Art Matters Forum Held in Conjunction
with the BC Scene Festival

Ottawa, Monday, April 20, 2009

Dear friends,

Over the next two weeks, the BC Scene festival will celebrate the diversity of the province’s artistic practices. As the 600 artists who will be presenting their works in the National Capital Region will demonstrate, the British Columbian scene is teeming with artistic vitality. For example, did you know that the province boasts the highest percentage of artists in the overall population, representing over 25,000 people? This information was confirmed in the latest Hill Strategy Research report.

Regardless of their number, British Columbian artists are known—here in Canada and around the world—for the quality of their approach and their reflection. They produce a wide range of works whose relevance lies in the fact that they are undeniably imbued with the physical and social place where they were created. In fact, the province’s geography has marked its cultural development and its artistic imagination. On the one hand, its natural landscape is diversified and omnipresent, even when you are in the middle of an urban environment: from English Bay to downtown Vancouver, you can see the distant coastal mountains. Open to the world of the Pacific Ocean, its exchanges and migrations from Asia, British Columbia has a diversity that negotiates daily on the streets of its cities and villages.

There is no doubt that British Columbia’s natural and social landscape affects its artists. Emily Carr, a true icon whose works are celebrated and exhibited all across the province and the country, inhabited nature as much as nature inhabited her. Ruffling the coastal landscape with great expression and spirituality, she documented the life of Aboriginal people with the same sensibility. Emily Carr is part of a long line of artists who have emphasized the natural and social landscape. Consider the contemporary work of photo-conceptualist Jeff Wall and documentary-maker Nettie Wild: two artists, among many others, who have made critical studies of the social dynamics of the contemporary city.

There are also artists and cultural workers in British Columbia who have decided to make direct and concrete contributions to the development of society. Artistic centres in Downtown Eastside, like Intersections and Centre A—where our moderator, Hank Bull, works—work towards revitalizing the neighbourhood’s social fabric.

The theme for this 37^th Art Matters forum was therefore obvious. By asking the question, “How do the arts sustain our communities?” we touched on an important idea. Not only because it affects all of Canadian society, but because the works and projects of British Columbian artists could serve as an example to artists all across the country.

As we make the final preparations for our State visit to Ukraine and Norway—along with nine representatives from civil society—tonight’s discussion is particularly important. Social, environmental and economic sustainable development on a global scale depends on the sharing of ideas and dialogue. Cultural diplomacy is now more important that ever and artists must play a central role in the debate, within their communities and around the world. It therefore gives me great pleasure to announce that the 38^th Art Matters forum will take place in Oslo, where we talk with Norwegian artists about the same theme we are discussing tonight. Hank Bull will also be one of the nine Canadians from civil society travelling with us whose mission will be to carry people’s thoughts from one place to another, to share our world views. 

It is now time for our discussion. There is currently an exhibit on display at Rideau Hall of young, sometimes very young, British Columbian artists, and I would like to reiterate the exhibit’s theme here; may our discussion be inspired by the “spirit of place.”