The promise of ‘west’: ever further, never there yet, untapped opportunity, rich with the unrefined potential of autonomy and prosperity. The myth of empty land, bought and sold, a sodbuster’s dream just real enough to internalize and enact by claiming, staking, leasing, owning. And of course, putting this land to work and putting work to this land.
Settler Sites explores site-specific installation art in rural and remote areas of British Columbia and Alberta. These artists’ projects evoke the sepia image of westward expansion, of blue-collar sweat and making a fortune or maybe just a hard living, but making it oneself either way. Their arrangements are grand, solemn, and even playful, misty hybrids of spirituality and superstition, imported and local lore.
The sites may be well known to local communities, their creators familiar characters in the folk-story of place. Or they may be kept as closely guarded secrets, private communions between the artist and the bush. Some pass their days quietly succumbing to the organization of nature; others cease to exist at all but for the efforts of their documenters.
Striking curious contrast to the average clear-cut, these accumulations of material and work-hours generate thought and stories rather than capital, spinning the extraction narrative as a means of production for puzzlement and delight. Miles from the edge of town, these works demonstrate the necessity of artistic creativity as a survival skill. We witness a delicate temporality in our otherwise pervasive presence as uninvited persons, cycles of boom and bust reflected through the imaginations of these artist-seekers themselves, whose labour sought to make a kind of sense of lands so generous and fertile they could swallow one whole.
Resource economies of timber, fishing, mining, and agriculture continue to drive the development of the settler-colonial state of western Canada to this day, but the time of naïveté and willful ignorance is now past. All the lights are on and we who are settlers, wherever we may be from, must confront our relationship with these lands and waters and our part in the colonial project. In the archive we see there have always been those who lived as outsiders from the status quo…might a look back reveal ways we can think and act differently in the face of complex challenges to come?
Settler Sites acknowledges the sovereignty and stewardship of the original inhabitants of these territories including but not limited to the səl̓ilwətaɁɬ təməxʷ (Tsleil-Waututh), Homalco, Tla’amin (Sliammon), K’ómoks, Kwakwaka’wakw, Ktunaxa, Métis, Tsuu T’ina, Stoney, Ktunaxa ɁamakɁis, and Niitsítpiis-stahkoii Nations.
Settler Sites is generously supported by Philip Beeman and the Irving K. Barber BC History Digitization Program.
Producer: Glenn Alteen
Archives: Dan Pon
Site design and development: Archer Pechawis
Additional graphics: Sara Tung
Editing: Hilary Wood
Administration: Meagan Kus
Financial Management: Linda Gorrie
Grant Support: Mary Ann Anderson, Little Dog Creative Consulting
Settler Sites © grunt gallery 2020. Please contact dan[at]grunt.ca for research inquiries, questions, or takedown requests.
grunt gallery is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia, the City of Vancouver, Vancouver Foundation, and the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts.
