At the Belkin Art Gallery, we often receive questions about public art on campus, how artworks come to be sited at the University, how they are funded and what is involved in their ongoing care. Responding to this growing interest, we issue these updates to share news and provide backstory information about what is involved with curating, stewarding and activating the University’s Outdoor Art Collection. The newsletter also offers a forum for the Belkin’s curatorial assistants to share their research about selected works from the collection.

In this edition, two different articles consider temporary public art projects on campus, their value and legacies enduring beyond their actual material and physical duration. In Spill, Pour and Residue: Temporary Outdoor Art at UBC, PhD candidate Alison Ariss cites an artwork by Robert Smithson, an artist who, along with Carl Andre and Hans Haacke (among others), visited the campus in the late 1960s and early 1970s and produced temporary, site-specific artworks that fell outside the purview of the formal Outdoor Art Collection. Despite their ephemeral nature, these works continue to occupy a space in our collective memory. Holly Schmidt, our current artist-in-residence in the Outdoor Art program, also produces temporary works as described in the article Vegetal Encounters by curatorial assistant Andrea Sánchez Ibarrola. Sánchez’s update on Schmidt’s series of projects in UBC’s outdoor spaces chronicles the artist’s rhizomatic approach to building frameworks for learning and sharing.

Donations

Artworks enter the Outdoor Art Collection through new commissions or donations of already existing artworks. The last project to enter the collection through donation was Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Bird’s Native Hosts (1991/2007) in 2007.  This year, the University Art Committee was pleased to accept the donation of Stela I and Stela II (1963) by Elza Mayhew.

Completed in 1963, this pair of abstract, cast aluminum sculptures are excellent examples of Mayhew’s production at a crucial moment in Canadian art history, as well as in her practice. In 1964, Mayhew would represent Canada (with Harold Town) as one of the first Canadian women to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, bringing her innovations in sculptural methods, use of industrial materials and exploration of the human experience to an international audience. These sculptures were two of the thirteen that were included in the exhibition at the Biennale. They are an integral part not only of Canada’s artistic heritage, but also of the history of how that heritage has been presented to the world.

The Stelae will be sited on campus in the Spring of 2020; a proposed location and orientation for the artworks will be presented at an open house in the new year. We are grateful to the Estate of Elza Mayhew for this remarkable donation and to President Santa J. Ono for his generous contribution to the artwork’s siting. In addition to the ongoing support of the University Art Committee, we extend our thanks to the President’s Advisory Committee on Campus Enhancement for their efforts in bringing this important artwork to UBC.

Elza Mayhew (1916–2004) was born in Victoria, BC. She received a BA from UBC (1936) and MFA (1963) from the University of Oregon. Mayhew was known for her abstract sculptures that were typically carved in polystyrene and then cast in aluminum or sometimes bronze. She worked primarily from sketches, rarely from models, and described her work as highly structured and architectural while always relating to the human form. Mayhew produced commissioned works for international events such as Expo 67, Expo 86 and an international trade fair in Tokyo, as well as for public institutions such as the Bank of Canada, the University of Victoria, the Canadian National Capital Commission and the Royal British Columbia Museum. Her work is included in the collections of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the National Gallery of Canada, Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria. Mayhew was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, and was an active member of the Limners Society.

Refurbishment

In addition to researching, commissioning and supporting artists who are developing projects specific to UBC, the role of the Curator of the Outdoor Art Collection is to steward and maintain the existing collection. In the last newsletter, we featured Robert Murray’s Cumbria (1966-67/1995), a modernist sculpture that is being refurbished and moved to a new location on campus. Work began in the Spring of 2019 and is still underway. UBC is built upon a vast network of criss-crossing underground services often making it challenging to site heavy artworks requiring foundations, and Cumbria proved to be no exception. To accommodate the sculpture at University Boulevard and West Mall, a geo-technical survey was completed, a gas line moved and a steam line decommissioned. Construction fencing is now up and formwork for a new concrete platform is underway. Once the concrete has cured, the steel sculpture will be craned into place and the restoration work will unfold in-situ. Anticipated completion, including final landscaping, is scheduled for Spring 2020.

