Huge news in Chinatown today! Our neighbours, the Rennie Collection gallery, have worked out a partnership with Victoria's Royal BC Museum for the summer so that the museum can hold an exhibition at the historical Wing Sang building, showcasing a portion of their 7,000,000 artifacts and specimens here in Vancouver! It launches today and goes until September 3rd.
More than simply bringing a bunch of stuff over and dropping it into the space, they've curated four mini-exhibitions with the overarching title of "Curious". The most extensive of the parts is "Intimate Glimpses", a look into the life and work of Emily Carr.
Walls of her famous works of art surround artifacts from her life (letters, diaries, etc) and truly humanize the artist, telling stories well beyond her actual work.
The Royal BC Museum has so many artifacts in its collection that it wasn't difficult for the curator to find pieces of clothing that were actually worn by Emily. Alongside a couple of the paintings are archival photos of her working on the actual pieces hanging on the wall. If you're interested in her story and how she made her way to be one of BC's (and Canada's) most iconic artists, don't miss this. Heck, don't miss it anyway; truthfully, I've never been crazy interested in her work but found it all fascinating regardless.
And speaking of artifacts, here's a page from a never-before-shown zine that Emily made for a friend of hers in the early 1900s. A zine! It's 7 pages and highlights a trip she went on to see the queen; like a personal letter to a friend, only illustrated. BY EMILY CARR.
Another of the 4 parts is "Bottled Beauty" made up of 100 specimens from the Royal BC Museum's "wet collection". Fish, snakes, a squirrel, a whale (yes, a freaking whale) and more pickled goodness await you in this dimly-lit corner of Wing Sang.
As a former professional photographer my personal favourite part of the exhibition is "Magic Lantern" which showcases a wall of images from lantern slides along with this ancient projector pictured below. It's powered by a carbon arc lamp (basically a flame produced by burning carbon) and the slides are mounted on glass.
The slides are less than 2 inches wide and, as they were produced before colour photography existed, they were hand-colourized by an artist using a magnifying glass and a brush with likely a single hair on it. It's crazy the amount of detail they got onto these slides which were put into the "magic lantern" and projected on a large scale. What they have on display are lightbox recreations of the projections.
Overall "Curious" succeeds in telling many stories of BC's rich human and natural history, and my absolute favourite piece of history in it is this lantern slide of the Strathcona Discovery Expedition on Buttle Lake on Vancouver Island in 1910 which perfectly ties together nature and humanity. The photo was taken during the adventure that ended in the ascent of Crown Mountain on July 29th 1910 and can be pinpointed as the birth of the province's extensive BC Parks system, of which V.I.A. is currently a PARTNER. Sometimes I come across images that make me want to stare at them forever. This is one of those types of images.
The fourth part of "Curious" is an interactive game called "Artifact/Artifiction" which we'll be sharing in the coming weeks.
The gallery is located at 51 East Pender in Chinatown and admission is $11 for individuals, $33 for a family (2 adults, 2 youth age 6-18) and kids under 5 are free. Learn more at RBCMVancouver.com
