It is with this legacy of segregation that arts organizations in Canadian national park towns still contend\u200a\u2014\u200aparticularly since many of them steward large collections of landscape paintings that depict the iconic mountain scenery, emptied of occupants, that seem to romanticize the historical dispossession of Indigenous land that made their institutional existence possible. The Banff Centre is certainly one such institution, and its Walter Phillips Gallery directly engages with its connection to this legacy in The Shape of an Echo<\/em>. Landscapes produced throughout the twentieth century by the Banff Centre\u2019s students, faculty, and residents line three of the main gallery\u2019s four walls, and a break in the back wall leads to an anterior room of even more mountain paintings. Crisp woodblock prints and meticulous watercolours by the gallery\u2019s namesake, Walter J. Phillips, appear in large numbers, having been moved from their permanent homes in various campus buildings. The viewer may note that the earliest of these were created in the 1920s, when parks conservation consultant Charles Gordon Hewitt was making the case that Indigenous peoples\u2019 \u201cpassion for killing\u201d had precipitated a \u201crelentless war on the animals.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mounted horizontally on the far wall of the main gallery are eight oil landscapes, each depicting an angle of the Rocky Mountains or the lakes and rivers of the region. Many of these rarely exhibited pieces are astonishingly handsome\u200a\u2014\u200apieces such as George D. Pepper\u2019s slickly articulated Laryx Lake Canadian Rockies<\/em> and Carl Rungius\u2019s jewel-toned Mount Rundle, Late Fall <\/em>are matter-of-fact, but also belie something luminous\u200a\u2014\u200atheir surfaces, shielded archivally for some time, are radiantly colourful, brushstrokes glistening as though the paint would still be wet to the touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More recent works are peppered among, and thus set against, these pieces. Next to several of Phillips\u2019s woodblock prints is Allan Harding MacKay\u2019s sickly yellow Vapours after WPG<\/em> (1998), <\/em>in which the mountainous silhouettes appear to be scraped into gluey layers of wax and varnish. Next to the former\u2019s precise colour blocking, the latter\u2019s polluted mixed media feels uneasy, a reminder of ever-encroaching climatological threats to the park\u2019s preservationist purpose. Quick, humorous sketches of symbolic western Canadian park imagery by Brian Jungen seem to parody the Parks Canada interpretation tents just down the hill from the gallery in the centre of Banff.Drawing the eye across the room, glowing as though backlit, is a strikingly large chromogenic photograph of Lake Louise from Jin-me Yoon\u2019s Souvenirs of the Self <\/em>series(1991\u200a\u2013\u200a\u200a2000). Here, the artist stands resolute and expressionless in front of the same thawing lake duplicated by one plein air painter after another, punctuating the familiar (and popular tourist) site with a human presence, one of the few clear portrayals of people in the show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The exhibition\u2019s centrepiece and thematic inspiration, however, is Rebecca Belmore\u2019s now-iconic Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother <\/em>(1991). The colossal wooden cone, amplifying the output of a megaphone attached to its narrow end, was originally constructed during a Banff Centre residency early in Belmore\u2019s career in response to the 1990 Mohawk Resistance at Kanehsat\u00e0:ke, popularly known as the Oka Crisis. This highly publicized conflict saw the Mohawk community mobilize against a municipal effort to expand development on disputed Indigenous lands, while police and military forces brutally attempted to disrupt their barricades. The incident prominently cast into relief a culture of virulent and often violent racism among unsympathetic settler Canadians. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Belmore\u2019s work was deployed at a variety of sites across North America, where she worked with community members to facilitate organized gatherings anchored by the piece; at various sites in national parks, those present spoke through the megaphone to commune, in the artist\u2019s terms, directly with the land. In the gallery, the piece\u2019s wide mouth faces an array of landscapes, just as it did on its tour of the continent. Here, however, those sites are mere representation. Perhaps there is power in placing such depictions\u200a\u2014\u200awhich belie a history of settlement and often stand unquestioned as authoritative realism\u200a\u2014\u200ain a position that invites critical dialogue through artistic intervention. Silent in the gallery, however, where the megaphone is not available for use, the sculpture\u2019s presence is stolid. A looping audio track documenting the piece\u2019s inaugural 1991 installation at Lake Minnewanka, a glacial lake near Banff, is piped continuously from speakers suspended from the ceiling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The symbolism of national parks is still powerful\u200a\u2014\u200athey contain and preserve the scenery singled out to represent nations, which, used in touristic iconography and wildlife preservation, reflects a kind of venerated yoking identity. A country whose national art style is so often associated with twentieth-century landscapes is one for which a direct reminder of the possibility of \u201cspeaking back\u201d to established narratives is not just a curatorial decision but a political one. In the back room where Phillips\u2019s studied watercolour of Lake Minnewanka hangs, the sound from Belmore\u2019s megaphone is dampened by distance\u200a\u2014\u200aboth physical and temporal\u200a\u2014\u200abut its acoustic reminder is a caution against forgetting a history of human presence and resistance in an apparently empty place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, where her research is supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Award, Stephanie Weber was the 2022 runner-up for the C Magazine New Critics Award.<\/p>\n![\"The-Shape-of-an-Echo\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/108_CR_Webber_TheShapeofanEcho_exhibitionview_07.jpg\")
Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity, 2022.
Photo: Rita Taylor, courtesy of
Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Jin-me-Yoon\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/108_CR_Webber_TheShapeofanEcho_Jin-me-Yoon_039.jpg\")
Souvenirs of the Self (Lake Louise)<\/em>, 1996, installation view,
Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity, 2022.
Photo: Rita Taylor, courtesy of
Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"The-Shape-of-an-Echo\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/108_CR_Webber_TheShapeofanEcho_exhibitionview_02_lr.jpg\")
Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity, 2022.
Photo: Rita Taylor, courtesy of
Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n