Director’s Choice:
Stan Douglas

Stan Douglas’s photographs of Nootka Sound, on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island, document many sites important in the history of both colonial and Indigenous people in the territory. Taken in 1996 following the artist’s residency in Berlin, the series was a kind of homecoming exercise for him as he anchored himself back in his home province. Currently showing at the McMichael are two works from this series—a duo honouring the distinctive character of the Pacific Northwest. In one, we see the ancient structure of a fishing weir, an adaptation of the landscape that allowed the Nuu-chah-nulth people to trap their catch. In the other, we see a decomposing clapboard building—now nearly unrecognizable—erected by settlers at McBride Bay a century ago as part of the fish-cannery operations there.  

These canneries have long been abandoned, rendered obsolete by the large-scale industrial fish processing that now takes place on international freezer boats offshore. Both pictures show a way of life that has vanished, evidence of its past subsumed by the twelve-month growth cycle of the rainforest of the Pacific Northwest. Depicted here, as in paintings by Emily Carr, is the extraordinary fecundity of the land in a place that has cradled humanity for millennia.

Sarah Milroy
Frances and Tim Price Executive Director and Chief Curator
McMichael Canadian Art Collection