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In this series, The Globe and Mail partners with award-winning platform Wondereur to explore the diversity of contemporary art from a completely new perspective. The Globe and Wondereur will approach radically different minds engaged in culture across the country and around the world. Each month, we will ask them to share with us the work of a contemporary Canadian artist who deeply touches them. This month, Globe Arts editor Jared Bland talks to Sarah Milroy, art critic and curator of the exhibition From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia, currently showing at the Art Gallery of Ontario, about the the work of Carr and that of Milroy's chosen contemporary artist, Charles Stankievech.

The recipient of numerous awards, Ryan Walker blurs the boundaries between photojournalism, documentary and conceptual art. Here he explores Sarah Milroy's world.

Was there art in your home while you grew up?

Definitely. My mother was Elizabeth Nichol, who started the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver. So we always had art in our house, kind of extraordinary art in fact, because she was very interested in American Pop Art. So, for example, we had Andy Warhol’s Vote McGovern print over the fireplace, which is a bilious green Richard Nixon with the slogan scrawled underneath. Kids would come home from school with me and there would be this thing over the fireplace that we had to deal with before we could do anything else.

Documenting the future of the art world, Wondereur is a ground-breaking cultural platform capturing the creative process of the most inspiring artists worldwide and providing exclusive access to their work. To learn more about Sarah Milroy’s top pick in contemporary art, continue to Wondereur’s photo documentary on Charles Stankievech.

Was art then the central language of your youth?

It was just a part of what was happening. People like Gathie Falk were part of our family life, and later when my mum started representing Bill Reid, he sometimes came over. People would come and go. One of the things that really strikes me is that my mother was able to create, in her gallery, this space where very different kinds of people could come together and connect. And she did it with such grace and subtlety. There would be some forestry-industry magnate talking to an artist, or an academic would come in and meet a mining executive, and there would be a conversation. There was always a really rich mix of people. And she was also very good at finding the one thing to say that would open up a work of art for the client but not overdetermine their experience. She was never what I would call an “art bully,” someone who would say “this is how to read it and this is why it’s important and this is what this other person in Europe thinks is important about this.” My mom would just sprinkle a little bit of her own special sauce and stand back and let the work do its thing. It was really kind of magical, how she could do that, connect with people that way.

Tell me about your relationship with Emily Carr.

If you grew up as a person with an interest in art in B.C., you definitely knew about Carr. If you were a woman growing up in B.C. of a creative bent, there was a way in which her example gave permission, continues to give permission, for people to live the kind of life that works for them and pursue their interests. If you want to have your sitting-room furniture up on the ceiling on pulleys so you can have room to paint, then do it. The people who will judge you are probably not worth your attention.

Photo: Ryan Walker

Because of the model of her own life?

Yes, the model of her own life. And also her sensitivity to the First Nations presence in the landscape, her reverence for that. I think it has contributed to a different culture in B.C.

At what point did you go from being a person who knew a lot about Emily Carr to a person who is…

Obsessed? Well it actually happened here at the AGO, I was asked to give a talk to a group of women donors when the big 2007 Emily Carr touring show was here years ago. Matthew Teitelbaum [the AGO’s outgoing director] asked me to speak about my relationship with Carr, and what I spoke about that night was how, when I look at Emily Carr, I find myself trying to understand her experience. I spoke about my own experience of growing up in B.C., loving Northwest Coast art so much and feeling such a close sense of identification with it, and yet knowing that it’s not my culture to love, and knowing, in fact, that the culture that I’m a part of is the culture that nearly destroyed those cultures – so it’s kind of a weird vexed love, it’s very complicated.

And Carr gives you a window onto that?

I can answer that with a story. In the course of the Carr research, I went to Alert Bay. It’s a place Carr visited several times and I had this feeling that I needed to go there to get started on my essay for the book. I happened to be there at the same time that a film crew was visiting the residential school, which has just been torn down this spring, but which was then boarded up and condemned. There was a group of residential-school survivors who were going back to visit the school and walk the halls with the film crew and tell their stories. They asked me to join them, which I felt was a great honour, and so we went into the school together and we walked from room to room as people told us what had happened to them. And I had known about the residential schools, we all know about the residential schools and have heard the terrible stories, we’ve read the accounts in the newspapers. But you can learn something with your head, and then there’s a way in which you can learn something more deeply. I really felt like furniture started to move around in my head in a very different way, all the way through this project.

