New Nanaimo Art Gallery exhibition looks at the stories that animate us
The exhibition uses a mix of paper and animation to bring to life a collection of oral histories, cosmologies, personal memories, and dreams. / Image: Marina Roy, The Floating Archipelago
The Nanaimo Art Gallery will be opening its new exhibition Stories that animate us this week that will share and reflect on the importance of stories telling.
The exhibition, which is touring from the Vancouver Art Gallery, uses a mix of paper and animation to bring to life a collection of oral histories, cosmologies, personal memories, and dreams. With 11 different artists, they reflect on the way stories are created by the themes of culture, community, memory, death, and identity.
Jesse Birch is the curator for the Nanaimo Art Gallery. He said Stories that animate us is a feature for the gallery. For the past two years, the gallery has been holding an inquiry asking What stories do we tell? This exhibition will be the last one as a part of this inquiry.
“So the last eight exhibitions have been thinking about this question. So when this touring show came on offer, it was just like, ‘Oh, this is perfect.’ What a stellar way to end the question by this,” Birch said. “This exhibition has so many different artists in it, thinking about storytelling, and how stories can come to life through art practice. It's like a great send-off for the question.”
Birch said that because there are so many pieces of artwork featured, someone could spend hours in the gallery.
“It feels like a very cohesive exhibition, even though there are artists from such different backgrounds, such different generations, and such different points of view?” Birch said.
Birch mentioned that because there are so many pieces, it was a challenge to find out how everything could fit together.
“There are a lot of deficiencies with this building because it was a former bank building. It was never made to be an art space, and so that really restricts the exhibitions we can bring,” Birch said. “So in that sense, a show like this has so many works in, that it can be a challenge to lay it out. I'm excited about the way this one has come together.”
He did add that the limited space in the gallery will add a new way for the gallery goers to experience the artwork differently compared to bigger art galleries.
“In a larger gallery, sometimes you see things separately. It's in a different room or on a different wall, and in here, all the works speak to each other, and they speak to each other so well that I think it benefits this show, but sometimes it doesn't,” Birch said.
When asked what he thinks people will be able to take away from the exhibition, Birch said that it is not what they take away, but what they bring.
“Well, I hope that they don't just take something away from it, I hope they bring something to it. We all have stories. Human beings, like to evolve around storytelling. It's how we share information across generations, and we all bring our own cultural stories, our own individual stories,” Birch said. “And being able to bring those stories in conversation with other stories from artists from lots of different places, and lots of different points of view, I think will be an exciting experience for people.”
Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo is one of the artists whose work is featured in the Stories that animate us. He immigrated from El Salvador in the 1980s in the middle of a 12-year civil war taking place in the country. He said a lot of his artwork speaks to the collective memories and historical trauma from this time.
Most of his works are mixed media drawings on paper, this art style is something he believes is the best way to tell his stories.
“I'm able to just evoke memory work, as I'm doing research on personal and historical memory, or collective memory, and start drawing from sources. Whether that's family stories or digging up the oral storytelling tradition, or just sourcing photographs from that time period, circa civil war period, and just measuring all of that in my drawn work,” Castillo said.
Castillo said he has been drawing since he was a kid and then later in life he attended art school where he learned artistic skills but also how to find his own style.
“Instructors really just teach people how to improve their observational skills in drawing, and then they are encouraged to just find their own voice or their own style or technique in drawing,” Castillo said.
He explained that storytelling has a big part in everything he makes as a lot of his works feature his personal voice with historical and social content along with myths and mythology.
I'm also interested in the oral tradition of Indigenous storytelling, and so that's part of the equation in my work, it's largely by and large, influenced by the two,” Castillo said. “So everything they do is storytelling, in a way, it's just creating my own myth, my own mythology, or my own mythos.”
Castillo said he hopes this artwork creates space for people to dig deeper into what the images mean; to wonder what it could be about rather than what it says it is about.
“I often say this, but I don't want to impose my own narrative on people. They have to work on interpreting what the artwork is about while keeping in mind that this person comes from a specific cultural background,” Castillo said. “You have to know the basis of what the art and the artist is about.”
He said he wants his work to start conversations and have other people bring their own interpretations. As well because his artwork features stories of conflict, he hopes it inspires people to look into other conflicts that are happening around the world.
“We have to think about other places in conflict in light of today, and why this keeps happening. That's what I wish them to think about when they look at my work,” Castillo said.
Stories that animate us will run from February 3rd to April 7th, with an opening reception tonight February 2nd from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Funding Note: This story was produced with funding support from the Local Journalism Initiative, administered by the Community Radio Fund of Canada.