What Is Welcome?

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RACHEL TOPHAM PHOTOGRAPHY Rachel Topham Photography Ltd.

Tania Willard, "Affirmations for Wildflowers: an Ethnobotany of Desire," 2020

installation view, SFU Audain Gallery, 2020. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography

What Is Welcome? includes works from the Belkin’s collection and long-term residency that question the art institution’s language, boundaries and potential for change. From performance to works-in-process that effect institutional practices, the artists included operate with, and at the same time counter, the institution to address the what, how and the why of gallery operations.

When the Belkin looked critically at our collection five years ago, approximately 85% of the works were by white men. In response, the gallery adopted a strategy to broaden artist representation by using 100% of the acquisition budget to purchase only works by women-identified artists, including self-identifying LGBTQ+ artists, with a priority given to Indigenous, Black and People of Colour (IBPOC) artists. This exhibition is an opportunity to explore the ways in which a collection can signal shifts in viewpoints and priorities, and to hold space for this conversation.

As galleries and museums strive to make space for new practices and ways of knowing, artists are critical agents in the institution’s evolution. In interrogating institutional cultural systems, the artists included in this exhibition consider sustaining relevance in the material of living ecologies through exchange, labour and stewardship. Collectively, the works ask the question: What is welcome?

Artists include Allyson Clay, Claudia Cuesta, Andrea Fraser, ReMatriate Collective and Holly Schmidt, as well as recent acquisitions of work by Skeena Reece, Kika Thorne and Tania Willard as part of the Belkin’s ongoing commitment to diversification of the collection.

Approaching the history and language of protest, ReMatriate’s banner YOURS FOR INDIGENOUS SOVEREIGNTY, (2018) borrows a message from a 1978 dispute that allied Indigenous women workers with other labour activists. The feminist Service, Office and Retail Workers Union of Canada (SORWUC) staged a three-year protest against Muckamuck Restaurant in Vancouver and ReMatriate’s use of the language of the strike’s picket signs acknowledges these women’s efforts and asks what sovereignty means over four decades later.

Andrea Fraser’s Official Welcome (2001/2002) approaches the rhetorical language and function of institutional opening events. The work was performed at the opening of Fraser’s exhibition at the Belkin where she delivered a speech that appropriated the physical and linguistic gestures of patrons, curators, critics and artists. Halfway through the performance, Fraser started to undress and stated, “I’m not a person today. I’m an object in an artwork.” In addressing how the gallery functions – akin to Claudia Cuesta’s Culture Cap (2002) that alludes to culture’s limits and expression, and Allyson Clay’s Untitled (He didn’t ask her much…) (1991) that points to the lack of representation of women artists in museum collections – she places audiences and institutions in positions of complicity and discomfort.

Positioning audiences to query their capacity for collective self-reflection, Tania Willard’s Affirmations for Wildflowers: an Ethnobotany of Desire (2020) is an installation work that uses representation of flora, reflection and political affirmations (“the revolution has come,” “the land is strong,” “the future is Indigenous”) to evoke shifting relations in this uncertain but transformative moment.

Questioning the potential for a symbiotic relationship between the site of the gallery and its structure, Holly Schmidt and Kika Thorne consider the physical form of the gallery in connection to its exterior ecology. Schmidt’s installation work, using sculpture, sound and text, connects to her durational residency Vegetal Encounters (2019-23) to test assumptions of where learning takes place and how plant ecologies can be seen as collaborative survival models for living on a damaged planet. Working with fireweed as a metaphor for resistance, Schmidt’s related project Fireweed Fields removes the Belkin’s outdoor green spaces from the dominant manicured campus landscapes to offer an alternate site for practices that increase biodiversity as a means to address the climate emergency. Thorne’s installation The Sun (2019) addresses questions of technology, belief, representation and cultural crises in relation to energy alternatives. Using solar panels to power a projection of the sun in which “the sun draws itself,” viewers watch the sun emit the energy that is enabling its own imagery to reach them in the gallery.

Skeena Reece’s video Hold This (2018) speaks to – and holds space for – a process of care in the face of loss due to colonial violence. The work documents the placing and retrieving of rings, bracelets, watches and glasses on an earthen altar outside a sweat lodge. These personal items are removed so they do not heat up and burn the skin, and are taken care of by the person tending the fire.

What Is Welcome? is curated by Barbara Cole and Melanie O’Brian and made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council, our Belkin Curator’s Forum members, and our individual donors who financially support our acquisitions and donate artworks to the collection.