New curator's first job: Kill The Workers

The Walter Phillips Gallery is getting ready for Kill The Workers.

That’s the title of an art installation by Janice Kerbel, which opens tomorrow (Jan. 20). The opening reception is at 7 p.m. and the installation runs until April 8.

Kerbel has been living and working in London since 1995. She studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver and completed graduate work at the University of London. Kill The Workers was originally commissioned for the Chisenhale Gallery in London last year. Ballgame, a play for a single voice, will be exhibited at the Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver later this year.

The installation is being overseen by the gallery’s new curator, Jesse McKee

“I think that this piece she’s done is one of the most virtuosic or masterful things she’s done,” said McKee. “This is the first major gallery installation, and probably her most comprehensive exhibition in Canada. We’re happy to be hosting it here.”

McKee was the exhibition’s curator at the Western Front in Vancouver. There he developed commissions and organized solo exhibitions with artists such as Eli Bornowsky, Sophie Bélair Clément, Neïl Beloufa, and Lee Kit, among others.

Previously, he organized the educational and live events program for the Barbican Art Gallery’s exhibition Radical Nature – Art & Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009. He was a guest curator at Gallery 101, Ottawa, in 2011, where he organized the exhibition Well Formed Data, which included work by Susan Hiller, Patricia Esquivias, and Falke Pisano.

“I’ve known Kitty Scott, the director of visual arts here, for about 10 years, since she was the curator for the gallery of contemporary art in the National Gallery in Ottawa,” said McKee. “When this job opened up, I thought it was about time we actually got to work together, so I applied right away.

“I’ve been coming to Banff for the past three years, for curatorial conferences or as a visiting curator.”

McKee came into the curatorial field accidentally, he said.

“When I was a student, I was studying politics and I wanted to be more hands-on with it and not so theory-based and, as one of my electives, I took a theatre course,” he explained. “This was exactly the kind of energy I was looking for, but it was in the past, so I looked for where it lies today, and that led me to contemporary art.

“It was a road of discovery and I’m still on it.”

Originally from New Brunswick, in his youth McKee moved around a lot. He obtained his master’s degree in curatorial practice at the Royal College of Art in London and has now been back in Canada for about three years.

“The fact that I moved around a lot when I was little made me feel like an outsider, always observing,” he said. “And so that’s what the curator does, observe and put together things that talk about the situation you’re in, in an objective way.”

As the curator for the Walter Phillips Gallery, McKee stressed his role will be working with artists, and to help them produce and show their work.

“The important thing is to work with artists and produce work,” he said. “That’s one thing I like about The Banff Centre, I have to be close to people making things all the time and be involved with them. Everything you do as a curator for an artist implies a commitment or trust to see their vision through.

“The galley here in the last couple years has focused mainly on solo shows. A gallery like the Walter Phillips doesn’t provide a totally comprehensive view of what’s going on in contemporary art, it provides very high quality moments of focus on various artists that are important for the moment and had a global outreach.”

Kill The Workers is an installation involving the creative use of lighting.

“It’s a play written solely for stage lights, so in a way what she’s done is focus on that one element of theatre – the lighting design – and she extracts that from a written script, and what you’re able to do at that point is be put in a position where she forces you to have a desire to resolve ambiguities,” explained McKee. “But it also heightens your abilities to understand the strategies that are used to create fiction and fantasy, and in doing so you become much more aware of what you imagine is a real occurrence.”

In the centre of the galley will be a configuration of stage lights, which use the floor as a playing space. The play itself lasts about 17 minutes.

“The choreography of the lights eludes to a journey of struggle, discovery and triumph,” said McKee. “The protagonist is a lone spotlight and it’s trying to achieve ‘open white’ – which is a theatre term which refers to a broad wash of white light on the stage – and of course a spotlight can never do this by itself.

“It’s trying to figure out how it can overcome the rest of the lights to achieve this open white, and only through working with everyone else, it has to join in with them to create that kind of effect.”

This will be the North American premiere of the installation. After this, it will travel to a gallery at the University of Toronto, followed by Montreal.

Kerbel will give an artist’s talk today (Jan. 19) at 4 p.m. in room 204 of the Jeanne and Peter Lougheed Building at The Banff Centre. The event is free and open to the public.