Visual essay: Keywords: informal learning, arts-based research, pedagogy, artist/museum

collaborations, socially–engaged new media, environmental interactive art

Title: Catch and Release: Artworks Inspiring Insight into Environmental Issues

Ruth Beer and Kit Grauer

Abstract:

Catch + Release is a research and creation government-funded exhibition of interactive new media artworks produced by a team of artists, educators and designers in partnership with Parks Canada’s Gulf of Georgia Cannery Museum National Historic Site. The exhibition addresses marine environments and coastal communities that once relied on fishing. Through viewer engagement with the artworks, within the context of the museum, the exhibition fosters awareness of the region’s social history and contemporary conditions—“catching” stories and responding and contributing or “releasing” stories into the public sphere. The aesthetic and pedagogical strategies for promoting sensory, experiential, participatory learning opportunities and critical engagement, acknowledge the museum as an important informal educational site in its role as custodian, maker of meaning and source of regional identity. The exhibition’s themes resonate globally in coastal communities that share challenges in adapting to (g)local circumstances of cultural and geographic transitions.

This visual essay presents an exhibition component of Catch + Release: Mapping Stories of Geographic and Cultural Transitions, an interdisciplinary collaborative project, supported by a Research and Creation in the Fine Arts Grant (2009-2013) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The project, involves artists, educators and designers in producing artworks that critically engaged with community members around cultural and environmental issues impacting local, and by extension global coastal communities.

Museums, such as the Gulf of Georgia Cannery in Steveston, BC, are public spaces that support the promotion of culture and education and advocate diffusion of knowledge and experience (Hooper Greenhill, 2007).

In the late 19th century, Steveston was the “salmon capital of the world”. Since the closing of the cannery 30 years ago, Steveston has changed from being a fishing community, to a gentrified suburb and tourist destination. The former buildings and canneries were demolished, with the exception of the Gulf of Georgia Cannery, a National Historic Site fought for and developed by the community in conjunction with Parks Canada. Some of the architectural elements of the former canneries have been preserved along the urban planning boardwalk.

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The Gulf of Georgia Cannery Museum National Historic Site is a destination site for bus loads of tourists, school groups and local residents who come to understand the historical and current issues around the fishing industry on Canada’s west coast. Our installation was a departure from the usual didactic displays.

This installation view includes sound posts, digital story wall, sculptures and an interactive projection. Through creative approaches to public engagement the project examines “salmon” as a departure point for capturing and disseminating stories that implicate exhibition viewers. Participatory interaction is designed to encourage the viewer to experience a sense of agency and inclusion for their role in the disappearance of salmon and related ecological and industrial concerns. Each of the elements of the exhibit works with different sensory modalities and is related to each other and the historical and cultural exhibit.

Sound Posts are sensor-enabled, interactive sculptures that include sounds of wind and boats. Made from the salmon cans used in the cannery displays, they allude to levels of past, present and future through association with visual and auditory clues.

Geo-forms incorporated video, interactive LED lights, and references deep time and the geomorphology of salmon habitats. The concentric rings of colour evoke ripples of currents caused by the disruption of still waters. The sensor activated lights were affected by the proximity of viewers to the artwork. Participants saw the impact of their close observation as a metaphor for our unconscious actions.

Mosaic, a multi level video montage of interviews about associations with salmon from different viewpoints included: a chef; a marine biologist; a former cannery worker now reflexologist; a Haida carver and Save our Salmon activist; a museum interpreter; children visiting the site; a dancer interpreting salmon; and sport and commercial fishers. Each story could stand alone or add to the levels of meaning in association with the others.

The fragmented video component breaks apart a single truth and reveals the complexity that exists within a community. In this way, the exhibition encouraged the viewer to find his/her own voice within the sea of voices gathered by the artists. It reinforced Butlerʼs (2005) idea that there is no authentic “I”, who can speak from outside of its own social matrix. There are no authentic stories to be told, only sets of relations to be negotiated.

Disrupting Currents was our interactive projection using real time data and underwater sounds from Canada’s Neptune Marine Observatory situated off the west coast in ocean areas that historically were rich in salmon.

The use of digital interactive installation and sensor technology aimed to create an immersive environment where participants are actively engaged and learn about social history and ecology from the vantage point of today.

This research and creation exhibition at the intersection of socially-engaged art, interactive new media and pedagogy, positions the museum as a social institution that acts as an informal educational site of learning and a narrative space where the public, artist/research/educator team and museum professionals can share in the process of constructing meaning and promoting critical thinking (Bal, 1996; Camnitzer, 2011). This type of collaboration references discourses about practice-based research in contemporary art (Leavy, 2009) and multifaceted interpretations of community-engaged or new genre art (Bishop, 2006; Coutts & Jokela, 2008; Kester, 2004). The notion of community in this article intersects Gusfield’s (1975) two interpretations: the territorial coverage of a geographic location and the relational cohesion of human relationships that move beyond that location’s limits. The intersection of these two interpretations is aligned with Dewey’s (1927) assertion that “[a] Great Community can only occur with free and full intercommunication” (p. 211). New directions in contemporary art practices seek convergence with communities through interactive engagement, providing an artistic inquiry approach that emerges from real-life issues and experiences within and around the communities. Artists increasingly turn to educational strategies of learning in informal settings to create artworks that operate as pedagogical encounters ((Allen, 2011; Podesva, 2007; Rogoff, 2006, 2010). Institutions, such as social history museums, have begun to invite artistic inquiry (Villeneuve & Love, 2007) by presenting temporary art exhibitions (Doherty, 2009; Montmann, 2006) that challenge conventional displays. Collaborations between these institutions, artists, and educators broaden audiences and create a dynamic expansion of pedagogical opportunities for viewer engagement, alternate modes of participation, meaning-making, and knowledge construction (Bishop, 2006a), along with new spaces for artistic exchange or encounter.

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Authors note: We gratefully acknowledge financial support of this research through a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research and Creation in the Fine Arts Grant, Catch+Release Mapping Stories of Geographic and Cultural transition (Ruth Beer, principal investigator, Kit Grauer co investigator). With the exception of the black and white photograph from the Gulf of Georgia archives, all photographs are the authors.