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Exhibition:

This is it with it as it is 
Curated by Wil Aballe

​Art History and Visual Art (AHVA) Gallery, Audain Art Centre
University of British Columbia

Opening Wed, Nov 23, 6-8 PM
Exhibition: Nov 24, 2016 - Jan 14, 2017 (holiday closure Dec 10-Jan 2)
Hours: Tues-Sat, 12-4 PM

Anonymous 19th century Indigenous artist
Ruth Beer
Douglas Coupland
Beau Dick
Christos Dikeakos
Keith Doyle
Michael Drebert
Lawren Harris
A.Y. Jackson
Germaine Koh
Ebony Rose
Kika Thorne
Peter von Tiesenhausen
Samonie Toonoo

In Canada, art making concerned with landscape is unavoidably tied to the 
narratives of place - local and nationalist, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. The 
thematic of the Canadian landscape in Canadian art, say, through the viewpoint of 
artists such as Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson, is an expansive and problematic 
subject matter that came to communicate the character of a wildly romanticized 
northern environment.

Such desperately romantic ideas about what can summarily be called 'the 
environment' (the "it" in the title) turn on a Faustian paradox: human survival 
requires the extraction of resources, the consequences of which threaten planetary 
existence. In the face of a seemingly unstoppable and increasingly injurious 
transformation of the world, there are related binaries between humans and nature 
- the tamed and the wild, the known and the unknown, and the mechanized and the 
untainted. These are contemplated by the contemporary works of Ruth Beer, 
Douglas Coupland, Beau Dick, Christos Dikeakos, Keith Doyle, Michael Drebert, 
Germaine Koh, Ebony Rose, Kika Thorne and Samonie Toonoo, which reveal the 
narratives of human endeavour contained within landscapes, amid concerns about 
tipping points, ocean gyres, fluorocarbons and melting icecaps. 

- Michael Prokopow

Dean (Interim), Graduate Studies and Associate Professor, Faculty of Liberal Arts 
and Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies
OCAD University