‘Rich artistic heritage’ of B.C. has a new home
Collection includes more than 200 works that retrace province’s cultural history
The new Audain Art Museum in Whistler houses a unique collection of art in an understated building that delivers surprises that start at the front entrance and continue through to the exhibition spaces inside.
Nestled among a grove of trees at the base of Whistler and Blackcomb mountains in the Village, the museum houses the collection of about 200 works of art, largely by artists from B.C., amassed by Michael Audain and his wife Yoshiko Karasawa. It was built at a cost of $30 million — one of the rare examples in Canada of a museum built by an individual without any government money, according to Ian Thom, the museum’s consulting curator.
“They have created a vivid and powerful window onto the rich artistic heritage of this province,” he said during a media preview on Thursday.
“The works they’re gifting to the museum trace the history of artmaking in B.C. from the late 18th century to the present.”
The museum, he said, was the only public art gallery in the country devoted to showing and collecting the art of a single province.
“This museum and art collection is an extraordinary gift to the people of Whistler, British Columbia and Canada,” said Thom, who is also a senior curator for the Vancouver Art Gallery.
“We all owe an extraordinary large thank you to Michael and Yoshi.”
By the entrance is a contemporary Northwest Coast aluminum sculpture in the shape of a house post by Xwalacktun (pronounced way-lack-tun). Called Big Flood, it refers both to an ancient Squamish story about a flood and to the flood plain on which the museum is built. Its placement at the front also marks the site as Coast Salish territory.
Inside, the smell of hemlock wood fills the entrance hall.
In addition to Big Flood, the second work commissioned specially for the museum is on the entrance hall wall.
Called No Thing is Forever, the bright, multicolored neon work by Paul Wong is a multicultural mash-up of a Chinese character with a row of letters of the alphabet from A to Z.
The gallery spaces are small, intimate and lit only with artificial light to preserve the art, which are arranged mostly in chronological order.
The first exhibition area is dedicated to indigenous art. The first work in a vitrine is a rare wood carving by an unknown Salish artist dating from the late 19th or early 20th century. It’s surrounded on three sides by a unique collection of historic Northwest Coast masks.
The room is anchored by a monumental work: The Dance Screen (The Scream Too) by James Hart. It took Hart and a team of artists three years to carve the massive cedar work, which is three metres high and four metres wide.
In another exhibition area, the world’s largest permanent collection of Emily Carr works — mostly paintings — is displayed. As Thom pointed out, while the VAG has a bigger collection, they’re not on permanent display.
One of the high-profile Carrs is The Crazy Stair (The Crooked Staircase), which was purchased in 2013 for a record $3.39 million — the most ever paid for a Carr painting.
Thom said by putting contemporary and historic indigenous art first, followed by paintings and other works by artists such as Emily Carr, E.J. Hughes and Jeff Wall, the museum tells the story that artmaking in B.C. started long before Europeans and other settlers came to this part of the world.
“I think Michael’s desire is that people will take art of B.C. more seriously,” Thom said.
Works in different mediums by different artists play off against one another. In one exhibition area, an abstract painting by Landon Mackenzie on a wall is framed by two totem-pole-like sculptures made from golf bags by Brian Jungen.
Other works showing the diversity of art made in B.C. include a stack of white snowballs in bronze called Arsenal by Gathie Falk, and a massive and scarylooking Dzunukwa Mask by Beau Dick with long flowing dark hair partly covering its eyes.
The museum opens to the public March 12.