Caught in the Vortex

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Douglas Coupland works on “Vortex” at the Vancouver Aquarium. (Photo courtesy of Ocean Wise)

The Vancouver Aquarium is not a place you’d expect to find work by one of Canada’s leading contemporary artists. But Douglas Coupland’s latest exhibition, Vortex, his response to a huge floating island of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean, will probably be seen by more people amid the fish tanks than in the pristine confines of an art gallery.

The show, which includes masses of plastic waste salvaged along the West Coast, is centred around a junk-filled water installation modelled on the Pacific Trash Vortex, also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Coupland, who was shocked to see a mounting tide of garbage on the Haida Gwaii beaches he has visited for 20 years, says he thought about the project for a decade before reaching out to the aquarium.

“I realized it’s probably not going happen in a museum,” he says. "They’re not really set up to do it. I literally cold-called the aquarium about 14 months ago, and they said: ‘We could do that here.’”

The focal point of Vortex is a battered day-fishing boat from Japan, which disappeared during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and turned up on the shores of Haida Gwaii in 2017. The boat is trapped in a watery trash vortex, along with its motley crew – models of Andy Warhol and a woman in a life preserver, along with two bobble-headed children.

The work, says Coupland, has conceptual links to Théodore Géricault’s potent critique two centuries ago, The Raft of the Medusa, as well as Bill Reid’s Spirit of Haida Gwaii, the bronze statue with a profound message about ecological interdependence that was featured on Canadian $20 bills issued between 2004 and 2012.

The exhibition, which opened May 18 and runs for a year, also features four other displays. There’s a colourful Lego reef inhabited by fish – red zebra cichlids and golden mbuna cichlids. The Lego was part of Coupland’s 2013 solo exhibition, Anywhere is Everywhere is Anything is Everything, at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

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Douglas Coupland with a Lego installation that's part of his exhibition, "Vortex," at the Vancouver Aquarium. (Photo courtesy of Ocean Wise)

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A fish swims past Douglas Coupland's Lego installation, part of his exhibition, "Vortex," at the Vancouver Aquarium. (Photo courtesy of Ocean Wise)

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As well, two other displays of marine debris encourage reflection on the troubled state of the world’s oceans. In one, transparent single-use plastic water bottles mix with blue blubber jellies in salt water. The other holds fancy guppies, who swim amidst plastic refuse in fresh water. The show's other major element is a large wall installation that displays shelves of marine debris holding everything from toothbrushes to tennis balls.

Coupland, also a best-selling novelist, hopes his imaginative interpretation will elicit a visceral reaction that encourages change. And perhaps, with all the budding young scientists who visit the aquarium, even solutions.

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Wall installation at Douglas Coupland's exhibition, "Vortex," at the Vancouver Aquarium. (Photo courtesy of Ocean Wise)

Daina Augaitis, a former curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, says Coupland’s installation “dramatizes a historic moment when a looming disaster can probably still be averted, but certainly not in the presence of today’s political and corporate regimes that refuse to accept the immense impact of this growing plastic vortex.

“Only massive efforts by scientists who are developing plastic-eating bacteria, by corporations who must change their economic and material models, by consumers who need to make different choices, and by governments who must coordinate concerted action, will our oceans be saved.”

More than 80 per cent of plastic waste in the ocean comes from sources on land, according to John Nightingale, the president of Ocean Wise, a non-profit environmental group that launched the Plastic Wise initiative to help tackle the problem. The group helped organize Coupland's exhibition.

“We live in a disposable world and it’s having a grave impact on our ocean,” says Nightingale. “Every day we use and throw away plastic cups, straws, bags, bottles and other single-use items.”

Coupland, who recalls picking up an oil-smeared duck as a student when his class helped clean up a small spill, is hopeful.

“I’m just old enough to remember when people littered,” says Coupland. “But almost overnight, littering stopped. It’s a hard thing to believe but it happened because millions of forces around the world coalesced.

“If I can be part of this process with marine plastics, then great. Environmental art is not what I thought I’d be doing with my life at the age of 56, but I think a lifetime spent beside the Pacific inevitably had to assert its presence from my subconscious out into the conscious world.” ■