PARADISE ON THE PRAIRIE

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"Detail from The Paradise Institute"

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, "Detail from The Paradise Institute," 2001. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Anonymous gift, 2002.

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"Godfrey Dean Art Gallery"

Outside the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery in Yorkton, Saskatchewan.

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"The Paradise Institute"

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Detail from "The Paradise Institute," 2001. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Anonymous gift, 2002.

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"Detail from The Paradise Institute"

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, "Detail from The Paradise Institute," 2001. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Anonymous gift, 2002.

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PARADISE ON THE PRAIRIE

Contemporary Art Draws a Crowd in Yorkton, Saskatchewan

By Lorne Roberts

In the past, selling tickets in small-town Saskatchewan may have involved the traveling circus, or an itinerant preacher passing through on horseback. These days, it’s more likely to involve a big game for the local junior hockey team. But in the Yorkton region recently, contemporary art has been bringing in the crowds. The Paradise Institute, an internationally celebrated video and audio installation with a strong prairie connection, was in town for three months in the fall of 2006, proving that smaller centres can sustain interest with special exhibitions that are unusual, challenging, and Canadian.

“The reaction to it has been absolutely fantastic,” says Brenda Sherring, former director of Yorkton’s Godfrey Dean Gallery, which brought the show in as a touring exhibition from the National Gallery of Canada. “We’ve had people come in saying they heard about it on the country music station, while they were out combining (the fields).”

Part of the key to the Godfrey Dean’s success is the work itself. The Paradise Institute, created by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, won the Special Jury Prize in 2001 at the Venice Biennale. But the Gallery also had the foresight to position this work as a must-see in their community. Taking a work of art highly recognized within visual art circles, but not widely known among the general public, could have been a gamble.

The Paradise Institute requires the audience to enter a small, three-dimensional replica of an old movie theatre and put on a pair of headphones. From there, they’re taken through a film and audio spectacle that questions the very notions of how we view movies—whether we’re simply passive viewers, or we actively participate in the fiction of movies by bringing our own ideas and expectations into the theatre with us.

 After its debut, The New York Times said the work “moves installation art to a different plane,” and explores “the unstable relationship between what seems real and what is.”

While Cardiff is from rural Ontario, Bures Miller hails from the prairies —he grew up in Vegreville, Alberta. Both also worked for many years in Lethbridge, Alberta, teaching and exhibiting at the University of Lethbridge and at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. But this work’s connections to western Canada go much deeper than that. The original installation was a co-production of Winnipeg’s Plug In ICA and The Banff Centre’s Walter J. Phillips Gallery, and its success in Venice launched the prairie provinces back onto the world’s visual arts map.

As co-commissioner of the project for Venice through Plug In ICA, Wayne Baerwaldt played a key role in the original creation and promotion of the work, and says that while its success may have been surprising, everyone involved knew before Venice that they had something special. “Our feeling was that if it fascinated us—and it did—then it should be able to move other people too,” he says.

Early in its exhibition history, Brenda Sherring, now the executive director of Saskatchewan Museums in Regina, first viewed The Paradise Institute in Banff. At that point, Sherring was working with a group of people who were committed to turning the Godfrey Dean Gallery into a true public art space. She correctly foresaw that bringing The Paradise Institute to town would help do just that.

“I contacted the National Gallery, and asked why it coudn’t just stop here as it went from Banff back east,” she says. “They said no, but I kept writing to justify why it should come out here to the prairies. Finally, about a year ago, they wrote and said they were going to release it on tour.”

So, a work that had been the toast of the international art world, and had shown in high profile museums and galleries across the country, was suddenly coming to small-town Saskatchewan.

Once it arrived, the ideas behind promoting the show were relatively straightforward, Sherring says. “We really focused on the spectacle of it, the fact that it was like the circus coming to town and that we had this piece of art that people all over the world would love to see.”

A promotional package aimed at schools proved to be a big success. More than 1,000 visitors saw the exhibition in October—with nearly 500 of them from local schools. Sherring adds that the show was such a hit that some of the kids came back to see it again on their lunch hour.

Some of the major themes behind The Paradise Institute—including the disruption of the normally comfortable movie-viewing experience —provided a perfect educational tool for reaching kids in a media-savvy culture.

“When the school groups came I would introduce the exhibition, talk about how, in art, you’re an active participant, especially with a work like this one,” Sherring says.

In addition, Sherring says that the exhibition pulled in artists from around the region, who were eager to see this celebrated work. “For (artists) here in a fairly isolated and rural part of the country, it’s so important to be able to participate in any kind of dialogue or exchange,” she says.

Baerwaldt, who grew up in Regina, has worked at major galleries in Winnipeg and Toronto, and is now the director and curator of exhibitions at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. He agrees with Sherring on the benefits of making this type of ground-breaking contemporary art accessible to people in all parts of the country. “It shows that the National Gallery can meet its mandate of bringing art to a wider audience,” he adds.

Judging by the enthusiastic public response at the Godfrey Dean, the lasting impact of The Paradise Institute in Yorkton can’t be overstated, Baerwaldt says. “For an artist who hasn’t been to Toronto, or a place where The Paradise Institute is showing, it gives them a sense of what’s possible,” he says. Its success in Yorkton, then, may eventually prove to be just as important to the future of Canadian art as its success in Venice.