FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved

Visual Arts by Monique Westra yellow, no sleep at night Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff runs until May 21, 2000 At Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, Winnipeg artist Jake Moore has created a textbook example of issue-based, postmodern art – provocative in its complexity, but predictable in its requisite recriminations and self-righteousness. Moore’s site-specific installation is about "moral consciousness" as the artist is "...driven by a duty to equality and inclusion." Focusing on Banff National Park, she targets history, capitalism, racism, xenophobia, exploitation and conservation of the environment in an attempt "to redress muddled memories and raise consciousness today." However, if the viewer can get past the overbearing moral stance of the artist and the show’s curator, Melanie Townsend, the exhibition is actually very interesting. Especially striking is the massive mountain that dominates one room, an incredible rendition in paper of Castle Mountain – about 12 feet high, 20 feet wide and eight feet deep. It was created by stacking thousands of tourist brochures, flyers and pamphlets gathered from the hotels and resorts that compete for the tourist dollar in Banff. The result is spectacular – an enormous mountain of paper, its "rock face" profiled to resemble the familiar shape of Castle Mountain and articulated by horizontal layers that recall the stratification of rock characteristic of the mountains in this region. The massive presence of this paper mountain triggers a train of associations. In this way, the grandeur of the real mountain qua wilderness is reduced to attraction status, a gimmick to lure tourists from around the world by the very promotional material that Moore used to build this paper dummy. She condemns the tourism industry that destroys the wilderness even as it extols it. The paper, its fantastic surplus so conspicuous here, effectively transforms the mountain into a monument of consumption, excess and greed. This is not the only reference to Castle Mountain in the installation. In the first room, its walls painted a deep red – the red of anger – are three blowups of black-and-white archival photographs from Glenbow Museum. In one picture, taken at the base of Castle Mountain, we see barbed wire and prisoners. This mountain with its fantasy appellation was the site of a prisoner of war camp during the First World War, a fact – deliberately, Moore contends – omitted from the official story of the National Park, a vaunted history that literally describes only the peaks and never the valleys. Moore wants us to remember the sordid events that are a part of collective memory in this place. Another disturbing photograph is of the Cave and Basin, where we see armed guards surveying a group of prisoners. The exhibition catalogue explains that during the First World War, Ukrainians and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war were interned in camps in what is now our pristine national park. The photographs are printed on three feet by four feet sheets of canvas to remind us of the tents that housed the park’s prisoners. The Cave and Basin occupies a venerable place in the history of Banff as its discovery as a mineral springs led directly to the building of the Banff Springs Hotel by the CPR in 1887, thus launching the tourist industry which has remained a mainstay of the national park. The Hot Springs at Banff are associated with sulphur, which brings us to the first part of the title of this installation. The second room of the installation is painted yellow – the exact mustard-like hue of the powdered sulphur that is piled onto an aluminium dish attached midway on a wall. Undeniably, the hot springs conjure pleasurable associations – relaxation, leisure, warmth. But, these pleasant thoughts are overwhelmed by the distinctive smell of sulphur, a horrible acrid stench of rotten eggs fills the room, prompting us to turn our minds to other historical truths like the sordid legacy of the internment camp at the Cave and Basin or its class and race affiliations. Historically, it was only upper-class white tourists who bathed in these soothing waters. A barely visible text inscribed on the wall beside the aluminium tray asks: "Is this the smell of hatred and fear or just the smell of money?" The phrase "no sleep at night" refers to the First Nation lore that revered Banff as a hallowed site of ceremony and burial, but not as a place to live or even to sleep in. In the catalogue, Townsend aligns the idea of sleeplessness with the colour yellow as the colour of fear and cowardice. She also manages to connect a native belief with white guilt, piously reciting a veritable litany of politically correct mea culpa: "Sleeplessness, too is a consequence of guilt; the guilt of histories known and unknown, told and untold; the guilt of capitalist interest; the guilt of the survivors who inhabit Banff and this continent with the knowledge that it is stolen land." The meandering Bow River is referenced by a tangled mass of electrical cords that traverse the gallery floor in the yellow room. Interspersed in this "stream" are "rocks" in the form of radios from the 1950s. The radios refer to the public airwaves which broadcast only the official story of Banff; its government-sanctioned homogeneous voice silencing all other voices that share a part of Banff’s history. To redress this wrong, Moore has written modern-day radio-dramas based on little-known historical facts that she found in the course of her extensive research in the archives of the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies and the Glenbow Museum. Even though she is critical of Parks Radio, she uses it to broadcast her stories. (Use and abuse is a typically postmodern strategy.) Imitating the casual conversational programming style of Parks Radio, she seamlessly intersperses her voice with road conditions, safety tips and weather reports. "It is here that Moore’s installation bleeds beyond the walls of the Gallery, into cars and campers, hotel rooms and homes of tourists and residents with obscure tales of, among others, a burial site beneath the Banff Springs Hotel." The artist and the curator are not subtle in their disdain for historians and museum curators. Moore is careful to distance her methodology from such mainstream work that misleads us with assumptions of truth and authenticity: "Unlike the historian or curator, Moore denies that her constructs present a conclusive thesis." Yes, of course. One major tenet of postmodernist ideology is to deny absolute truth, to insist on continuously fluctuating and shifting realities that resist closure. Yet, the catalogue essay says that Moore’s installation operates like a historical marker that "leaves the ultimate conclusion to the viewer." What ultimate conclusion? I thought the whole point was that there is no ultimate conclusion, only enhanced awareness.

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