Western Canada's art magazine since 2002
27 July 2021 Vol 6 No 15 ISSN 2561-3316 © 2021
Portia Priegert
From the Editor
When I was a child, I would ask my mother which of her four children was her favourite, secretly hoping it would be me. But unfailingly, she would reply: “I love you all the same.”
I don’t have children, but try to emulate her approach with the articles I nurture for Galleries West. Unlike my mother, however, I must choose a lead story to promote in the newsletter we email to subscribers every two weeks once a complete issue is posted online.
Our goal is to prompt people to click through to the Galleries West site. So, I factor in various things – the work's visual appeal, the significance of the exhibition, the quality of the writing and more. There’s no easy formula. Ultimately, it’s a judgment call.
Sometimes the lead story is obvious – the image so amazing, the information so fascinating or the project so ambitious that it deserves a moment in the sun. But, often, I struggle to choose. Articles can be interesting for so many different reasons. How do you choose a favourite child?
In this issue, the lead story stands out for several reasons. It’s the first time Galleries West has published a review of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. While New York City is far from our usual coverage area of Western Canada and the North, the show features work by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, a Métis artist born in Comox, B.C., who teaches at Emily Carr University in Vancouver. Astoundingly, it’s MoMA’s first-ever solo show for an Indigenous artist.
Hill’s work is fresh and vital – she considers the use of tobacco in Indigenous communities in an array of 2D and 3D work, while pointing to contrasting views about land, property and systems of exchange in settler and Indigenous societies. The reviewer is Aruna D’Souza, who was raised in Lethbridge, Alta., and now contributes to the New York Times, among other publications, from her base in Massachusetts. Earlier this month, she was named one of eight winners of the $50,000 Rabkin Prize, which is given to important American art critics. She writes eloquently about Hill's work, seeing in it a reminder that there are forms of worth beyond money that "we might draw upon to remake our broken world."
This issue of Galleries West also includes Mark Mushet’s visually enticing video about bird-watching artist Matthew Ballantyne. For his current show at the Mónica Reyes Gallery in Vancouver, Ballantyne focuses on woodpeckers. One of my favourite pieces (spoiler alert) is a music stand that holds a "score" evoked by the holes sapsuckers have drilled into a tree.
Freshness is also apparent in the stunning work of Marcy Friesen, a Métis artist from small-town Saskatchewan. She describes how a recent trip to the Remai Modern in Saskatoon prompted her to take her traditional beading practice in an entirely new direction. All her work is gorgeous, but I particularly like Nourish, a beaded moccasin that’s linked to smaller moccasin by a beaded cord. It becomes a simple but universally understood life-affirming metaphor for nurturing in all its forms.
Another article focuses on two artists, Henry Tsang and Cindy Mochizuki, who explore the difficult history of Japanese Canadian internment during the Second World War in shows at the Surrey Art Gallery in British Columbia's Lower Mainland.
Meanwhile, I stepped in to preview a show by long-time Saskatoon artist Norm Dallin. I enjoyed chatting with him about his downsized art practice and his new focus on painting the ordinary objects around him.
Finally, Galleries West is pleased to present Doug Maclean’s roundup of the spring auction season – which this year stretched from April to July and was entirely online. If you like Emily Carr, you'll want to check out our images of two of her forest paintings, which have been held in private collections for decades.
Speaking of auctions, and looking ahead to the next issue of Galleries West, we are putting the finishing touches on our first foray into long-form digital journalism, a 5,500-word story by Edmonton writer Curtis Gillespie. His story starts with the edge-of-seat sale of those two Carr paintings for a combined total of more than $5 million. He then traces the history of art auctions in Western Canadian through conversations with some of the major players over the last half century. A major focus is the rise to dominance by Heffel, the Vancouver-based auction house that handled the sale of those Carr paintings. The story, Going, Going, Gone West, has been a mammoth undertaking, but it provides what we think is the first-ever comprehensive look at this important chapter of Western Canadian art history. It's perfect for summer reading.
Until next time,
CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE: Aruna D’Souza, Mark Mushet, Janet Nicol, Doug Maclean
We acknowledge the support of the Government of Alberta Media Fund, the Government of Canada Special Measures for Journalism Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts.
