Landfall and Departure: Epilogue
to
Nanaimo Art Gallery 150 Commercial Street, Nanaimo, British Columbia V9R 5G6
Genevieve Roberston, "Whale Bone," 2017
bitumen, seawater, and gouache on paper,
Join us for the opening reception: January 11, 7 pm.The evening includes a performance byWillie Thrasher and Linda Saddleback.
Michele Di Menna, Ayesha Hameed, Lili Huston-Herterich, Dawn Johnston, Orca Lab, Eleanor King, Marcus Reddiker, Genevieve Robertson, Jenni Schine and Jay White, Fiona Tan, Willie Thrasher and Linda Saddleback, and others.
Our history of the sea is a record of misunderstanding the cries of whales and the whispers of waves. But, as sea levels rise and fish stocks dwindle, being attuned to what the ocean is telling us is now more important than ever. Landfall and Departure: Epilogue endeavours to listen to the sea through contemporary visual art, sound works, presentations, and performances.
Oceans cover more than seventy percent of our planet. Artists in the exhibition engage this impossibly vast environment by listening and responding to diverse perspectives, including those of cod fishers off Fogo Island, citizen scientists monitoring salmon stocks in the Broughton Archipelago, workers on a cargo ship, world traveling sailors, pirates, and whales. Others explore through the languages of seashore debris, digital shoreline maps, and experimental music.
For Landfall and Departure: Epilogue, the gallery commissioned Nanaimo based Inuit musician Willie Thrasher to write a new song about listening to the sea, which was recorded with his partner Linda Saddleback, and will be performed at the opening. Details of other public events including tours of the Pacific Biological Station will be forthcoming.
Nanaimo artist Jesse Gray's series of unique bronze jewellery works responding to the accumulation of plastic beach debris will be available at the Gallery Store for the duration of the exhibition.
Landfall and Departure is the third in a series of three exhibition projects that look to the resource industries that formed and fragmented communities on Vancouver Island while having implications globally. The first project: Black Diamond Dust (2014) responded to coal mining; the second project: Silva (2015/2016), responded to forestry. Landfall and Departure (2017/2018) is a two-part exhibition, which considers resources both distributed on, and extracted from, the sea. The first part in this series, Landfall and Departure: Prologue, responded directly to the Nanaimo Harbour.
Landfall and Departure: Epilogue is the final project in a year of exhibitions, special projects, education programs and events, that explore the question “What does it mean to live on an Island?”