An Olympic moment: The Vancouver Art Gallery has mounted a brilliant and sprawling show that reveals the province’s complex relationships with its residents, nature, and the global community
British Columbia is like the rest of the world, only more so.
Nature is beautiful everywhere, but this mist-wreathed Nirvana of dripping cedars and sparkling fjords is ridiculously, rapturously so. Here, the universal contest of man versus nature takes on a certain steroid-enhanced quality: It’s not unheard of to find an avalanche settled at your back door, or a black bear in your garbage. Human migration is creating change the world over, but in B.C. the disjunctures are extreme and dramatic. Where Chinese labourers once built the railways, Hong Kong billionaires now call the shots in their towers of glass and steel.
Aboriginal cultures exist around the world, but in B.C. they take centre stage – fighting and surviving in a way that inspires indigenous people everywhere. The green movement has always been the mainstream here – it’s hippie heaven – while resource extraction manifests itself in fearsome ways: in the logging trucks that barrel past on the highway, in the clear cuts, in the armada of freighters destined for the shipping lanes of international capitalism.
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