Western Voices in Canadian Art

Review By Sadira Rodrigues

November 5, 2024

I experience a certain mix of admiration and trepidation, bordering on fear, when approaching books that attempt to survey vast expanses of time, geographies and/or practices. They seem never to be able to meet the ability to encompass the complexities that are inevitably lost in the attempt to pattern a narrative, weave continuations and establish identities of place. Western Voices in Canadian Art by Patricia Bovey is a book that is clear and earnest in its attempt to do just this – to address a gap in the texts that comprehensively focus on artists, practices and movements from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia, and to examine “some of the key ideas, themes, and significant milestones”.

The book is laid out in a combination of chronology and themes, building a robust armature of the development of movements, institutions and artists who have profoundly shaped contemporary culture as we experience it today in the “West”. Bovey’s research is meticulous, and the details assembled provide an important contribution to historical record keeping of how and when ideas and institutions emerged – situating “seminal”, “contribution” and “influence” as three important and recurrent concepts. In its attempt at history-making, and establishing foundational ontologies, Bovey’s book is an important contribution as a tool for pedagogy and curatorial research. The breadth of her investigation, and the details assembled, are a profound gift to future scholars, curators, artists and writers – even more so with the loss of important publications and periodicals in recent years (Canadian Art as an example) that were often the only places to encounter robust and critical writing engaging with the geographies and practices she explores in this book.

Bovey’s grounding in curatorial practice is evident in her commitment to center artists, their practices and their work – not just in the writing, but also in the beautiful image reproductions. For me, this is perhaps the greatest contribution of this book – its insistence on centering artists, their curiosities, their voices and the movements and ideas that stemmed from the work, and the communities that intersected with them.  Bovey’s approach is also notable for weaving together diverse practices – attempting to acknowledge the simultaneous contributions of artists from non-European heritages – situating these within a constellation of connected practices. In this way, it departs from establishing binaries, linear narratives, or influence-paradigms – artifacts of post-colonial history-making projects that maintain “othering” frameworks.

Perhaps the most predictable challenge of the book is “Part One – An Evolving History” which falls into a familiar trope of establishing what is happening in western Canada as either connected to, or in advance of, movements and practices in Europe. This need to establish lineage, and to claim precedence in relation to traditional narratives of avant garde art movements in Western Europe is understandable, but it also sets the book up to follow traditional art history survey methodologies that maintain the haunting of our need – in the West – to be legitimised and “seen” by the centers of the Art World. As an introduction to the book, it doesn’t do justice to the rest of the book which makes every effort to decenter a binary, instead sharing rich, complex and sometimes contradictory movements and practices that were able to simultaneously exist in places like Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg, Saskatoon and many others.

Western Voices in Canadian Art substantially records the last two hundred years of cultural making in Canada’s West. It does an extraordinary job of locating BIPOC practices within an unfolding framework – avoiding chapters that continue to exclude. It is unfortunate, from the standpoint of 2024, that some of the more urgent concerns of climate change, the Black Lives Matter demands, and current calls towards Palestinian solidarity do not find themselves in the pages of the book. This is no fault of the author, but simply a result of fixing writing into a physical, published form – it is never able to remain responsive and current to an ever-evolving field of practice.