies by T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss and Anne Riley, will be distributed to gallery visitors in the form of 100 cassette tapes. It responds to Butterfly Garden, a 1999 work by Indigenous artist Mike MacDonald. Located outside the gallery, the garden offers habitat to migrating butterflies. ■

If the river ran upwards is on view at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity from June 16 to Aug. 26, 2018.

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Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity

107 Tunnel Mountain Drive, Banff, Alberta T1L 1H5

1-403-762-6281

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