Spill, Pour and Residue: Temporary Outdoor Art at UBC

by Alison Ariss

The time between two events – the recent Spill exhibition at the Belkin and Robert Smithson’s Glue Pour conceived in 1969 – marks a half-century of engagement with contemporary art practices at UBC. In returning to consider Smithson’s creative relationship with Vancouver, what becomes apparent in the act of a pour? What intentionality exists in a pour that is non-existent for a spill? What dialectic is spanned between these moments?

What was Glue Pour? As an outdoor artwork it was ephemeral, lasting in a physical and temporal sense over three days in early January 1970. Robert Smithson’s act of pouring water-soluble glue down the disturbed slope of a ravine remains accessible only through its photographic image.^[1] As image, this partial record forms a muted archive of Smithson’s brief physical presence in Vancouver.

At that time, Christos Dikeakos was a UBC fine art student and participant in Glue Pour. A recent and far-ranging conversation with Dikeakos discussed the transformational state of contemporary art at that moment.^[2] He remembers the campus as a space for experiential and self-directed learning, as far as making and exhibiting art were concerned. Relationships between artists, poets and literati in Vancouver grew closer and informed the students’ thinking through possible spaces and places of exhibition. In this time before the Belkin’s current site existed, the UBC Fine Arts Gallery and the Student Union Building (SUB) gallery were dynamic spaces for artistic innovation. Fine arts students at UBC were closely connected to the Vancouver Art Gallery, taking curatorial courses with Doris Shadbolt, whom Dikeakos recalls as open minded and encouraging.^[3]

Initially invited to Vancouver for the 955,000 exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery (January 14-February 8, 1970) curated by Lucy Lippard, Smithson’s engagement with local artists and students such as Dennis Wheeler further supported the activation of Glue Pour at UBC.^[4] In that moment of 1969, Smithson was experimenting with the visualization of “alluvial/fluvial flows” and concepts of geologic time, as modes of approaching art historical analysis.^[5] Smithson had already photographed his asphalt pour in an abandoned mine near Rome, Italy, and while in Vancouver, he envisioned filming paint pours at the Britannia Beach copper mine.^[6]

Dikeakos recalls the search for the pour location and chancing upon a temporary road cut near the present-day “UBC Information” pull-out on Chancellor Boulevard.^[7] This site was disturbed earth but not yet built upon, a quality of abandonment essential to Smithson’s vision of the pour. Smithson required photographs as no portion of its physical “being” as sculpture would enter the gallery, nor would it be accessible as a public performance. As Dikeakos conveyed, the photography was a collaborative effort choreographed by Smithson, and was intended as a “straightforward” documentation of the event.^[8] Wheeler and Dikeakos used medium-format cameras with black and white film, while Smithson and Lippard shared the use of a small Instamatic camera and colour film.^[9]

It is in the visual record that Glue Pour resonates with Spill exhibition images. Spanning fifty years, these two acts of photographic documentation speak to ideas of purposiveness and containment, accident and rupture. Unlike Smithson’s emphasis on land and geologic time, Spill centres on continental waterways and their sources, and the state(s) of our relationships with these fluid entities. Smithson’s controlled act of pouring anticipated the dissipation of a water-soluble substance, to produce the desired entropic state.^[10] In consideration of waterways as sites of sustenance and degradation, rivers such as the San Juan and the Columbia are explored in Spill through embodied research approaches to the physical and conceptual alterations that modify their movements. For instance, Genevieve Robertson encounters the Columbia River in Still Running Water (2017), where containment of riverine flows through a series of reservoirs effectively eliminates the chance of silt-rich spills of nutrients into the ocean. Each reservoir controls the flow of the river, enacting a metaphoric pour in opposition to the river’s natural flow.

