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For immediate release Walter Phillips Gallery looks at landscapes and living spaces with two exhibitions
Building a town (or worse — a suburb) in the middle of a spectacular natural landscape is a surefire way to get people talking. In Banff National Park, people have been discussing the pros and cons for more than 100 years. In Donegal, Ireland, they’ve been ruminating on the issue much longer. Two exhibitions opening August 28 at The Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery look at the issue (and the controversy) through the media of photography, drawing, and installation. All over Ireland, one of the biggest bestsellers of 1971 was a DIY manual called Bungalow Bliss by Jack Fitzsimmons (“Six Plans and Six Specifications for only One Hundred Pounds”). Landing in the hands of eager, would-be homeowners, the book was a detailed how-to on building a small home. And following Fitzsimmons’ success, a rash of owner-built, single-story houses began to spread across the dramatic Donegal coastline. Thirty years later, UK-based curator Aoife MacNamara has built an exhibition around the bungalow craze and its consequences, the result of a years-long, evolving study of one small group of homes and their owners. MacNamara has developed Bungalow Blitz around the often-heated animosity between the bungalow builders and the keepers of the traditional beauty of the Irish coastline. “I’m interested in how representations of the landscape, be they photographic, filmic, literary, painterly, or historical — play an important role in the assignment of value to particular places,” MacNamara says. She’s commissioned three artists, Paul Antick, Andrew Kearney, and Jim Grant, working in photography, drawing, and installation, to represent the same set of homes on the southwest coast. Grant’s piece will be a life-sized concrete installation of a bungalow in progress, based on plans from Bungalow Bliss. Earlier stages of this exhibition have been displayed at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture in London, and have toured Ireland. At the close of the Banff show, MacNamara will produce a book in conjunction with the Walter Phillips Gallery, to be published in October, 2004. The second exhibition, Great Expectations: Banff, 1979 and 2004, draws the exploration closer to home. In 1979, Winnipeg-based artist David McMillan produced a series of landscape photographs of the town of Banff during a creative residency at The Banff Centre. The series did not represent the grand mountain vistas normally associated with Banff, instead capturing the back lanes, homes and front yards of its residents. In 2004, McMillan was invited back to Banff to revisit the original series and commissioned to produce the same shots of the town 25 years later. Great Expectations: Banff, 1979 and 2004 presents photographs from both series. The Banff International Curatorial Institute symposium will also present Informal Architectures: A Symposium on Contemporary Art, Architecture and Spatial Culture from October 27 to 30. —30— High-resolution, downloadable images: Bungalow Blitz Great Expectations Media Contact
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