Landfall and Departure is the third in a series of three exhibition projects that look to the resource industries that formed and fragmented communities on Vancouver Island while having implications globally. The first project: Black Diamond Dust (2014) responded to coal mining; the second project: Silva (2015/2016), responded to forestry. Landfall and Departure (2017/2018) is a two-part exhibition, which considers resources both distributed on, and extracted from, the sea. The first part in this series, Landfall and Departure: Prologue, responded directly to the Nanaimo Harbour.

Landfall and Departure: Epilogue is the final project in a year of exhibitions, special projects, education programs, and events, that explore the question “What does it mean to live on an Island?”

Our history of the sea is a record of misunderstanding the cries of whales and the whispers of waves. But, as sea levels rise and fish stocks dwindle, being attuned to what the ocean is telling us is now more important than ever. Landfall and Departure: Epilogue endeavors to listen to the sea through contemporary visual art, sound works, presentations, and performances.

Oceans cover more than seventy percent of our planet. Artists in the exhibition engage this impossibly vast environment by listening and responding to diverse perspectives, including those of cod fishers off Fogo Island, citizen scientists monitoring salmon stocks in the Broughton Archipelago, workers on a cargo ship, world-traveling sailors, pirates, and whales. Others explore through the languages of seashore debris, digital shoreline maps, and experimental music.

For the past 47 years, OrcaLab, a land-based whale research station on Hanson Island founded by Dr. Paul Spong, has been studying whales in the most unobtrusive way possible. For Landfall and Departure: Epilogue we celebrate and share their longstanding practice of listening to the sea by embedding video of their recent observations here on the exhibition’s webpage.

For this exhibition, the gallery commissioned Nanaimo-based Inuit musician Willie Thrasher to write a new song about listening to the sea, which was recorded with his partner Linda Saddleback, and will be performed at the opening. Details of other public events including tours of the Pacific Biological Station will be forthcoming.