Five B.C. Artists Respond to the Pandemic with Wit and Perseverance

A less restrictive lockdown, but social isolation remains a challenge.

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Thankfully, the pandemic hasn’t been as restrictive in British Columbia as in some other provinces and public galleries have been open, under strict conditions, since last summer. Nevertheless, social isolation remains a primary concern as artists start to reconnect with the public and each other. Some are seeking out company through collectives, some are turning inward to rethink their art, and others are documenting the weird and the unusual. But, through it all, British Columbia artists are responding to the crisis with perseverance.

Scott August

Vancouver-based artist Scott August can’t explain why he takes a humorous approach to issues of the day. Or why he loves wordplay. Take for instance, his 2009 installation, If I Had a Rocket Lawnchair, a take-off on the Bruce Cockburn song If I Had a Rocket Launcher. It consists of a smoke machine, found objects and, of course, a lawn chair. “So many people make such serious stuff, but I like keeping it on the funner side,” says August, originally from B.C.'s Okanagan Valley. No surprise then that the inspiration for his latest piece came when he took out the garbage one morning and found the sidewalk covered in pandemic litter. He rushed back inside, grabbed his camera and trained it on some gloves that had been discarded on the street. Using branches and twigs to change their position – “I didn’t want to touch them,” he says – he created a tableau that he christened The Summer of Gloves and proudly displayed on Instagram. August’s next COVID-inspired project is an installation called The Destroyed Broom, a reworking of Jeff Wall’s 1978 classic, The Destroyed Room. But in August's version, a broom is sweeping away some of the room’s clutter – metaphorically preparing society for life after COVID-19. It's a hopeful piece, he says, with an amusing title.

Lori Goldberg

Vancouver artist Lori Goldberg struggled at first with pandemic isolation after she returned from a Mexican residency last spring. She had planned a busy summer travelling and preparing for exhibitions – until COVID-19 put those plans on hold. Then something strange happened. “For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t have the drive to go anywhere," she says. "I didn’t have to do anything.” Goldberg found herself in a peaceful place with a gentleness she wanted to pursue. She took up meditation, temporarily abandoned her studio and began paying more attention to what was going on around her. The birds outside the kitchen window captured her attention. “I wanted to paint something commonplace and not so complicated,” she says. She also thought it would motivate a return to her studio. The original plan was to paint birds for the month of January and then move on, but the response to her Instagram postings kept her going. She has done 28 bird paintings to date, 20 of which were included in a recent group show. Goldberg says she's happy to be bringing joy to people through her art. And, yes, she has since returned to the studio, where she is tackling large canvases while listening to recordings of her favourite bird songs. 

lessLIE

Coast Salish artist Leslie Sam, who exhibits under his "decolonized artist's name" of lessLIE, says it’s absolutely vital to document the pandemic from an Indigenous point of view. “For Indigenous communities, the potential for loss is both mortal and cultural,” he says, lamenting the heavy toll the disease has taken on his community. Currently working on a Master's degree in interdisciplinary studies through the University of Victoria, he is hyper-cautious, living within his household bubble and using nature "to centre my soul.” Anxious to avoid stereotypes, he blends ancestral symbols and a modern graphic aesthetic in his art. Three of his pieces are on display at the Nanaimo Art Gallery, not far from his home in Nanoose Bay on Vancouver Island. For instance, The Bubble, a series of concentric circles, is based on the spindle whorl, a Coast Salish icon. “Overall, I wanted to evoke a feeling of difficulty breathing,” he says. Hence, the circles are incomplete. With Covid Night, he takes a more hopeful stance. The tension between two shades of black evokes light emerging at the end of a tunnel, while the man in the moon (an ancestral face subtly embedded in the circle) is meant to reflect nature’s beauty. 

Audrey McKinnon

In Northern B.C., Audrey McKinnon thinks big – as in huge brushes and large cans of house paint from the hardware store, her medium of choice for her recent show, I Miss Your Faces, at the Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George, B.C. Zoom calls and texting don’t quite cut it for McKinnon, who created six canvas portraits with “extensions” – symbols and images painted directly onto the gallery wall. Think of the framed canvas as what we see on a Zoom call and the painted extension as what we’re missing – things like expressions, body language and context. Thus, McKinnon’s portrait of her Mexican cousin Dina, Women and girls are being violently killed at an alarming rate in Mexico and those are just the ones we know about, shows her surrounded by marigolds. Considered a flower of the dead, they help viewers understand that Dina is concerned about sexism and toxic masculinity. “That extension speaks to what we’re missing in our current safe modes of communication,” says McKinnon, who started painting at 16, eventually juggling motherhood and a successful career in communications. After the show closed on March 14, her canvases were taken down and the extensions were painted over. But that’s okay, says McKinnon, who sees impermanence as part of life during the pandemic. “It’s unfortunate that we don’t get to stand in a room and connect for real," she says. "But this was the best I could do right now.”

Joanne Hewko

Victoria multidisciplinary artist Joanne Hewko says she retreated to the refuge of her studio when the pandemic struck. She was busy, but isolated. “You begin to pare away what’s important and what’s not important,” she says. “One thing that is important is community.” Hewko belongs to two artist collectives in Victoria, where a dearth of studio space and other challenges has prompted many artists to join forces. Last year, Hewko and five colleagues created postcards and mailed them to each other to amend or, if they wished, start anew. The group, started as a way to connect with other artists and keep the creative juices flowing, eventually grew to more than 60 people. Lately, Hewko has been working on two paintings for an April group show, Not Going to Buenos Aires, organized by another Victoria collective. Nobody’s going anywhere soon, it seems, least of all to Buenos Aires. But Hewko's series, Garden of Dreams, lets her imagine a place that's warmer and lusher than Victoria. It has allowed her to take a break from winter, if only in her mind, and she says that has boosted her social, emotional and creative well-being. ■  

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