An extended presentation of the Audain Art Museum’s Permanent Collection, From Sea to Sky celebrates the collection’s evolution from its inception in 2016 to the present. Built on the generous donation of over 200 works by Founders Michael Audain and Yoshiko Karasawa, the AAM’s Acquisition Committee has since guided the holding’s expansion through purchase, commission, and donation, to almost 300 outstanding pieces representing the art of British Columbia. Carving, painting, and photography serve as the pillars of the collection, featuring notable works by artists active from the mid-nineteenth to early twenty-first century. Such a display offers a unique visual evocation of the cultural differences that continue to shape BC’s socio-political identity.

From Sea to Sky showcases familiar masterpieces alongside newly acquired and previously archived works of art. These pieces by artists from the province, and those inspired by local environs, are all housed in Patricia and John Patkau’s stunning example of contemporary West Coast architecture. Among the active carvers and photographers of note are Robert Davidson, Dempsey Bob, Jeff Wall, Jin-Me Yoon and Stan Douglas, while paintings by Emily Carr, AY Jackson and BC Binning add a historical dimension to this sweeping display. Works acquired from Karin Bubaš, Rebecca Belmore, and Russna Kaur are indicative of a mid-point in their respective careers and each have also been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum.

Hannah Rickards’ artistic practice studies the relationship between perception and experience. Resistant to the construction of narrative, she employs a range of conceptual tools and media to create works that measure the limits of language and map conditions of uncertainty in our attempts to discern and describe the world. Rickards’ solo exhibition of new work at the Gibson, I am the infant and I am the bird, is informed by her relocation from London, UK, to an acreage in Syilx Okanagan territory in the interior of British Columbia. Life in this new context, with its markedly different tempo and scent—a rural valley thick with orchards, pastures, and lumber mills, encircled by rocky benchland—invoked a metabolic shift in the artist’s approach.

Rickards’ characteristically spare installation rewards a willingness to slow down: single channel videos capture brief glimpses of hummingbirds recorded in the soft grey light before dawn. A large-scale video work depicts footage gathered over years by an infrared trail camera erected in Rickards’ pasture. Triggered by motion, the camera does not differentiate between the types of activity it detects. Depending upon the duration of their visit, viewers may experience the erratic flight of a moth, a grazing deer that pauses to stare arrestingly at the camera or simply long stretches of wheatgrass nodding in the breeze. A series of photo-lithographic-and-silkscreened prints, created by Rickards using remote viewing—a paranormal practice of perceiving a distant or hidden subject without the aid of the senses—reconsider questions of landscape and place.

In its alertness to the agency of the world, I am the infant and I am the bird shares much with early interpretations of photography. For the first decade of its existence, the photographic image was understood not as “captured” or “taken” but rather as something “received from the world.” As William Henry Fox Talbot observed in an 1839 letter, “It is not the artist who makes the picture, but the picture which makes itself.” While the question of where and how we place our attention has always been fundamental to Rickard’s work, I am the infant and I am the bird invites an uncoupling from contemporary culture’s relentless “attention economy” to allow a consideration of how we might more carefully attend to the world’s ways of revealing itself to us.