Vancouver Art Gallery selects five iconic pieces
Chief curator chooses works from the collection that best represent this province
We asked the Vancouver Art Gallery’s chief curator to choose five iconic B.C. works of art — out of more than 12,000 in the permanent collection — to help celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday.
More than visually representing aspects of B.C., they also refer to art history and to ideas and events that allow viewers to consider “who we are as people and societies,” says Daina Augaitis. “Art often points to things beyond itself — one can learn a lot about the world through art.”
1 Bax’wana’tsi: The Container for Souls, 2006 Marianne Nicolson
The first work is by Marianne Nicolson, a member of the Dzawada’enuxw First Nation of the Kwakwaka’wakw. For thousands of years as one of the first people of this land, the Kwakwaka’wakw have lived in and around what we now call northern Vancouver Island, as well as the nearby islands and coastal area of the mainland.
Nicolson’s light box casts shadows on the surrounding walls of a raven, owl and two girls — the artist’s aunt and mother as young women.
Augaitis said as viewers walk into the exhibition space of Nicolson’s work, the shadows cover them. Viewers become part of the work and part of the history it tells.
“It’s a moment for us to pause and to think of the indigenous history of this place and how we’re implicated in it,” she said. “It’s a work about now, but also about 1,000 years ago and how we as visitors should be mindful in this place.”
2 Totem Poles, Kitseukla, 1912 Emily Carr
This painting by Emily Carr depicts totem poles in a Gitxsan village by the Skeena River in northwest B.C. Carr went to great lengths to make sure her paintings of indigenous villages were as accurate as possible, even as she painted them in a Fauvist style learned in France. Carr went to aboriginal villages at a time when it was highly unusual for a woman to travel independently.
The work is significant because it’s part of the original group of artworks bought by the founders of the Vancouver Art Gallery when it opened in 1931.
Augaitis said Carr saw British Columbia differently than anyone before her. “She’s the first to make images of the forest in that modern way.”
3 Cetology, 2002 Brian Jungen
“I will never forget the ‘aha!’ moment when people walked into that gallery and saw this work,” Augaitis said of Brian Jungen’s sculptural work Cetology, recalling when it was shown at the gallery in 2006. “Their jaws would drop when they realized that this amazing whale skeleton was made out of white, plastic lawn chairs.”
His work is about the magic of materials and how an artist can transform one thing into something completely different.
Augaitis said Cetology embodies the wonder art can create. It recalls both a skeleton you might find in a natural history museum and consumer items made of petroleum-based plastic. In one work, it highlights the growing importance of environmental issues and the part people have played in creating the problem and in contributing to a solution.
4 Woven Chronicle, 2015 Reena Saini Kallat
Reena Saini Kallat’s Woven Chronicle uses electric wiring and barbed wire to create a political map of the world showing the movement of, and impediments to, people and products.
Kallat, based in Mumbai, donated the work to the VAG after it was shown at the public art location offsite in 2015. The intensive labour required to wind the wires used in the work highlights capitalism’s need to use cheap labour in countries such as India.
“It speaks to global movements of humans, of bodies, of materials, of consumable goods,” Augaitis said.
“It really shows those points of global flows and how Vancouver is part of it and how we have to live together in this world.”
5 Slogans for the 21st Century, 2011-14 Doug Coupland
Made up of 44 phrases, Doug Coupland’s work captures the zeitgeist of our social media era. The work also highlights the modern and contemporary use of art made out of words.
Phrases such as “I Miss My Pre-Internet Brain,” “The Time Feels Right for Something Nuclear” and “Haters Gonna Hate” speak “so eminently to where we are right now,” Augaitis said. “He’s so prescient with his thinking. It’s really remarkable that Doug put his finger on the pulse of what is changing at an exponential rate.”