D’ARCY ISLAND | DON GILL
09.23.2006 | 11.12.2006

Social history is inextricably tied to natural history and Lethbridge artist Don Gill’s investigations have produced a convergence of the two; often evolving into case studies which the artist documents through photography, text, video and installation.  His practice has been one of critical questioning based on explorations of specific sites and their social histories; these sites are often in proximity to where he finds himself geographically. In the mid-seventies, Gill worked in the photographic section of the British Columbia Provincial Archives in Victoria. This experience has informed his work in the sense that he has critically investigated the histories of several documented sites through his own art production. He has noted: The raw material of historical construction is derived from the commonplace: family albums, oral history, account books, events of natural history, remnants and fragments of architecture and engineering, official and unofficial archives, political clashes, the breaking and mending of social contracts and all the detritus that accumulates with the passage of time. The reading of these entrails (or more precisely, who is reading these entrails) determines which particular history will be elevated to the status of authority.

For his exhibition at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Don Gill presents D’Arcy Island; an installation that explores a particular geographic site which is linked to the early history of British Columbia. His narrative is revealed through video, photographs, audio and the web. D’Arcy Island is a small island off the east coast of Vancouver Island that was used in the nineteenth century by the city of Victoria to quarantine residents, primarily Chinese, who were diagnosed with leprosy. Central to the installation is a text published in the Dominion Medical Monthly in 1898 and written by a doctor and a journalist who toured the island: British Columbia has a leper colony. Its existence is not widely known, for those who compose it are of a race whose affairs rarely reach the public ear. But for years to come students of this strange disease may find in Canada’s most western province, material of the most interesting and instructive nature to aid them in their researches. About a league off the eastern coast of Vancouver Island, and separated from it by the waters of the Gulf of Georgia, lies the pretty little island of D’Arcy… 

Don Gill has excerpted from this historical source to produce an audio component for his video. To create the unusual operatic libretto, the artist collaborated with Patrice Jegou (voice) and Deanna Oye (piano) faculty from the University of Lethbridge Department of Music. In another video, the artist reads a text from Franz Kafka’s The Burrow. Accompanying the videos are large-scale photographs of the island and related sites.

D’Arcy Island is a meditation on the ramifications of official and unofficial exile. The artist’s documents reveal ways in which history is written on landscape and how a specific history is interpreted by succeeding generations. The installation is part of a larger project titled Carceral Landscape, which is concerned with the role of landscape as a device for the incarceration of human subjects. The project was stimulated by photographer Ansel Adams’s belief that the sublime beauty of the natural environment surrounding the WWII internment camp at Manzanar, California inspired and helped Japanese American internees transcend the effects of detention.

Don Gill studied at the University of Victoria and the California Institute of the Arts. His work can be found in collections across Canada. He teaches in the Department of Art at the University of Lethbridge. In 2007 Gill will be expanding the concept of carceral landscape during a residency at the Imaging the Land International Research Institute at Fowlers Gap in Australia; a continent originally colonized by transported British and Irish convicts.

Organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Curator: Joan Stebbins).  Funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the City of Lethbridge.