Michael Belmore, Ursula Johnson and Camille Turner - LandMarks works in Border Crossings Magazine
Michael Belmore, Left Standing on a Barren Shore (detail)
“Sense of Site” at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia
Excerpt of article by Ray Cronin · Crossovers - Border Crossings
Re-presenting performance and site-specific art in galleries poses questions for audiences to which there are no easy answers. Is “performance documentation” even art, for instance, or just what its name implies—a document? If something is site-specific, can it exist, as art at least, away from that site? And, anyway, just how much time and effort should be put to preserving something conceived and executed as ephemeral?
“A Sense of Site,” a recent exhibition at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia curated by David Diviney, brought these questions, and more, centre stage. Diviney was one of the curators of the exhibition “Landmarks 2017/Repères 2017,” a project set in and around several national parks and historical sites across Canada, featuring work by Michael Belmore, Rebecca Belmore, Chris Clarke and Bo Yeung, Raphaëlle de Groot, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Maureen Gruben, Ursula Johnson, Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Camille Turner, Douglas Scholes, and Jin-me Yoon. The stated aim of “Landmarks 2017/Repères 2017” was to present projects that invited “people to creatively explore and deepen their connection to the land.” The various projects addressed issues such as Indigenous title, systemic racism, the limits of national identity stories and how individuals mark their presence in the landscape.
At the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the 12 artists took different approaches to presenting versions of their site-specific projects. Some relied on documentation of their performances, along with objects that were used in the performances themselves; some presented new works that were based in the ideas explored in their previous works; and others relied on a mix of these strategies.
Michael Belmore, Ursula Johnson and Douglas Scholes presented new but related works, and Jin-me Yoon presented a series of photographs taken as part of her residency at Pacific Rim National Park. Maureen Gruben, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Camille Turner, and Chris Clarke and Bo Yeung presented videos that documented the performances that were part of their residencies. Raphaëlle de Groot and Rebecca Belmore combined documentation with works reflecting the concerns of their site-specific projects.