PREVIEW
BILLY’S VISION
Andrew Hunter
Runs until November 25
Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff)
Exploring the museum through Billy's Vision
Artist,curator and historian Andrew Hunter creates a compelling tale
"When I was a kid, I used to go to the museum with my grandmother a lot," says multi-talented artist Andrew Hunter. "It wasn't a strictly educational thing, we would look at a photograph and ask, 'Who do you think that is?' We didn't look at the labels."
It was this kind of questioning and exploration that led Hunter to work in a way that challenges the very definition of a museum. Billy's Vision uses the form of a museum exhibit to tell a fictional story, inspired by and incorporating historical objects. The project began when The Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon asked Hunter to put together an exhibition featuring pieces from its collection. Inspired by stories from his grandparents about life in 1930s Saskatchewan, he selected works by western Canadian artists from that era. Lawren Harris, William Kurlek and Illingworth Kerr are included. Extensive research led Hunter to other sources: historical objects, film footage and archival photographs.
The main photograph in the show, the one that triggered Billy's story, is a blurry image of a man and two children running towards a small cabin during a prairie dust storm. Very few people knew Billy, but he seemed to have a special relationship with a woman named Anne and her two children. Together, they lived on an abandoned farm in St. Laurent, Saskatchewan, an isolated cabin near Banff, and a shack near Los Alamos, New Mexico. An unusual figure, he is described as a tall, thin man with long arms, and strange silver-blue skin.
Some of the most striking elements in the exhibition are the ones Hunter constructed himself. Every object that belonged to Billy is covered with distinctive markings inspired by the "vision" of the title. Images of floating triangles, golden rays of light and a mushroom cloud came to Billy in a trance-like state. These recurring events were recorded in small journals filled with poems and drawings, carved into Billy's mandolin and embroidered onto his long-armed suit jacket. The obsessive decoration in Billy's prairie shack was so intense that one witness described it as a kind of temple or chapel. That building is reconstructed inside the Walter Phillips Gallery.
While working as a curator, Hunter began to question how and why museums display their collections. Placing objects and images together, using them to tell a story, the curator has a subjective, powerful role in this process. Like the telephone game many of us played as children, where a simple phrase is passed through many different people, new meanings are attached to objects and images over time, by the people that record and interpret them. Hunter wanted to explore the boundaries of this process.
There is often a virtually blank slate to work with. In many institutions, crates full of photographs are labelled with just the name of a city and an approximate date. Most of these materials, although valuable, are hardly ever seen. These are the tools that Hunter uses.
It is difficult to separate reality from fiction in Billy's Vision. There are grey areas and flights of imagination in the "evidence" presented, ignoring the neatly displayed, resolved narratives of a traditional museum. It is the job of a museum to tell stories, and the story of Billy is compelling and absorbing. What is "true" and what is not doesn't matter. A well-written novel has just as much to tell us as a history textbook about a time, place and person. |
