The two main exhibitions currently on display at Two Rivers Gallery are both subtly linked to the Canada Winter Games.
The first is a group exhibition called North that assistant curator Maeve Hanna led the design of. Nineteen artists contributed to this collaborative effort to express the concept of that word and all its possible meanings - geographic and philosophic.
"It was a partnership with the Games," Hanna said. "A representative of the Canada Winter Games was part of the jurying process."
Each artist is from B.C., most are from the Prince George region, there are aboriginal artists included in the group, and a variety of styles from very literal to highly conceptual.
"There were four pillars put forth in the call for entry: youth, community, culture and sport," Hanna said. "So the artists all had to think in their way about those concepts and apply it somehow together with their feelings and experiences to do with the north. Northness is a subjective idea for just about every country in the world. It means something different no matter where you go, and even to different societies within a culture."
The 19 artists were chosen from among 49 who applied for inclusion in the North collection. They are Anna-Maria Lawrie, Annerose Georgeson, Azucena Rudland, Betty Kovacic, Bill Horne, Caroline Anders, Crystalynn Tarr, Desiree deRuiter, Elmer Gunderson, Frances Gobbi, Jennifer Pighin, Judy Hilgemann, Kim Stewart, Mary Mottishaw, Perry Rath, Roderick Brown, Saul Miller, Susan Barton-Tait, and Victoria Edgarr.
The second showroom spotlights a quintet of artists who each symbolized the concept of time's passage or moments in time in the collected works of the show entitled Elapsed. Again, it was an artistic homage to the Games. Each of the sporting events in some way has time and hitting chronological marks as a defining feature. Hockey players have their periods, figure skaters have their short and long programs, wheelchair basketball has its shot-clock, speed skaters have to arrive in their timed order, a good curler has a stopwatch always handy. Time means critical but different things from sport to sport.
So too did the threads of time get tied differently by Adad Hannah, Philippa Jones, Marianne Nicolson, Jennifer Pighin, and Ann Smith.
"Another way Elapsed applies to both sport and art is in the time you don't see but means so much to the people involved," said curator George Harris. "It is the time needed to hone and refine what you do to achieve your goals. That process is similar in many ways between an artist and an athlete."
Pighin's feature piece depicts two gigantic wings and the world beneath, as though the viewer is using them for flight over the landscape. Both wings are in the style of her aboriginal heritage, but each is a wildly different image. Harris said the one on the left adheres to the classical northwest coast traditions of line and shape, whereas the one on the right was more modern aboriginal and "you see an outline that looks more like the wing of a jet plane than the bird's wing on the left."
The ground, too, is deliberately different below the wings. The traditional wing flies over an impression of pristine wilderness whereas the one on the right flies over an almost digital patchwork of agriculture and forestry.
In the raven's tail blanket weaving by Smith, there is the ancestor of the more famous Chilkat blanket, but Smith incorporates touches of modernity in the weaving styles and materials. It is a bridge between early aboriginal craftsmanship and new practices.
The same old styles as a foundation for modern touches is seen in the twin tunic renderings by Nicolson, a member of the Kwakwaka'wakw First Nation.
"The materials she chooses hearkens back to the 1920s or thereabouts when First Nations started to take on materials from the modern social influence, and their population started to rebound after a serious decline caused by those colonial forces," said Harris. "It represents that period of time where there were big prosecutions under the Indian Act that outlawed important cultural practices like the potlatch, but Kwakwaka'wakw culture rebounded significantly after that very dark period and it is once again vital and dynamic."
Hannah's contribution to the exhibition is a video series of people in period costume standing in self-aware tableau. Even though no one is moving, the involuntary swaying of bodies and blinking of eyes and flickering of flames is left in to punctuate the life behind the frozen image. Each one depicts, through photographs and other research, Hannah's imagined last night on earth of former Prince George saloon Virginia Hall. It was the city's premier night spot for about nine months in the early 1900s but burned to the ground never to be rebuilt.
The piece at the back of the room takes up no literal space at all. It is a projection on the far wall. Jones drew out an animated short film of a stunned (or dead?) raven coming back to life and flying off. With the use of Wii-like technology, the piece is triggered by human movement.
"There is this notion that sports and arts are not good bedfellows, and it's true that the outcomes are often different, but there are elements in common of perseverance, commitment, sweating out the details of mastering something, the long and tiring process of honing whatever it is you do," Harris said. "One of the best examples of that attention to tedious detail, resulting in something amazing that looks much simpler than it really is, is the art of animation. It takes a fantastic amount of drawing, very precise and repetitive drawing, to produce even a few seconds of animated film, and in Philippa's work we see that played out as an awakening, a coming to life of something unconscious, then flying off into some unknown promise."
Harris said the title Elapsed and its artistic characters in the show all draw the mind to the point in time at which Prince George finds itself, the 100th anniversary of a terrible act of oppression of a local community that over time resulted in a different and quite beloved community forming, and perhaps, as local society ripens, the restoration and reconciliation for the original community as well.
North and Elapsed are on display until April 26.
