"SPIRITLANDS: t/HERE:" Marian Penner Bancroft - Selected Photo Works 1975-2000, Vancouver Art Gallery, June 30 – September 30, 2012

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Henri Robideau

"For Dennis and Susan: Running Arms to a Civil War"

Marian Penner Bancroft, from "For Dennis and Susan: Running Arms to a Civil War," 1977, 24 silver gelatin prints and 1 text panel, 20.2 x 25.5 cm each, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

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"Mnemonicon (The Screen)"

Marian Penner Bancroft, "Mnemonicon (The Screen)," 1988, silver gelatin prints, wooden screen, 180 x 300 cm, Collection of the artist. Photographer: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery.

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3 of 3

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Henri Robideau

"For Dennis and Susan: Running Arms to a Civil War"

Marian Penner Bancroft, from "For Dennis and Susan: Running Arms to a Civil War," 1977, 24 silver gelatin prints and 1 text panel, 20.2 x 25.5 cm each, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

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SPIRITLANDS: t/HERE: MARIAN PENNER BANCROFT

Selected Photo Works 1975-2000

Vancouver Art Gallery

June 30 – September 30, 2012

By Beverly Cramp

Some years ago on a trip to France, Vancouver artist Marian Penner Bancroft wrote notes to herself about taking photographs in “the spiral of Paris,” as she described the city. One of those was: “Render a tapestry of the body and its material surround.” Such poetic musings about context – where social and material surroundings end and the body begins – provide insight into SPIRITLANDS: t/HERE, a retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery that offers a rich and inspirational exploration of the visual markers of place.

Some 50 photo-based works reflect Penner Bancroft’s output between 1975 and 2000, exploring themes related to the pull of memory and history, the interplay of sensorial experience and cultural knowledge, and the framing of perceptions within feminist and post-colonial paradigms. As Penner Bancroft said in an interview after winning this year’s Audain Prize for lifetime achievement in the visual arts: “Personal memory and social history are very interconnected – they aren’t exclusive of each other ... We are always being moved by forces so huge we can’t see them.”

In her 1999 project, By Land and Sea (Prospect and Refuge), Penner Bancroft explores some of these powerful historical forces, taking a metaphorical trip to Canada with ancestors from Europe. She includes colour images of their homelands in Scotland, where her maternal grandparents lost their farming livelihood when landowners deemed it more profitable to raise sheep instead of crops, as well as what was previously southern Russia (now part of Ukraine), home to her paternal Mennonite forebears. Penner Bancroft incorporates found historical photos, including grainy images of her father who, at nine, holds the family violin, fulfilling his responsibility to safeguard the instrument. In Canada, both sets of immigrants were implicated in their own uprooting of people, this time aboriginal inhabitants. Penner Bancroft uses text, maps and photos to elicit a common settler narrative. By Land and Sea is so evocative it can summon viewers’ own family stories. You don’t so much objectively look at the work as get involved with it.

Penner Bancroft’s use of poetic text is evident in other pieces, such as Susan Seasons After (1979), in which she writes on her photographs. She also uses techniques to bring images off the wall. For instance, in a 1998 work, Mnemonicon (The Screen), she embeds photos as well as covers, pages and text from vintage books on an accordion-like wooden screen, the kind used to divide space within a room. BLIND/MAT(T)ER (1990) places photos and graphite rubbings on double-sided, freestanding ‘blackboard’ contraptions on wheels. Not only can these contraptions be moved, but their panels can be flipped over and upside down. Holding/XA: YTEM (1991) is a series of four diptychs showing various angles of a glacial erratic, a huge freestanding boulder in Mission, B.C., that has sacred meaning to the region’s indigenous people, along with graphite rubbings of surfaces near her urban home. The images are mounted on pine-and-mesh frames that mimic screens used to sift soil from archeological artifacts.