On the other hand, Teresa Montoya’s artworks in Spill interrogate the breach of a containment structure and its spill of toxins into the San Juan River. She tackles the (un)comprehensibility of toxicity through her photographs and multimedia installation of the aftermath of the 2015 Gold King mine accident. Particularly poignant is the visual and chromatic resemblance between Teresa Montoya’s Yellow River (2016) and the few extant Instamatic colour images of Glue Pour. Smithson’s 45-gallon barrel of non-toxic glue was an unexpectedly lurid orange colour, and Dikeakos recalled how it darkened as it slowly spread and dissipated into small runnels in the steady January rain. Smithson had envisioned the aesthetic of black and white photography to convey the seriousness of contemplating geologic strata as metaphor for events and accumulations of history.^[11] Conversely, the effect of three million gallons of toxic waste water that spilled out of the mine’s ruptured retaining wall and into the river was of an entirely different magnitude and not at all purposive. As Montoya explains, this spill transformed the river into an “otherworldly” and opaque yellow torrent, resulting in jarring images reliant upon colour to convey the extremity of its toxicity.

The saturation of red rock and yellow water flowing through Montoya’s images draw attention to earth processes, where natural runoff and industrial discharge may appear undifferentiated. The questions Montoya asks trouble the conflation of such images with toxicity, where contaminants at lower levels have been normalized and become an invisible consequence of a long history of unwelcome extractive practices to the lands of the Navajo Nation. Montoya’s installation of water samples from the river is also reminiscent of Smithson’s “non-sites” but again, only at the level of the visual.^[12] The entrance of this spilled liquid into the space of the gallery is not at its heart a critique of art institutions, but addresses colonial structures and practices of extraction. However, the exhibition is activated beyond the gallery walls as was Smithson’s land art. Spill: Response and Spill: Radio overflow the gallery, generating performative and sonic encounters to raise the consciousness of our ever-embodied relationships with water. The visitor’s encounter with Spill becomes an opportune moment to pour over the realities of the residues located within and beyond each of the artists’ works, residues ever present in land, air and water.

Vegetal Encounters

by Andrea Sánchez Ibarrola

In the Fall 2018 edition of the Outdoor Art Newsletter, curatorial assistant Greg Elgstrand introduced Vancouver-based artist Holly Schmidt as the Outdoor Art program’s inaugural artist-in-residence. Following Schmidt’s work over the last year, this article addresses her art practice, working methodologies and the ways in which her research is being made public.

Holly Schmidt develops most of her work through relational and collaborative processes. Using artist residencies as open-ended productive frameworks, her practice emphasizes the creative process as part of the artwork itself. Schmidt is interested in building socio-ecological relations through diverse poetic gestures that operate in rhizomatic ways, that is, growing as interconnected networks of multi- and interdisciplinary roots. Establishing an analogy with the botanical concept of the rhizome, plant life provides an evocative figuration that shapes her thinking and, in particular, her current project Vegetal Encounters.

Vegetation teaches us another way of understanding time in relation to processes: it reminds us that each process takes its own time and that in slowness many creative possibilities reside. Schmidt has embraced slowness as a methodology for her practice, which has led her focus in the process of experimentation rather than in a fixed result, allowing for the emergence of multiple and diverse outcomes. This is why, when approaching the Belkin curatorial team, she proposed a slow residency that would evolve over a minimum of three years.

Fortunately, this proposal arrived at a timely moment at the Belkin, as their curatorial team, in conversation with the University Art Committee and the Outdoor Art Subcommittee, had proposed a focus on residencies as an approach to commissioning that supports artists to develop a concept over a period of time in consonance with the particular context of the university’s community and environment. This format would prioritize artist-led research projects and engage with the university as a site for experimentation, exploration and interconnection of different areas of knowledge. Like water and soil, the Belkin’s interest and Schmidt’s proposal were a perfect mix to seed Vegetal Encounters.

