Artists search for home in A Question of Place

With works by six internationally recognized artists, A Question of Place opens Saturday, April 3 in the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre. Curator Candice Hopkins has invited Jimmie Durham, Faye HeavyShield, Zacharias Kunuk, Brian Jungen, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and Truman Lowe to show works inspired by contemporary takes on traditional Aboriginal ideas of home, community, and cultural change.

Nunavut (Our Land), a thirteen-part video series by Zacharias Kunuk, recreates Inuit life in the mid-1940s, a time when centuries-old nomadic traditions were brushing up against modern government and settlement life. Kunuk is best known for Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), which won the Camera d’Or award for best feature film at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001.

A Question of Place will also feature new works by Arkansas-born artist and activist Jimmie Durham, whose installation stoneheart was invited to the 2003 Venice Biennial, and Wisconsin-based sculptor Truman Lowe, who has exhibited in the White House Sculpture Garden and at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis. Together, their subtly political works shift the gallery into an active site for exploration into themes of fictional, creative, and Aboriginal communities.

Saskatchewan-based interdisciplinary artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle will exhibit an original piece, and present a community art project entitled Echoes and Transmissions: Voices of the Land, a series of experimental audio and digital works produced collaboratively with students at the Morley Community School on the Morley Reserve just east of Banff.

Faye HeavyShield, whose work is in public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Calgary’s Glenbow Museum and the Heard Museum in Phoenix, has brought her installation body of land to the exhibition. It’s a series of more than 200 photographs folded into small cones and pinned to the gallery walls, reminiscent of the time when the silhouettes of hundreds of teepees could be seen on the treeless plains.

Designs from Brian Jungen’s Bush Capsule Study show a small solitary dome, created in part from his memories of seasonal shelters used by his mother’s family in northeastern B.C. The Vancouver-based artist, winner of the first Sobey Art Award, builds hybrid forms using contemporary materials like plastic lawn chairs and Nike Air Jordans.

A Question of Place runs April 3 through May 23, 2004. The opening reception is Saturday, April 3, at 3 pm. Before the reception, at 2 pm, Faye HeavyShield, Cheryl L’Hirondelle and curator Candice Hopkins will host a walk-through tour of the exhibition. Both events are free and open to the public.

On Friday, May 14, at 7 pm the Walter Phillips Gallery will present the North American premiere screening of The Pursuit of Happiness by Durham along with Kunuk’s Nunaqpa (Going Inland). The free screening will be in the Max Bell Auditorium at The Banff Centre.

The Walter Phillips Gallery is located in Glyde Hall at The Banff Centre, and is open Tuesday to Sunday, from 12 noon to 5 pm, and Thursdays from 12 noon to 9 pm. Admission to the gallery is free.

For more information about this exhibition and the curator’s statement, visit www.banffcentre.ca/wpg/exhibit.htm.

Downloadable images are available.

This exhibition was made possible with the generous support of The Canada Council for the Arts

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