Spill

Vancouver exhibition considers blighted rivers and oceans.

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Artists. Activists. Only a few letters separate these two words. And in a new exhibition, Spill, at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver, they flow together, a powerful river leading to a sea change. 

Along with the element of water, it’s the shared depth of research that draws together the eight Canadian and international artists featured in Spill. The show, curated by Lorna Brown, floats on a sea of information, much of it collected over years. 

Endurance and fortitude are clearly evident in the work of Kootenay artist Genevieve Robertson. To create Still Running Water, she travelled nearly 2,000 kilometres, tracing the path of the Columbia River from its headwaters in British Columbia to its alluvial plain on the border between Washington and Oregon. 

Over the course of the journey, she documented the effects of 14 major dams – drowned landscapes, blighted habitat and ravaged sacred sites – places captured in eerie images both familiar and strange. 

The materiality of these sites is built into the grain of an accompanying drawing, Alluvial Fan, which recalls the branches of the river’s mouth as it reaches the ocean. Here Robertson has used silt collected from the Kinbasket, Roosevelt, McNary and Wanapum reservoirs as her medium.

Abuses suffered by rivers also make up the substance of Chicago-based Diné artist Teresa Montoya’s Yellow Water. 

Her subject is the 2015 Gold King Mine spill, which disgorged more three million gallons of acidic mine waste into Colorado’s Cement Creek. The toxins made their way eventually into the San Juan River that flows across the traditional territory of the Navajo Nation. Montoya followed the yellow water’s route, detailing the disaster’s impact in photographs and writing about the community’s response. 

The long-term effects are rendered acidly clear in an accompanying installation that features four water samples collected along the spill’s path. The numbers tell the story in blunt, indisputable fashion: The amount of arsenic and lead in the water far surpasses safe levels for human consumption as established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

Meanwhile, Carolina Caycedo, born in London to Colombian parents, presents Serpent River Book, a similarly encompassing look at resource industries and their effects on river systems. 

Over the course of 72 pages, the book unfolds like an anaconda, following a snaking path from biodiversity and Indigenous knowledge to methods of resistance. 

Richly collaged with images, text and maps, the book is designed to be moved – folded and lifted on the shoulders of participants in a collective act of performance and solidarity. It is exhibited with video footage of Caycedo’s field work in Colombia, Brazil and Mexico.

All rivers lead eventually to the sea, and the culmination of the Belkin show is Susan Schuppli’s multidisciplinary work, Nature Represents Itself, an examination of the repercussions of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The largest marine oil spill in American history, it killed 11 crew members and dumped an estimated four million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, devastating marine life and coastal communities. 

When news of the explosion began to emerge, British Petroleum, the corporation that owned and operated the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, used its considerable power to squash the story, booking hotel rooms in the area in an effort to keep journalists at bay. 

This incident, along with others, is documented in a recitation of the lawsuit filed against BP by Ecuador, based on the 2008 inclusion of the Rights of Nature in the country’s constitution. Schuppli, a Swiss-Canadian artist based in London, brings together two forms of toxicity in a video loop that combines animated images of the oil slick accompanied by an audio component that lists the charges levelled against the giant oil corporation. 

In spite of corporate manipulations, independent observation sprang up in the form of a grassroots initiative that documented the spill. Working together, community activists enlisted environmentalists and designers to create an ad hoc satellite system that collected hundreds of thousands of images as evidence of the devastation. 

In addition to the exhibition, which includes work by Nelly César, Guadalupe Martinez, Anne Riley and T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss, the Belkin has planned related activities, including a weekly radio broadcast and Spill: Response, a series of performances. 

There’s no mistaking the artists’ anger at the atrocities and abuses inflicted upon water. Their binaries are crystal clear. On one side are massive corporations representing profit, power and corruption, while on the other are ordinary people – farmers, activists, artists and community organizers. 

The battle is uneven in many ways. But, as Spill demonstrates, there’s great strength in collective action. It’s a swelling wave that brings to the surface stories that powerful forces would prefer to submerge. ■

Spill is on view at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery in Vancouver from Sept. 3 to Dec. 1, 2019.

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