Read the words, stay for the images

Light Years: The Phil Lind Gift
by Adam Welch

Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions and Art Gallery of Ontario, 2024
$40.00 / 9781773104393

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic

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For those unable to wander through the Signy Eaton Gallery in Toronto’s AGO to see the artworks of “Light Years: The Phil Lind Gift,” an exhibition that runs until November 2, 2025, the accompanying volume, a catalogue, of the same name is an attractive, engrossing, and budget-friendly alternative. 

The exhibition honours Phil Lind (1943-2023), an “ardent and excitable collector” whose final gift to the AGO was the artwork—37 pieces—currently on exhibition.

Before that, Lind also donated paintings, photographs, and multimedia work, gave financial gifts, and supported the commission of North Okanagan artist Brian Jungen’s 2022 sculpture Couch Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch’ill, positioned at the AGO’s northeast corner. 

“Companions,” Associate Curator Adam Welch’s brief but capable introductory essay, begins its survey of Lind’s decades of collecting with a formative moment: an undergraduate student in 1966, Lind spent a mesmeric afternoon inside the UBC Fine Arts Gallery. An enigmatic installation, Lind recalled, represented “the most unusual thing I’d ever seen.”

In the gallery N.E. Thing Co. (a “company” composed of Ingrid and Iain Baxter) had arranged four rooms into a facsimile of a furnished apartment and bagged all the contents in clear plastic. Voilà: Bagged Place.

For context: six decades ago, Harold Town was the biggest name in Canadian art, with groovy canvases in the Silent Light series (1968-9) selling for the record-breaking figure of $4,000.

Years later, in the late ‘80s, Lind began to acquire photographic prints by a handful of male artists based in and around Vancouver (including Roy Arden, Andrew Dadson, Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham, Scott McFarland, Ron Terada, and Jeff Wall) as well as other Canadian, American, and European artists, such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Anselm Kiefer, General Idea, and Phillip Guston. 

But page after page, art’s the thing in Light Years. Reflecting a patron’s acquisition history and personal passion, the collection points out the idiosyncrasies of taste even as it provides a selective history of art production between 1962 to 2013. 

Viewers of the book whose knowledge of Canadian art diminishes at about the paintings of The Group of Seven will immediately notice they’re not in Kansas anymore. For them, a mini-art history course arrives courtesy of Light Years. 

What’s more, the quickest of glances will reveal how the landscapes depicted in many of the works, especially photography, stands in reference to earlier artwork, as well as in response to it.

(And perhaps an inquisitive viewer will be tempted to connect, say, Tom Tomson’s 1916 canvas Autumn Foliage—a landscape that bursts with blues, oranges and yellows—with the fallen leaves, urbanism, and ironic outdoorsiness of Ron Terada’s Entering City of Vancouver (2002). And from there, to consider ‘nature’ in photographs such as Wall’s Concrete Ball or Douglas’ Masonic Lodge, Baskerville.)

Whatever the object of fascination might be—a delightful piece of Pop, a classic of the Dusseldorf School, a lesser-known photo by a veritable art-making institution (“Basin in Rome” by Jeff Wall, say, or Rodney Graham’s “Weathervane”)—a tour through the book offers singular experiences over and again.

By turns edifying, stimulating, perplexing, curiosity- and thought-provoking, and ____ (whatever active mental state that occurs while you’re in front an artwork that’s simultaneously gnomic, attractive, unexpected, sensuous, personal, allusive, political, and, of course, really hard—impossible!—to pin down or encapsulate in a word of two), the images and artists within Light Years cannot help but tantalize. And a reader cannot help but feel wonderstruck.

My Two-Faced Luck, the fifth novel by Salt Spring Islander Brett Josef Grubisic, published in 2021 with Now or Never Publishing, is reviewed here by Geoffrey Morrison. A previous novel, Oldness; or, the Last-Ditch Efforts of Marcus O (2018), was reviewed by Dustin Cole. [Editorial note: A BCR editor, Brett Josef Grubisic has reviewed books by Andrea Bennett, Patrick Grace, Cole Nowicki, Tania De Rozario, John Metcalf (ed.), Brandon Reid, Beatrice Mosionier, Hazel Jane Plante, Sam Wiebe, Joseph Kakwinokanasum, Chelene Knight, Lyndsie Bourgon, Gurjinder Basran, and Don LePan for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster