Last Stand
An unusual residency yields art from the old-growth forest blockades.
Kyle Scheurmann, “Lonely Doug – The First Night,” 2021
oil on jute, 24″ x 36″ (courtesy the artist)
The cleverly titled exhibition, Last Stand: Ancient Forests, Collective Action, has as its origins a residency that invited artists to one of the few remaining old-growth forests on southwestern Vancouver Island. Artists were based near Eden Camp, a blockade on unceded Pacheedaht territory in the Port Renfrew area, ground zero over the last year for opponents of provincial policies that have allowed loggers largely unbridled access to precious – and irreplaceable – forest ecosystems.
Dawna Mueller, “Procession for the Fallen,” 2021, pigment print on archival paper, 36" x 24" (courtesy the artist)
The exhibition, at Victoria’s Fortune Gallery until Sept. 4, is remarkable in that it is happening at all. The residency was organized on a shoestring with seed money from a GoFundMe campaign, and artists, who received no fees, slept in their vehicles or in the studio tent, coming and going as their schedules permitted, starting in March and continuing until the RCMP dismantled Eden Camp, along the road that leads to Avatar Grove and Vancouver Island’s most famous tree, Big Lonely Doug.
Heather Kai Smith, “Reciprocity,” 2021
coloured pencil and pastel on paper, 15″ x 20″ (courtesy the artist)
Much credit is due curator Jessie Demers, a Victoria-area arts programmer who is active in forest protection campaigns. Acknowledging that the issues can be complex to navigate and that activism sometimes polarizes people, she organized the residency as a way to encourage dialogue. “Anybody can engage with artwork and have a response to it,” she says. “It can stimulate discussion and questioning and just elicit whole-body, whole-being responses in ways that reading scientific reports or paying attention to politics doesn’t.”
Kyle Scheurmann, “Witness #2,” 2021
oil on linen, 40″ x 30″ (courtesy the artist)
As climate change, which old-growth forests help mitigate, makes itself painfully apparent in unprecedented ways, the urgency to save these magnificent ecosystems is particularly trenchant. The suffocating heat dome last month upped the ante on a hot, dry summer that has seen several hundred wildfires across the province, including one that obliterated Lytton, a village on the east side of the Fraser River. If we hope to avoid widespread ecological collapse, we need, as a species, to find new ways to live in harmony with the rest of nature, and we need, as the recent UN climate change report makes clear, to do so quickly.
Rande Cook, “Grandmother Tree,” 2021
yellow cedar and red cedar, paint and mother-of-pearl, 36″ diameter (courtesy the artist)
Visiting the show – a varied lot of paintings, photographs and sculptural work – prompts me to think about how artists can most fruitfully respond to crimes against nature. I also wonder how artists' material and conceptual choices affect readings of the work. How can something as complex and sensorial as an old-growth forest be represented on a small square of paper or canvas? Must artists use manufactured wood products – like plywood or stretcher bars – the stuff forests are being leveled to provide? Does art’s critical function outweigh such ethical dilemmas? Is it enough to do less harm by protecting the magnificent old-growth forests, when even the most careful amongst us are complicit with an economic order predicated on unsustainable growth?
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Paul Walde, “Tempus Fugit, Arborum Cadunt (after Man Ray),” 2021
wooden metronome set to the rate of trees felled in British Columbia, colour digital photographic print, paper clip, 9″ x 4″ x 4″ (courtesy the artist)
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Paul Walde, “Our History is Your Future,” 2021
wax rubbing of old growth cedar on hemp paper and salvaged cedar slash on wood panel, 36″ x 24″ (courtesy the artist)
A piece featuring a wooden metronome by Paul Walde, a professor at the University of Victoria, catches my eye. Its label indicates it is set to the tempo of trees being felled in British Columbia. Oddly, the metronome’s pendulum, to which a cut-out image of a tree is affixed, is not moving and, as no instructions are provided, I am left to wonder what that rate might be. Still, just thinking about the tick-tick – or would that be tick-tick-tick-tick? – gives me a frisson. Demers tells me later the metronome is set to 125 beats per minute – roughly two trees per second – and instructions are being added for visitors. “For me, my anxiety level just goes up,” she says. “And it feels like my heart races.”
Jeremy Herndl, “Grandmother Tree (Solstice). River Camp 2021,” 2021
oil on canvas, 72″ x 60″ (courtesy the artist)
Victoria artist Jeremy Herndl’s paintings are striking, particularly his largest, Grandmother Tree (Solstice), River Camp 2021, an oil on canvas. Here, scale is at play. The canvas, at six feet in height is roughly human-sized. Yet staring at the thick tree trunk that fills most of its surface plays with my perception. I feel dwarfed.
Valerie Salez, “The Structure of Wood,” 2021
weathered wood, collage (text/images from University of Toronto Press “Canadian Woods: Their Properties and Uses,” 1981), 3″ x 9″ x 29″ (courtesy the artist)
A collage of found imagery on board scraps by Victoria-based Valerie Salez offers different takes on wood, wood products and forest denizens. It has a retro feel, as collage so often does, with its amalgam of woodsy imagery. It has a political element – it’s hard to read a deer slumped in the scoop of a front-end loader any other way – but also whimsy.
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Mike Andrew McLean, “Divide and Conquer. Deferral Area.” 2021
cyanotype on plywood, 16″ x 44″ (courtesy the artist)
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Mike Andrew McLean, “Please, John, Don't Screw This Up For the Rest of Us / Version 3 / The Forest for The Trees,” 2021
digichromatograph and custom-made plywood frame coated with cyanotype chemistry, 24″ x 30″ (courtesy the artist)
The show’s overtly political work includes Mike Andrew McLean’s Divide and Conquer, a plywood cut-out that maps the land where the province has deferred logging for two years. The work is somewhat opaque, but the title refers to old-growth forests outside the boundary that remain under threat. A nearby photo-based piece by McLean is pleasing in its evocation of the filtered light of the forest. Political intent is revealed when you read its title, presumably, directed at Premier John Horgan: Please John, Don't Screw This Up For the Rest of Us / Version 3 / The Forest for the Trees.
Ken Miner, “Big Lonely Doug,” 2021
print on watercolour paper from scan of wet collodion glass negative, 20″ x 24″ (courtesy the artist)
I leave the show feeling a little like Big Lonely Doug, the moody black-and-white image Ken Miner created using the wet collodion process. It shows the tree, left by loggers as the sole sentinel over a clear-cut slope, and made famous by a book of the same name by Harley Rustad, a Toronto-based writer originally from Salt Spring Island. If you have read the book, or B.C. ecologist Suzanne Simard's Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, which explores the deep relationship network in forests, the indecency of this scene is even more potent. Miner's work recalls vintage photographs from the early heyday of colonial expansion, but here within a context of imminent exhaustion. The print’s aqueous aspect evokes both mourning and the dank coastal winter. It feels timeless, and so it is. Human destruction of the natural world is as old as civilization itself. ■
Last Stand: Ancient Forests, Collective Action at Fortune Gallery from Aug. 9 to Sept. 4, 2021. Artists include Jeremy Herndl, Kyle Scheurmann, Mike Andrew McLean, Heather Kai Smith, Connie Michele Morey, Rande Cook, Paul Walde, Valerie Salez, Tony Grove, Ken Miner and Dawna Mueller.
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fortune gallery
537 Fisgard Street, Victoria, British Columbia V8W 1R3
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