Solace, by Haruko Okano Click image for larger view

Haruko Okano is self-described “recovering consumer.” She makes no apologies, nor for the fact that she remains a consumer, albeit one who is more aware. Okano consumes abstract things, like opportunities, that take her to places where she collects ideas. While there, she consumes concrete things – recyclables and “detritus materials” – by turning them into art.

“I take and scrounge around like a street person, and pick up pieces of metal that have been cast aside and I incorporate them,” Okano said at the Three Rivers forum at the Yukon Art Centre on Friday night.

“It’s a process. It’s not an end in and of itself.”

Okano’s process brought her to the Yukon last summer, to the Peel plateau, where government and industry have been considering petroleum exploration, and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society has been determined to stop it. In a canoe with Yukon artist Joyce Majiski, Okano paddled the Wind River – a tributary of the Peel – collecting sand, wood, twigs, fossils, castings of spoors from wolves and caribou.

Last week, she installed her work at the centre’s gallery as an interactive part of the Three Rivers: Wild Waters, Sacred Places exhibition, sponsored by CPAWS and others. Standing among three pod forms suspended from the gallery's ceiling, Okano extended her fingers and explained their symbolism.

“People have said it looks very female, like female genitalia,” she said. “The shape is chosen so that there are multiple possibilities of meaning.” The pods are all vaguely egg-shaped. One is a bird’s nest. Another is a miniature aboriginal kayak, covered in moose hide.

The third is made of steel and looks like a huge miner’s hat, turned upside down. Beneath each of the forms, or sculptures, the floor is covered in sand. There are marks from the castings of animal prints. Inside each of the pods is a pool of water. Lights from above cast shimmering images of mountains and rivers onto the sand. Inside each image there are two words. Beneath the nest, they are solace and serenity.

“You consider nature to be your solace, your serenity, where your spirit is rejuvenated,” Okano said, gently bumping the nest. Serenity remained, but solace disappeared as the water rippled. “Then you disturb that. What happens to solace? Where do you find your solace? And if this is gone permanently, what would be your solace?”

Okano turned and walked to the metal sculpture. It was lined inside with orange clay and casting of fossils. “We came up to parts of land where it was just flat, and you could see these fissures in the land, like secret caches of history,” she said.

Endangered, by Haruko Okano Click image for larger view

“This feels to me like an archeological dig. But it also feels to me like an old well, a water well that has been abandoned.” Lining the metal rim were hacked-off twigs Okano gathered from refuse in Vancouver, where she lives, to be used as drumsticks against the metal pod, sounding it like a gong.

“I felt it was a bit on the morbid side, but it was like a warning, because you guys are going to have steel mills and things on this land,” she said, plucking at a twig. Underneath the metal pod, the words timeless legacy floated in silhouette. “I thought to myself, ‘There’s a timelessness out here,’” she recalled. “There’s an abundance of time to just be. And then you go back into artificial time. Our sense of nature is that there is this endless land, as far as you can see. And the sense that it’s there forever. But it’s not. Not if we do the wrong things.” The three pods symbolize three rivers. They are made, mostly, from organics Okano gathered from the places they represent.

The interactive nature of her art belies the impact of human civilization on nature – the question at the root of the Three Rivers journey. “When I’m building pieces like this, I need to know what’s the intent of the organizers,” she said as she jostled the kayak pod, sounding the bamboo chimes inside.

“If it’s just a one-shot – it’s only going to be here – then I speak to a smaller community. But if it’s going to be, eventually, going abroad, then I want to be able to speak to a broader community. I want them to feel the connectedness.”

The project organizers are trying to market the exhibition internationally. Okano thinks some of the materials she used, such as bamboo, that are not native to Canada will resonate with people in other parts of the world. “The whole thing is about dialogue,” she said. “I can’t carry a picket saying ‘Don't do!’ anymore. What I have to do is work with the people who are influenced and impacted, to find alternatives.”

Hence Okano’s dialogue with the Yukon government, regarding the area targeted for oil and gas exploration. “The government of the Yukon has been sending me all their studies, trying to address the questions I had,” she said.

“I’m hearing people complain about a lack of real collaboration and listening. What’s that all about? They’ve said they're open to public dialogue. But it seems (the government) is bypassing the very community that is going to suffer as a result of this.” Nevertheless, Okano has faith in the process – or art, of society – more than anything else. “I have faith in people, and I have faith in process,” she said.

“But if the process is adulterated or restricted, then those with the greatest influence are going to be the ones doing all the decision-making. But I have seen people who said they couldn’t do anything, change, and make change.” People don’t often buy her art, said Okano. It’s not really marketable.

She survives on teaching, lecturing, giving workshops about the relationships between people, art and the world that surrounds. “My hope, as an artist, is that my work will move people to examine how they are in this world now, and to think about how, possibly, that could be changed, and put it into practice,” she said during Friday’s forum.

