Open Channels
Western Canadian artists show work they made as part of an epic voyage along all three coasts of Canada.
Benjamin Kikkert, “Copper River Fracture,” 2019
blown glass sculpture, 18” x 22” x 16” (photo courtesy of the artist)
Vancouver artist Benjamin Kikkert’s blown-glass sculpture looks like an unusual chunk of Arctic ice with its two arm-like protrusions reaching toward the sky. It’s as if water from a river splashed upwards and instantly froze in the frigid northern air.
The powerful upward thrust scooped up coloured pebbles, also made of glass, now captured as part of Copper River Fracture. The sculpture symbolizes the various forces – environmental, geological, historical and cultural – that are reshaping the Arctic.
Its effervescent maker was one of 13 artists from across Canada who spent a week or two on different legs of a unique Canada 150 voyage in 2017 and agreed to participate in the exhibition.
The artists joined the former Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Prince – renamed the Canada C3, a reference to the country’s three coasts – as it journeyed from Toronto through the Northwest Passage and then south to Victoria.
“It was excitingly overwhelming,” says Kikkert, who won the 2012 RBC Glass Award, a national prize for emerging glass artists. He now works out of Vancouver Studio Glass on Granville Island.
Benjamin Kikkert poses with his glass sculpture “Copper River Fracture” in Ottawa (photo by Martin Lipman / Students on Ice Foundation)
Each artist was expected to create work inspired by the trip, sponsored by an educational charity, Students on Ice, as part of Canada’s 150th birthday celebrations. The trip was funded by the federal government and other donors.
An exhibition of some of their work, Open Channels, is on view until January at Âjagemô, an Ottawa gallery run by the Canada Council for the Arts. A national tour may follow.
Melissa Rombout, an independent curator in Ottawa, organized the show.
“Open Channels implies the flow of navigable water,” she says. “Sailing along Canada’s three coasts, through actual open channels via the fabled Northwest Passage, is a phenomenon borne of warming ocean temperatures, a disturbing augur of the advancing climate change that already affects Canada’s coastal communities.”
The inspiration for Kikkert’s sculpture came the first day of his trip from Kugluktuk, Nunavut, to Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T.
That day, Kikkert and some other passengers hiked along the Coppermine River to a site called Bloody Falls, named for a massacre believed to have occurred in 1771 during a Hudson's Bay Company expedition to search for copper deposits.
“It was a powerful place,” says Kikkert, who became aware of the forces that affect the North, including damaging intrusions by settler society and environmental degradation from the global climate crisis. He decided to portray “the power of the forces” shaping the region.
The changing environment was a common topic for many of the artists. So too was reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.
Geoff Phillips, “Namu,” 2017
oil on canvas, 5.5’ x 6.5’ (photo courtesy of the artist)
Geoff Phillips, a painter from Maple Creek, Sask., incorporated both themes in his large-scale painting, Namu. Phillips travelled aboard the C3 ship between the British Columbia communities of Bella Bella and Campbell River, disembarking at several villages along the way.
Phillips responded to a request by Heiltsuk Chief Harvey Humchitt to tell the story of the Heiltsuk village of Namu by showing a derelict fish cannery that’s close to an ancestral burial ground.
“It’s really an ecological disaster site,” says Phillips, mentioning pollution from old barrels of creosote and oil at the cannery site. “The Heiltsuk people are left to clean it up.”
Polar Prince / Canada C3
The C3 voyage, which lasted from June until October, included about 60 passengers at any one time.
Other Western Canadian artists on the trip included Deanna Bailey, of Whitehorse, and Rachel Rozanski, of Vancouver.
Bailey created two Zen-like shadow boxes containing scores of pebbles made from clay. She encourages viewers to focus on the small details of nature, like the stones she admired on the beaches of Haida Gwaii.
Rozanski’s travels in Nunavut inspired her to draw the barren landscape. The land looks alive, like a reclining beast. The work is meant to focus attention on environmental issues.
The artists, chosen by a jury, also included Leslie Reid, of Ottawa; Paula Murray, of Chelsea, Que.; and Lizzie Ittinuar, of Kangiqliniq (Rankin Inlet), Nunavut. ■
Open Channels is on view at Âjagemô in Ottawa from June 25, 2019 to Jan. 26, 2020.