How does that impact your work as a curator?

It has made me curious, I think, about different kinds of knowledge. One of the great moments for me was showing Emily Carr’s painting Totem and Forest to the Haida carver Jim Hart – who had helped to advise me on the indigenous objects for our show in the U.K. I would look at that painting and I would say, Oh, it’s cubist-influenced, she’s probably seen this artist or that artist, and the composition is thus and such. Jim looked at it and he saw his family pole from Tow Hill, near Masset, where he lives. It’s now in storage there. And he then could tell me about the person he thinks made the carving, his ancestor who commissioned the pole, what the occasion might have been for the raising of the pole, what the story is on the pole – the story of the bear mother, and what it means. The real kicker was when we were making some joke together about the low man on the totem pole, and he said, “No no no, it’s really interesting you mention that because in our culture, the person at the bottom of the pole is the most important person, because he holds everyone up.” So there’s a totally diametrically opposite notion of leadership there, what leadership is. Leadership is a responsibility to hold other people up, not an entitlement to control other people from the top. Right? It’s conceived completely in opposition to our ways. So it’s no small wonder that we’ve had some disjuncture coming together across that cultural divide. But it’s certainly we who come out looking like the vulgarians.

Does Charles Stankievech’s work have connection in your mind to the work of Emily Carr?

I think both artists are interested in the way in which we, as human beings, relate to the natural world, and to the landscape. When you think of a painting like Carr’s famous Indian Church, a picture she made of a white clapboard church in Friendly Cove, on northern Vancouver Island, you can see that she is making a picture about a disjuncture between the environment and the colonial presence there. She goes out of her way to emphasize the geometry of the church – its right angles and straight lines and bright white – as a contrast to the surging and curving shapes of the dark trees and branches. In [the film and sound installation] The Soniferous Aether of the Land Beyond the Land Beyond, Stankievech is setting up a similar kind of opposition: the purity and almost lunar featurelessness of the landscape, which Stankievech shot using only starlight, and in it the presence of this old relic of a Cold War intelligence-gathering station in Alert, out there in the middle of nothing. “The land beyond the land beyond” is a translation of the Inuit term for this place; they deemed it too cold to hunt there or to set up camp. But now, there really is no land beyond.

There’s another thing. Stankievech has made the observation that a culture will show its values most clearly at its fringes, and I think he’s right about that. I think this is what Conrad was thinking about when he wrote Heart of Darkness. For this reason, too, Stankievech’s piece makes for sort of melancholy meditation. The audio portion of the work is the chatter of intercepted Russian radio transmissions, which he has blended into a kind of digital soundscape. It’s a soundscape of fear and surveillance. It speaks about who we are today, but set against this primeval backdrop of snow and stars and sky. It makes you fear for our souls.

Photos: Ryan Walker

So his work is frightening?

I think what excites me is when I see an artist that is making work that helps us see more clearly the world we live in. And I think Charles’s work is, for me, kind of like the artistic equivalent of watching Citizenfour. I think it gives us information we need to know about the way we behave, and the implications of that. What I found poignant about Charles’s Soniferous Aether is the sense of the last possible frontier, like even in this place that’s so far away, and that is so pristine and where we haven’t managed to mess things up yet – even there there is this trace, and the trace that’s left is one that speaks of our paranoia and fear and desire for control. A human virus, the European strain.

He has a piece called Loveland which is this Arctic landscape in daylight and then there’s a purple fog that comes streaming at you across the ice, so again it’s about that human stain. But it’s curious because you look at the purple, and initially you take pleasure in the colour – it’s a fanciful colour. And then you realize this is possibly highly toxic, the colour is so synthetic, and your experience of it starts to change. Telling you about this reminds me of flying north from Iqaluit to Igloolik, which was a three-hour flight in a supply plane. I was sitting in the front with the pilot and there was this brown colour in the atmosphere above the horizon that was getting browner and browner as we headed further north. I asked the pilot, “What is that? Is that colour reflected off the ground?” We were flying over tundra. He said, “No, that’s China. That’s the air blowing north over the pole from Asia that you’re seeing.” That was 24 years ago.

From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia runs at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario until Aug. 9 (ago.net).

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Photo by Johan Hallberg Campbell