Laura Vanags
From Bureau du change
The Banff Centre celebrates 75 years of visual arts with Bureau de change
This year The Banff Centre celebrates its 75th anniversary of creative activity while the Walter Phillips Gallery concurrently celebrates 30 years of challenging exhibitions and visual arts programming with Bureau de change a retrospective exhibition encompassing works from more than 60 prominent international artists who have spent time at the centre during the past three decades. The works chosen are so numerous that they extend past the gallery to the building entrance and further still in Janet Cardiff’s audio work Forest Walk from 1991. Given the physical and historical expanse of the show curators Sylvie Gilbert and Helga Pakasaar have culled works describing certain currents — political technological and social — demanding our attention and reiterating insights that maintain a social currency today.
One such current is the centre’s recognition of aboriginal artists of the region and the establishment of programs designed to encourage dialogues between histories cultures and artistic voices. Rebecca Belmore’s monumental birch phonograph Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother which references the cones used for moose-calling in northern Ontario faces the gallery entrance bringing to mind its performance aspect in which sensitive post-colonial issues have found a symbolic vehicle for vocalization. The geographical location of the centre is evident in all the works shown from the representation of landscape in Patterson Ewen’s Rain Over Water painting of 1974 to Archive’s audio installation Room Tone (2008) showing reworked attitudes toward emergent technologies discovered at a distance from the city. The philosophical location of the centre says Gilbert “has always been one of experimenting and exploring the margins of one’s practice or medium.”
Media works have been displayed on their original monitors and screens so that a technological chronology is set up through the gallery among other chronologies. Vera Frenkel’s early experimental video work Lost Art: A Cargo Cult Romance studies travel and the movements of ideas throughout the art world accelerated (or paradoxically slowed down) by such means of travel. Jan Peacock’s made-for-TV video production White Wash from 1990 examines early insights of how technology effaces memory by exacting repetition and taking over our imagination’s contact with it. By comparison Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s “tell” issue on the Banff New Media Institute’s flash website horizon zero uses digital technology to uphold indigenous storytelling in new ways.
Thematic residencies over the years allowed artists to explore identity politics and many had break-through moments at the centre which later became central to their practices as well as prefiguring international art movements. Formidable examples are Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan’s Lesbian National Parks and Services Jin-Me Yoon’s Souvenirs of the Self (1991) from the Between You and Point of View residency and Brian Jungen’s Prototype for New Understanding #4 (1998) .
As the title suggests Bureau de change offers a place where ideas are exchanged and change itself is enacted. The overall tone of the show is one of enquiry observation and reflective responses to world climates. That said these artworks aren’t alarmingly critical or unwelcoming to viewers as conceptual import is balanced with esthetic affect and many recourses to art’s trepidatious footsteps and fingerprints.
