Vancouver is currently hosting a perfect storm of its local art history. Jerry Pethick’s retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery and an exhibition of Gathie Falk at Equinox are both recently opened exhibitions, while BC Almanac(h) C-B at Presentation House Gallery has been up since late September. Rather than the lore of an individual artist, the history brought to light in this group exhibition is of collective production during the phenomenon of new media or multimedia in the sixties and seventies. 
BC Almanac(h) C-B, Gallery Exit Mural
In 1970, the Stills Division of the National Film Board of Canada commissioned Jack Dale and Michael de Courcy to produce a series of photographic pamphlets, later collected and published as a book, which then served as the framework for a travelling exhibition. This remount of the original exhibition is considered a “3-D version of the book’s production,” but is much less of a dioramic treatment than an installation that simply reflects the sentiment of the book and the period in which it was produced. That is, it captures the love for indexical expressions and a propensity to excavate meaning between quotidian subjects under the liberated lens of experimental filmmaking and photography, accompanied by collage, drawing, and poetry.
The problem with exhibitions based on books is when images or information compiled to be experienced on the page are expanded onto a wall, it feels more like a celebration of the book than a real attempt at transforming the image to a new viewing context. Dale and de Courcy must have known this; they seemed to have admitted it when they decided to simply deposit a heap of books in the middle of the installation, located within Gallery Exit Mural– a two-part mural suspended on an angle in the gallery. This work functions as a group portrait as it is a composite of the fifteen artists in project, depicted first from the front and then from behind, traversing a white imaginary space. This theatrical fixture and the room’s grey-scale paint job are considerations that fulfill the project’s promise as an exhibition and make it more than a gutted book on the wall.
Presentation House Gallery: http://presentationhousegallery.org/
BC Almanac(h) C-B continues until November 29.
Steffanie Ling's essays, criticism, and art writing have been published alongside exhibitions, in print, and online in Canada and the United States. She is the editor of Bartleby Review, an occasional pamphlet of criticism and writing in Vancouver, and a curator at CSA Space. She is Akimblog’s Vancouver correspondent and can be followed on Twitter and Instagram @steffbao.
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BC Almanac(h) C-B at Presentation House Gallery
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