Media Release

October 14, 2009
High resolution photos available

The Walter Phillips Gallery juxtaposes vintage Canadian photography, contemporary Salishan weaving

Laid Over to Cover: Photography and Weaving in the Salishan Landscape
October 17 to December 13, 2009
Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre
Curators’ and artists’ talk: Saturday, October 17, 1:30 p.m.
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 17, 3 to 5 p.m.
Guest curators: David Bellman and Meirion Cynog Evans
Organized by Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver
Information: 403.762.6301 or 1.800.413.8368

In the late 1800s, the Canadian Pacific Railway contracted photographers to document the line’s great western expansion, capturing the people who built the line and the territory it travelled through. The CPR collection has become a vital archive of Canada’s early history, and in particular the history of the west, but it didn’t accurately reflect the culture that already existed in the west before the line was built. This month, the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre brings together two important historical records of industry and art in Alberta and British Columbia — vintage photographs commissioned by the CPR, and traditional and contemporary weavings by the interior and coast Salish people.

Laid Over to Cover, organized by North Vancouver’s Presentation House Gallery and curated by Meirion Cynog Evans and David Bellman, traces the history of a particular western Canadian landscape over the course of more than 100 years. Photographs, commissioned by the CPR and contracted to Montreal’s William Notman Studio, were shot between 1871 and 1900, tracing the line as it made its way from the Rocky Mountains to the west coast. The pictures captured a previously unrecorded landscape, punctuated by evidence of contact between the region’s Aboriginal people and the newly arrived colonists.

While the CPR photographers — William McFarlane Notman and Benjamin Baltzley — were at work, the Salishan people (whose traditional territory ranged from the Kootenay region west to Vancouver Island and south as far as contemporary Oregon) were recording their own customs, culture, and landscape in weaving. In a society without written language but with an intricate oral tradition, cedar basket-making and ceremonial wool blanket weavings were embedded with cultural and spiritual meaning.

Laid Over to Cover includes an extensive sample of the CPR’s vintage photography, along with Salishan basket weavings made throughout the 20th century. The curators have also invited contemporary Salishan artists Melvin Williams of the Lil’wat Nation and Keith Nahanee of the Squamish Nation to participate in the show. Their contemporary woven work ties together a century of Salishan culture and artisanship.

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More information about the Walter Phillips Gallery