T H E F I S H B O W L - A U G U S T 2 0 1 7 • PA G E S I X
Celebrating Canada’s 150th birthday
Salt Spring
Stories
by Greg Klassen and Andrea Locke
August 11 to 22, 2017
Stories are central to being human. Stories are a stepping-stone to truth. They have the power to inform, and to place in context. Stories are at the heart of the way we create and communicate meaning. When Greg first landed on this island, six years ago, he chose to sit down for a tea at TJ Beans. While sitting there he overheard a conversation - actually more of an intense argument - by two old-timers. Much to his surprise, the topic of this active disagreement was the relative merits of competing theories of stellar evolution… In that moment he knew he wanted to live here! In a sense that moment also identified the kernel around which germinated the idea of a series of images that spoke to the uniqueness of this place - this ‘argument surrounded by water’. In 2016 Greg was fortunate enough to receive funding from the Canada Council for the Arts to realize what we have come to see as a personally meaningful and - hopefully - socially relevant approach to telling engaging and visually arresting stories about our new home. Stories that don’t simply capture the history of this Island - such stories are abundant and told far better by others - but stories that engage despite, or perhaps because of, our very newness to the Island, that express a sense of wonder at the connection between this Island’s complex - and not always pleasant - history and everyday realities as we experience them now. Stories that, instead of ‘recounting’ history as something ‘in the past’ place us squarely within our historical context, allow us to experience a ‘sense of history’ while never forgetting the ‘now’. This exhibition, presented by ArtSpring as a celebration of Canada’s 150th birthday, consists of two main interconnected elements - images and text - designed not just to communicate our sense of wonder and awe at this amazing place but to provide a space for our community to come together and share in the stories of this place and its people and in the making of new stories that will unfold as we continue to move between past and future - always in the present. Anchoring the experience are the images - composites of past and present. Each image, its structure, its content, is designed to simultaneously engage the viewer in a unique story about the historical context associated with specific sites around the Island and contribute to the overall collective - and ever-evolving - story that is this Island, its people and its larger context in contemporary Canadian society. Structurally,
each image presents three key elements, a site (to date 35 of 50 sites researched have been photographed as panoramic images for inclusion in the project), historical images (for 28 of the sites we have so far incorporated sets of historical images to tell specific, unique and meaningful stories relevant to those locations), a personal context (our daughter, RhiAnnon is included in every image as avatar - encouraging each of us to perceive - reconceive - the stories through another’s eyes). The accompanying texts, written by Andrea, interpret the images and serve as a jumping-off point for further storytelling based on written and oral histories, the collections of the Salt Spring Historical Society - with special thanks to Usha Rautenbach - and our own experiences. But during the process of making the series the context of these stories and our goals for the series have evolved and radically expanded. Therefore, the exhibition is no longer just a presentation to an audience nor just a visual telling of our history. It has become a celebration of, for and by a community that we have adopted, and more importantly, that has adopted us in a way and to an extent that we could not have anticipated or hoped for when we arrived here five years ago. Consequently, this show will involve three additional distinct but connected elements that collectively embody a burgeoning sense of belonging: a speaker series (we are inviting up to ten Salt Spring residents who have a deep connection to this Island to talk about one or more stories of personal importance to them during a lunchtime speaker series; plus one speaker from off-island to help us re-contextualize our vision of ourselves, supported by the Salt Spring Arts Council through the Dialogue with the Arts series), show sitters (in collaboration with the Gulf Islands Families Together Society and thanks to the Salt Spring Island Foundation and the Community Fund for Canada’s 150th, we will be inviting members of the Disability Community of the Island to sit the show. Each sitter will bear a name tag with the line “ask me my Salt Spring Story”); and satellite exhibitions (both the Salt Spring Public Library and Steffich Gallery will be participating in our celebration through collaborative special events). But the stories do not end with this exhibition… Starting in 2018, we will be pursuing a much more involved, island-wide exhibition project involving the actual locations explored for this project. The goal is to turn the entire Island into an Augmented Reality Gallery, an open air, interactive exhibition space for viewing and sharing the ever-evolving sense of community as seen through our “Salt Spring Stories”. Will you tell us your story?
Creation of the work in this exhibition was made possible thanks to grants from the Canada Council for the Arts (Cultivate: Creative Development Grants) and the Salt Spring Arts Council as well as support and archival images from the Salt Spring Island Historical Society. We are grateful to ArtSpring for choosing this project as their Celebration of Canada’s 150th birthday and for donating gallery space and technical support. Many thanks to all the members of GIFTS (Gulf Islands Families Together Society) for their contribution to the success of this program and to Scott Simmons for documenting the project. We are further grateful to the Salt Spring Island Public Library and Steffich Gallery for participating in this celebration. Furthermore, this initiative was made possible by the Community Fund for Canada’s 150th, a collaboration between the Salt Spring Island Foundation, Community Foundations of Canada, the Government of Canada, and extraordinary leaders from coast to coast to coast.