In the gallery next door, already, there were footprints in the sand beneath her sculptures, and prints that had been erased. “I expect that there will be pieces broken off of this installation,” said Okano. “That it even might get destroyed. I’m hoping that people will document, and that people will come back and interact again, and examine their impact on the installation, and find a way of interacting with it with all of their heart and all of their energy, and yet leave it there for other people to enjoy.

“What I’m trying to do is create an opportunity to experiment and experience and teach yourselves. So these are tools. They’re not really artwork at all.”

Three Rivers forum provokes questions of value

Art, politics and conservation collided Friday night at a public forum celebrating the Three Rivers exhibit at the Yukon Arts Centre Gallery. The exhibit features works by eight Canadian artists who travelled the Peel River watershed by canoe and raft in the summer of 2003 in three separate groups to capture the essence of pristine wilderness in paintings, sculptures and photos.

At Friday’s forum, organized by the Yukon branch of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, the artists and First Nations elders from the communities of Mayo and Fort McPherson met to discuss art, nature and conservation with members of the public.

“There are some very important issues about the life and the future of these three rivers,” said former Yukon premier Tony Penikett, who moderated the discussion. “One of the fascinating lessons for me in government, a few years ago, was the discovery of a writer by the name of Marilyn Waring, who did an analysis of systems of national economic accounts, on which so much government policy is made.

“And she pointed out the great rivers of the world – the rivers we’re talking about – in our system of national economic accounts, they have no value whatsoever. They count for zero.” Penikett opened the discussion by questioning each of the panelists on the relationship between art, the environment, and public policy.

“One of the hardest values to explain is intrinsic value when you are living in a culture that has trained you to think of everything in terms of how usable, how much money and how much profit can be gotten from it, in economic terms,” said Haruko Okano, a Vancouver-based artist whose installation piece involves three pods made of organic materials suspended from the ceiling.

“What I’m trying to do is create an opportunity to experiment and experience and teach yourselves,” said Okano. “These are tools. They’re not really artwork at all.” The exhibit celebrates the natural beauty of the region.

Some places are just not meant to be touched said Brian Brett, a poet, novelist and journalist from British Columbia’s Salt Spring Islands who paddled the Wind River with the artists. However, “I have problems with the whole idea of protected places,” said Brett.

“I don't know that we should be striving to have protected places. I believe that all places should be protected. Some should be more protected. But we have to understand that everything around us is part of that alignment.”

Ron Bolt, a landscape painter from Ontario, said the artwork was also an alarm bell. In one of his paintings for the exhibit, he’s superimposed a smoke-belching factory on a mountain landscape. “I think even though the work in there is celebratory in many ways, it’s also a warning,” said Bolt.

“It’s what we have now. This is the beauty of it, this is the incredible variety and fragility. These are the universal meanings eight people have put on it. And this is what you can lose. So you have to decide what you're going to do with what you have.”

Exhibit and gala celebrate wonders of the Peel watershed

Flow, by Michael Belmore Sterling silver, rocks and steel Click image for larger view

Here’s a recipe for cultural dynamite. Take three rivers, several artists and mix thoroughly for 18 days. Separate the artists and allow their experiences to germinate for more than a full year. Bring them, and their works, back together a few weeks after the watershed has been officially opened to petroleum exploration. The result: an exhibit called Three Rivers: Wild Waters, Sacred Places, which opens next week at the Yukon Arts Centre.

“It’s going to be a wonderful variety of stuff,” said Brian Brett, a poet and author from BC’s Salt Spring Island who canoed down the Wind River in the summer of 2003. “I’m really keen to see the show. They had everything from poets to fiction writers to naturalists to different kinds of artists; everything from super-realists to abstractionists to conceptual artists.

“I haven’t seen the physical art, but I actually had the wonderful honour of watching them. Of watching them think.’ In conjunction with a national celebration of the boreal forest organized by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, the eight artists were jury-selected from across Canada.

Michael Belmore, Ron Bolt, Marlene Creates, Gwen Curry, Haruko Okano, Jane Isakson, Joyce Majiski and Jose Mansilla-Miranda joined more than 20 scientists, writers and First Nations members on the tour. The artists produced paintings, sculptures and installations made out of natural and manmade materials. The goal was to see how the artists would express their impressions of this special part of the North.

Vancouver-based Okano created “a viewer-interactive installation comprised of three organic pod forms” from materials she gathered on the trip. “There were only natural objects, and she was looking at them in probably the most unique way of any of us there,” said Brett.

“She would just haul these things out, and we would say, ‘Where did you get that?’ She had a vision that none of us could figure out, but she had this ability to collect strange objects.

“She was looking. She had a great ability to look at things that you would step on.”

Life in a canoe provided fascinating opportunities for artists to compare their world views, said Majiski, who paddled stern in Okano’s canoe. “The whole trip was one big art-gathering process,” she said.

“It was like having all senses open all the time as you went down the river or went for walks. I found I had quite a bit of time to myself to go hiking and take pictures and draw.”