Inside the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Future Geographies Exhibition

Teresita Fernández, Island Universe 2, 2023

On the fourth floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery, there grows an 1,800-year-old red cedar. Stepping inside the tree’s hollow trunk, visitors are greeted by a video installation of British Columbia’s last remaining ancient rainforests. Sanctuary: The Ancient Forest Experience, a work by artist and ethnobotanist T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss in collaboration with filmmakers Damien Gillis and Olivier Leroux, is part of Future Geographies: Art in the Century of Climate Change, the first major art exhibit in Canada to explore the relationship between this definitive modern crisis and contemporary art.

Josh Kline, Desperation, 2024

The power of Future Geographies resides in works such as Sanctuary, a distillation of the often-abstract climate crisis into something emotive and tangible. In Wyss’s work, this means immersing people in threatened, biodiverse ecosystems that they may never walk through in person.

The landmark exhibit, which runs until January 10, 2027, before moving to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, features work by Canadian and global artists spanning the last 25 years. Sculptures and paintings by B.C.-based Brian Jungen and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun sit alongside multimedia installations by Ghanaian British artist John Akomfrah and New York-based Josh Kline.

Edward Burtynsky, Oil Spill #10, Oil Slick, Gulf of Mexico, June 24, 2010

Edward Burtynsky, Oil Spill #14, Marsh Islands, Gulf of Mexico, June 24, 2010

“I hope the exhibition forefronts how these are shared concerns,” says interim co-CEO and curator at large Eva Respini. “One of the works is about the wildfires in the Okanagan, but obviously wildfires are something that touch people all over the world. I really enjoyed this push and pull between the local and the global.”

This idea of interconnection is woven through the exhibit, which is organized under four themes: Living Knowledge, Consumed Earth, Speculative Worlds, and Material Memory. Upon entering, visitors encounter Island Universe 2 by Teresita Fernández, a large-scale charcoal wall sculpture that presents the continents of the world as a single landmass, rejecting the idea of socioeconomic and political divisions.

asinnajaq, Rock Piece (Ahuriri Edition), 2018

“Artists have an important role to play in helping us parse through this moment, put ourselves in other people’s shoes, and have a sense of empathy that can maybe lead to advocacy and policy change,” Respini says. Works by Carolina Caycedo and Reena Saini Kallat interrogate the idea of ownership over natural entities such as rivers, examining how water is a shared resource that transcends borders while acknowledging the Indigenous peoples who have cared for these waterways for millennia.

The empathetic response Respini hopes to elicit is deepened by the gallery’s collaboration with the University of British Columbia’s Climate Action Lab. Accompanying the exhibit are videos created by lab students that connect the works to climate action and science, linking extractive industries such as logging and mining with their impact on local communities and human health. The videos bring the idea of One Health to the fore while asking where responsibility lies and how we can demand more just industry and government.

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun, The Impending Fire Storms, 2024

While Judy Chicago’s series of porcelain and glass paintings, The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, confronts us with the heartbreaking magnitude of species loss, perhaps the most resonant works in the exhibit are those that ask us to imagine prospective realities, and that position visitors as active participants in shaping that trajectory. In artist and co-curator Josh Kline’s Desperation, a video and sculpture installation of a makeshift raft, we encounter a world of climate refugees in which sea levels continue to rise, threatening global coastal communities.

“Art is an emotional medium,” Kline says. “Some of my work is dystopian, but I hope it prompts people to ask themselves if this is a world they want to live in.”

Brian Jungen,Cetology, 2002

In Clarissa Tossin’s Future Geographies: Cosmic Cliffs, from which the exhibit takes its name, strips of Amazon shipping boxes are threaded with NASA images of the cosmos using Amazonian weaving traditions, creating a double entendre that links overconsumption and waste with ecological destruction, examining the far-reaching ways we’re modifying the planet.

“Artists help us navigate these big questions and issues within the larger context of how we imagine our shared future on this planet,” Respini says. The sprawling exhibit echoes this idea of marrying individual agency with global impact in its very form, extending multiple floors and spilling out into public spaces with Cannupa Hanska Luger’s billboard on East Hastings Street. It’s a reminder that climate change is an issue that will reach us all, and that how our future on this planet will look is a collective creative act.

SHARE