Gerry Schallié  
A Terrible Vitality

2260 Oak Bay Avenue

Preview
Saturday, April 4, 2009   10 am – 5:30 pm

(work subject to prior sale)

Opening Reception
Sunday, April 5, 2009   1 pm – 5 pm

Elizabeth Ely, harpist;   Karel Roessingh, piano

Exhibition continues until April 25, 2009

 

THE POLES CONTINUED TO RADIATE
                           A TERRIBLE VITALITY
                           THAT ONLY DECAY AND DESTRUCTION COULD END.

                    William (Bill) Reid
                                                                                                                                  OUT OF THE SILENCE*

Although formally trained in graphic design, Vancouver born and recent Victoria resident Gerry Schallié’s artistic progression has been largely self-guided. Graphic design’s compositional discipline has remained one of the cornerstones of his photographic images. By merging the content of documentary photography with Pictorialism’s interpretive qualities, he achieves his trademark subjective realism. Since the 19th Century, these rival photographic genres have been seemingly incompatible; the modernist aesthetic versus the experimental movement maligned by purists. Schallié considers Pictorialism as photography’s creative soul in many respects, a stance increasingly embraced by art historians.

Recently Schallié turned his attention away from the tropical forests of Central America and related collections in museums, and has begun documenting the monumental art and environs of First Nations settlements in the Pacific Northwest. Of these settlements, some remain abandoned since the times of the earliest smallpox epidemics while others are thriving communities, some even undergoing a cultural renaissance. Emily Carr and Marius Barbeau visited many of these same sites and communities approximately eighty years ago. Not surprisingly, much had changed during this interval. Many totem poles are now relocated within villages joined by more recent carvings while others and related structures have long since disappeared. A select few objects seemed almost untouched by time, echoed by some of Schallié’s personal encounters. His time at Gitanyow (Kitwancool) included some remarkable parallels with Carr’s written accounts in Klee Wyck.

In how he documents his subjects, Schallié sees himself primarily as a portrait artist. He believes the most successful portraits are essentially neutral works, images strong in context as well as their fundamental honesty, in which the subject is not upstaged by technique or stylistic excess.

This will be the inaugural exhibition of twenty-five new images, all meticulously hand printed traditional gelatin silver prints, selectively bleached then followed by selenium and gold toning solutions. National art critic Robin Laurence once referred to Schallié’s printmaking as an “amazing technical accomplishment.” Each image is a document of an aboriginal monument or site in its present-day state, part of the visual continuum started by the likes of Carr and Barbeau, perhaps even Edward S. Curtis and George Dawson through their earlier works.

 

          * Courtesy of the Bill Reid Estate.