As her project unfolds around – and along with – plant life, Schmidt acknowledges the privilege of being a guest on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Musqueam and works to honour and respect the traditional knowledge embodied in the plants that are integral to these lands. Through this residency, Schmidt creatively engages with the abundant vegetation and rich biodiversity of this place as a significant source of life, learning and reciprocity. The artist suggests that learning with plant life involves slowing down, using the senses fully, forming deep attachment and allowing for emergence.

More than a metaphor for shaping her practice, one could say that plant life is an active collaborator in Schmidt’s creative process. For instance, in her project All the Trees (2018) with the Vancouver Park Board in Jericho Park, Schmidt invited the community to interact with the site’s vegetation. By placing tags on twenty-five trees, which included an ID number, email address and invitation to send a message, Schmidt encouraged people not only to become more aware of the trees of the park, but also to communicate with plant life in an intimate way. In collaboration with a multidisciplinary group comprised of a horticulturalist, poet, historian and Indigenous herbalist, they replied to the emails “on behalf of the trees.” Ranging from botanical or scientific inquiries to friendly greetings or personal memories, the communication established between participants and the trees invited us to reconsider our own personal relations to all living beings.

In a different way but with a similar poetic gesture, Schmidt’s Forecast (2019) – the first public intervention that developed as part of Vegetal Encounters – offers us an alternative approach to experiencing weather. Throughout the first week of June, when UBC hosted the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Schmidt daily installed a brief text describing the environmental conditions to be expected – “environmental” in the most open sense of the word. Borrowing the predicting language and grammatical structure of weather forecasting, Schmidt’s texts go far beyond traditional meteorological facts like temperature and precipitation, to create richly visual and poetic descriptions that provide a different understanding of how environment and living beings interact to create alternative and dynamic weather conditions. Printed in a mirror-finished vinyl and installed on the glass façade of the Audain Art Centre looking outward to the north, the windows and texts create uneven reflective surfaces that are constantly shifting as the surrounding weather and light conditions change. Passers-by and readers can see themselves reflected on the text, creating a visual allegory of the reciprocal interaction between individuals and the environment.

  

Expanding from this initial Forecast, Schmidt is planning two new iterations of this piece that will grow slowly throughout 2020. One of them will be an online weekly forecast to be posted on the Vegetal Encounters website and linked to the UBC Weather Forecast Station website. Connecting both digital platforms allows us to relate the scientific facts involved in atmospheric conditions with the poetic interpretation of what the weather might be during that week. Schmidt’s second iteration will be a seasonal forecast that describes the conditions expected for each of the four seasons. As site-specific installations on the windows of different buildings across campus, they will explore the notion of weather as a hyperlocal experience by creating descriptions that explicitly address their immediate natural surroundings.

In addition to the Forecast series, Schmidt has been establishing links and building relationships with staff and faculty from different departments across campus whose work addresses plant life from distinct perspectives. A characteristic element of Schmidt’s embodied research process has been conversational walks. By sharing conversations while moving through and observing different sites, the artist not only exchanges ideas with her interlocutors but also learns from their particular ways of interacting with plant ecologies.

It is in these ways – sharing conversations, exchanging information, walking together and performing embodied research – that Schmidt has been preparing fertile ground for future growth. The multi- and interdisciplinary network Holly Schmidt is carefully weaving with her work promises exciting outcomes, encouraging us all to remain aware of our natural surroundings, attentive to the subtle changes that each season brings and remain open to experience the surprising Vegetal Encounters project.

 

IMAGES (FROM TOP):

Myfanwy MacLeod, Wood for the People, 2002. Photo: Barbara Cole.

Elza Mayhew, Stela I in chains preparing for the Venice Biennale, with (l to r) Stela II, Princess, Commedia and Matrix. Photo taken in Oregon, 1963. 

Robert Smithson, Glue Pour, 1970. © 2019 Holt / Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo: Christos Dikeakos.

Teresa Montoya, Yellow Water, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

Holly Schmidt, Forecast (details), 2019. Courtesy of the artist.