"It’s in the Making," Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Oct. 28, 2016 to Feb. 12, 2017

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Installation view of “It’s in the Making” at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

showing “The Best Laid Plans” by Cedric Bomford, Nathan Bomford and Jim Bomford in foreground and Nicholas Galanin’s “Imaginary Indian” in rear.

It’s easy to walk past this group show – after all, the entry is almost blocked by boards and stacks of lumber. Visitors may be excused for thinking the show is still being installed or the gallery needed urgent repairs. But look a little closer: that lumber is a little too artful, those steps lead nowhere, and few workers would fit under the scaffold passageway. And then, of course, the real giveaway – a couple pieces of art are tucked amidst it all. In fact, this ersatz construction site is also art – an installation titled The Best Laid Plans, built by the Bomford boys – brothers Cedric and Nathan, along with father Jim. Its quick wink is an apt introduction to It’s in the Making at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria until Feb. 12. The show, curated by Haema Sivanesan and Nicole Stanbridge, takes as its subject the way art is made, its materials and processes, a topic that seems newly relevant given the recent trend to “maker” culture in wider society.

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Nicholas Galanin, “Imaginary Indian,” 2016

installation view, Courtesy of the artist, Photo by Cedar Coast Photo

In some ways, the works are an odd assortment. The entry room also holds a piece by Nicholas Galanin, an artist of Tlingit and Aleut ancestry, that seems as much involved with the conceptual as the material. There’s a trompe-l’oeil playfulness in its juxtaposition of a wall covered with a Victorian-looking fruit-and-flower wallpaper and a totem pole, painstakingly painted in the same pattern so pole blends almost seamlessly into wall. Called Imaginary Indian, the piece seems a statement on cultural appropriation, a clever take on histories that have been swept under the wallpaper, so to speak.

The show’s other works are smaller wall pieces mostly in a second room that feels less substantial than the first. Along with the difference of scale, there’s also a gender aspect, as all these works are by women. The most interesting is Angela Teng’s challenge to the traditional boundaries between art and craft, including a stunning piece, Golden Boy, which is crocheted out of acrylic paint. It retains unmistakable craft references, but has the aura of a colour-field painting. More than any piece in the show, it raises the question: “How was this made?” The show is rounded out with quirky found-paper collages by Jess Willa Wheaton and loose process-based abstract paintings by Shelley Penfold that pull the eye toward landscape, without actually delivering it.

Angela Teng, “Golden Boy,” 2015

Jess Willa Wheaton, “Untitled (atoms),” 2015

Shelley Penfold, “The Older You Get, the Harder It Snows,” 2015

A video of short interviews with the artists, who have various connections to the West Coast, stands in for both brochure essay and didactic panel. The video, with its melange of awkward questions and nervous artists, is arguably a process-based work itself. But it leaves unanswered questions, not the open-ended musing-over kind offered by interesting art, but the practical sort, about the artists’ backgrounds, for instance, and the curatorial premise of the entire endeavour.

Without doubt, linkages exist between the works in this show – an interest in bringing together disparate elements, for instance, as well as engagement in studio practices that are playful and intuitive, and, of course, the unmistakable, if diverse, materiality of the work. But art is an elixir made of both material and concept. In this show, the pieces that shine brightest engage not only material exploration but conceptual depth. Art is in the making, for sure, but also in the thinking.