Stir 'Splainer: 5 works at Audain Art Museum's 2023 Illuminate Gala & Auction

Works by artists such as Russna Kaur, Dempsey Bob, Dana Claxton, and more up for bidding

AUDAIN ART MUSEUM’S 2023 Illuminate Gala & Auction at Fairmont Chateau Whistler has long been sold out; it will be the largest do to date with more than 500 guests, a welcome by a cultural ambassador from Squamish Lil’Wat Culture Centre, a dance performance by Arts Umbrella, and more. The keenly anticipated live auction, however, is open to the public. Advance bidding on 18 artworks opens on March 23 at 5 pm at audaingala.com. Here’s a look at five of the pieces on offer.

After it is no longer visible in the sky

Russna Kaur

The Toronto-born, Vancouver-based artist, who earned a master’s of fine arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, has works featured at the Audain Art Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery, and Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art.

Known for large-scale and multi-surface paintings that are developed through explorations of colour, text, digital sketches, and mixed media, Kaur often creates paintings made up of several modular fragments, to reflect her varied life experiences and piece them together. In After it is no longer visible in the sky (pictured at top), Kaur lays thickly painted lines of different widths on top of a magenta background; the piece can take different forms depending on how its separate components are assembled.

Study for a Protest 2

Dana Claxton

A member of the Wood Mountain Lakota First Nation who works in photography, film, video, and performance art, Dana Claxton explores social and political issues as well as spiritual and cultural life in her art. She is a recipient of the YWCA Women of Distinction Award, the Scotiabank Photography Award, and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

In reflecting on the legacy of colonialism, Claxton often juxtaposes Indigenous traditions and contemporary Western imagery in her photographs. Study for a Protest 2 features two female figures who were part of Re/Matriate, a collective dedicated to the positive representation of Indigenous women in media. Claxton inserted the pose into another work, Muckamuck Strike Then and Now (2018), which speaks to the 1978 Union protest against Muckamuck Restaurant. Claxton emphasizes the placement of these contemporary figures into a moment in history by hand-colouring the ribbons in the skirt and the beaded art on the necklace, forming a trans-generational link between Indigenous women of the past and present.

In the Museum (The Peter Halley Series)

Ian Wallace

Ian Wallace is a British-born Vancouver-based artist and a pioneer of photo-conceptualism, best known for works that combine photography and painting. An Officer of the Order of Canada, Wallace is also the most recent recipient of the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts (2022).

This single canvas piece from In the Museum (The Peter Halley Series) shows partial views of an installation of abstract works by the New York painter Peter Halley and consists of a photographic image laminated onto the center of gessoed canvas bordered on either side by acrylic paint. Impressed by the Halley’s work, Wallace wanted to reference it without appropriating it, focusing his view on the wall space between the artworks.

Eagle Human Spoon

Dempsey Bob

Dempsey Bob is a Northwest Coast woodcarver and sculptor of Tahltan and Tlingit ancestry and of the Wolf Clan based in Terrace, B.C. He works primarily in wood to create bowls, masks, totem poles, and other pieces, mostly in the Tlingit style. He helped found the Freda Diesing School of Northwest Coast Arts in honour of his mentor. His many awards include an Aboriginal Art Lifetime Achievement Award and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts; he is also an Officer of the Order of Canada. Wolves: The Art of Dempsey Bob, organized by the Audain Art Museum and McMichael Canadian Art Collection, is currently on tour across Canada.

Carved out of alder wood, Eagle Human Spoon depicts an eagle resting on top of two human faces whose body creates the handle of a deep spoon. The eagle is known by his long beak curving down toward the bridge of the human’s nose, while the human faces feature Bob’s signature wide mouths and slanted, drooping eyes. The work illustrates Bob’s progression from traditional masks to his experimentation with nontraditional forms and functions.

Winter Scene at Alexander Falls

Karin Bubaš

A North Vancouver native, Karin Bubaš studied at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and has gone on to exhibited nationally and internationally. Known for her photographs, collages, and drawings, Bubaš explores the construction of gender in fashion and art. In the fall of 2023, Bubaš will have a solo exhibition at Audain Art Museum.

In Winter Scene at Alexander Falls, Bubaš explores the interpretation of landscape as sublime yet terrifying. The photograph was taken at Alexander Falls, just south of Whistler, and plays on the contrast between light and dark, which is compounded by the softness of the snow against the jagged hardness of ice and rock. A nod to atmospheric vistas painted by J. M. W. Turner, the work is also reminiscent of the Ansel Adams’s photography, with its references tourist attractions within a landscape.

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Gail Johnson

Gail Johnson is a Vancouver-based journalist who has earned local and national nominations and awards for her work. She is a certified Gladue Report writer via Indigenous Perspectives Society in partnership with Royal Roads University and is a member of a judging panel for top Vancouver restaurants.