EDITORIAL – Exhibit proves once again that one person’s junk is another’s art

An editorial by Mel Rothenburger.

HERE’S A POP QUIZ for you. There’s only one question and it just takes a minute but requires some careful contemplation before you answer.

The question is this: Which of the two items in the above photos is art? (“Both” isn’t an allowable answer. If you really do believe it’s “both,” then you have to decide based on which one demonstrates more artistic talent.)

Here’s some background that might help you. The one on the top might look like some old stove pipe, a couple of metal funnels and some twisty wire but, if you think that, you’re obviously not an experienced visitor to the Kamloops Art Gallery.

The piece clearly evokes the historic pre-emption land acquisition process in the province that dates back to the 1800s. What? You didn’t see that right away? Appropriately named “Pre-empt,” it was created by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, who, according to the art gallery, “utilizes found materials — natural and human made — to investigate ideas of economics and land ownership.”

It’s part of a current exhibition at the gallery titled Town & Country: Narratives of Property and Capital, which “troubles the enduring narrative binary of town and country.” “Binary” is a word that appears often in the gallery’s description of the exhibition.

I admit, when I first looked at “Pre-empt,” I saw some old stove pipe and wire, which I could have put together at home in five minutes. I, too, could be an instant artist.

The work in the bottom photo, you might suppose, looks rather like some sort of metal mosquito. Indeed, like “Pre-empt,” it’s made from found materials — nuts and bolts, washers, some railway spikes, a bit of rebar, all welded together. It sits in my rock garden.

But it’s no ordinary metal mosquito. It doesn’t have an official title but I call it “Contagion,” and interpret it to represent humankind’s eternal struggle with the inexorable forces of nature. Do you see it now? It was created by Garden Critters, a Revelstoke endeavor specializing in garden art. We picked it up at their booth in Riverside Park on Canada Day.

The Garden Critters guy creates chickens, mosquitoes, dogs, dragons and all kinds of creatures that I have neither the skill, creativity or time to make myself. It’s incredibly creative and it makes you laugh.

To be clear, I love the Kamloops Art Gallery. It has a long history of junk exhibits that are given lofty titles and interpretations cut from whole cloth. I seldom find any of it to be art but, obviously, others do.

I do, though, enjoy these exhibitions because they obviously reflect what people with a broader interpretation of art than my own like to see. If “Pre-empt” or “Precious” (a painted shovel, pitchfork and other tools hung on a wall by artist Karin Jones) or any of the other things collected for Town and Country speaks to them, well, good. The gallery does a real service to this community by defining just about anything you can think of as art and worthy of display so that everyone can enjoy whatever message they choose to attach to it.

Me, I still prefer art that I can recognize as being something just by looking at it, rather than requiring an instruction manual from the gallery to explain that “This group exhibition, which focuses on histories and practices in so-called British Columbia, approaches the political, economic and representational systems at play in our long-mythologized conceptions of this binary of place, through the work of contemporary artists.”

By now you’ve probably guessed that my own answer — which may well be different from yours — to the pop quiz is “Contagion.” It certainly looks better in the garden than some stove pipe and wire would, and anybody who looks at it knows it’s a large metal mosquito. They can interpret its deeper meaning any way they like.

The art gallery would do well to invite Garden Critters to do an exhibition.

Mel Rothenburger is a former regular contributor to CFJC-TV and CBC radio, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and a Webster Foundation Commentator of the Year finalist. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor.  He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.