Until June, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV) is encouraging people to reconsider their surroundings with its exhibit The Places We Live. AGGV curator of Asian art Heng Wu has co-curated the exhibit along with Mel Granley and Nicole Stanbridge; Wu says it’s a collective show, meaning it’s a survey of the AGGV’s permanent collections.
“This exhibition is using our collections to tell a story about the space we live in,” says Wu. “It includes three sections—’Look up,’ which means when we look up into the sky, into the universe. ‘Look around,’ like landscapes or scenes, visions, and the third section is ‘Look closely,’ so we have included collections of, for example, insects. So this is a show to invite the audience to pay more attention to our surroundings, to the space we live in, to explore the connections between us as human beings and the space around us.”
Wu was in charge of the ‘look around’ section, so she included some landscape scrolls from the Asian art collections at the gallery. But the exhibit takes from all different styles of exhibits at the AGGV, not just Asian art, an approach that Wu liked.
“What impressed me most was this approach of curating,” she says. “It’s something we’d like to do more—remove the boundaries between categories.”
Wu says that some of the art found at the AGGV is significant for more than just its artistic value.
“Some are archeological findings,” she says. “I think the main purpose of them are telling the stories about other cultures, about other civilizations, so I want to say that the term ‘art’ can be a very broad umbrella. It really depends on the context of the specific situation. It can be everything, but I think the most important thing is art can engage people, which is what we are doing with our collections.”
Wu hopes that The Places We Live makes people think deeper about their own connection to their spaces and places that they live in.
“We hope that visitors can come and enjoy the art in the gallery,” says Wu. “But also, we hope that the show can invite us all to think about the connections between us and nature, to think about the relationship between us and the surroundings. So I hope that it’s not only about art or it’s not only about building beautiful artworks but also about something more in-depth to think about something, about life, for example.”
The Places We Live
Until Sunday, June 5, 2022
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
aggv.ca