Overburden

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Gabriela Escobar Ari, “Sealed Dam,” 2019

aerial photograph, archival pigment print , 24" x 14" (courtesy the artist)

Overburden, an ambitious group exhibition about geology and resource extraction organized by galleries in two small cities in the B.C. Interior, surprises with some hard truths. Courtesy of COVID-19, an attendant virtual symposium and website cater to online visitors, broadening the project’s reach. 

Overburden, a geological term for the rock and soil over a body of ore, also carries the meaning of “too much to carry.” In a nutshell, that’s the subject of this two-part exhibition, organized by Maggie Shirley, curator of the Kootenay Gallery of Art in Castlegar, and Genevieve Robertson, curating for the Oxygen Art Centre in Nelson. The pandemic led to the postponement and reconfiguration of the show, which gathers work by 11 artists concerned about environmental degradation and the climate crisis in both regional and global contexts. 

The heart of the show, which carries the subtitle Geology, Extraction and Metamorphosis in a Chaotic Age, is the symposium's keynote address by Patti Bailey, qÊ·nÌ“qÊ·inÌ“xÌŒnÌ“, who spoke about holding resource industries and various governments accountable for pollution of the Columbia River watershed. Bailey, a Sinixt weaver in Inchelium, Washington, worked for 20 years as an environmental planner for the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, downstream from Trail, B.C., the location of one of the world’s largest lead and zinc smelters. 

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Tara Nicholson, “Permafrost Tunnel, Melnikov Permafrost Institute, Yakutsk, Russia,” 2019

archival pigment print, 32" x 40" (courtesy the artist)

The show includes images of disappearing permafrost due to climate change by B.C. artist Tara Nicholson, who photographs climatology outposts in Northern Canada, Greenland and Russia. One of her works, Tusks, is a poetic installation of pit and raku-fired porcelain tusks that speak to mastodon ivory buried in the Russian permafrost that has been subject to capitalist chicanery.

Asinnijaq, an Inuk visual artist, writer and filmmaker from Inukjuak, Que., is featured with Rock Piece, a Fluxus-inspired score and video that shows her buried by rocks, rising and magically reburied. 

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Asinnajaq, “Rock Piece (Ahuriri Edition),” 2015

video still of performance

Vancouver-based Randy Lee Cutler’s Mineralogues is a poster that lists the physical and metaphysical properties of minerals, while her sound piece, Rock Album, provides supplementary information. 

B.C. artist Keith Langergraber’s sculptures present models of three abandoned Kootenay-area mining sites, as well as 12 framed drawings of the same structures installed at a neck-craning elevation. 

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Sarah Nance, “points of rupture (alaska glacial event 1999),” 2020

letterpress print of knitting pattern coded using cryoseismic data, edition of 15, 18" x 18"

Dallas-based Sarah Nance’s points of rupture is featured on Overburden’s exhibition cards. They transpose cryoseismic events such as ice quakes into knitting patterns in striking white on black, like written garments in glacial form.

Trilobites Above the Fog, a collection of collaborative, hand-drawn cartoons by B.C. artists Darren Fleet and Jim Holyoak provide comic relief. Douglas and George, anthropomorphic trilobites from the Cambrian explosion some 540 million years ago, anachronistically discuss love, procreation and beauty in the impending Anthropocene implosion. 

Ts̱ēmā, a member of the Tahltan Nation, presents the video Tāłtān for Reclamation 2. It is projected onto the same moosehide that she cuts and uses to spray-paint in the video, leaving the word esghanānā (reclamation) on a rock in a spot in Tahltan territory devastated by fire and mining.

Aerial photographs by Gabriela Escobar Ari, a Bolivian-Canadian photographer based in Fernie, B.C., shock when you realize that unearthly orange shapes are water bodies in Bolivia ruined by mining.

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Carol Wallace, “Nelson Batholith,” no date

photomicrograph research (courtesy of Dr. Derek Thorkelson (photomicrograph photographer) Department of Earth Sciences, Simon Fraser University, and Dr J.H. Sevigny)

Local artist Carol Wallace’s beautiful Nelson Batholith is an impressionistic tribute to the granite rock under Nelson. The installation is composed of maps stitched and drawn on three organza panels on which slides of thinly sectioned rock are projected.

Taken as a whole, Overburden informs and consoles with uncommon wisdom, a curatorial feat. ■  

Overburden: Geology, Extraction and Metamorphosis in a Chaotic Age at the Oxygen Art Centre in Nelson, B.C., from June 1 to July 10, 2021 and the Kootenay Gallery of Art in Castlegar, B.C., from June 18 to August 21, 2021. An online exhibition is viewable here. 

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