Galleries, studios and artists are gearing up for the Sunshine Coast Art Crawl and Powell River art lovers will have a wide range of work to absorb over the weekend festival.
On the Upper Sunshine Coast alone, there are 18 venues hosting public exhibits.
More than 140 artists, studios and galleries are participating this year from Langdale to Lund, making it the largest art crawl in the event’s five-year history.
One opening of note is Stanley Darland’s Forgotten exhibit at Studio 56.
Darland is an American photographer, painter and mixed media artist interested in the themes of politics, mythology and technology.
Darland started as a model and then transitioned to the other side of the camera and worked under Henry Wolf, an influential magazine and commercial art director and photographer for magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire.
“He was my mentor and really put me through my paces,” said Darland who worked under Wolf for two years before opening his own commercial photography studio in New York in the early 1980s.
He and his wife Rose moved to Powell River from New Mexico in 2010.
He said it took some convincing, but he is pleased to be able to show his work in Powell River.
The combined exhibit is a grouping of works around the theme of forgotten people.
“It’s about how we treat the most vulnerable,” said Darland.
The first part of the exhibit is called A Street Person’s Wine Tasting and includes photographs of three men dressed in tuxedos tasting wine on Seattle’s streets. The series was taken in 1975 while Darland was home from New York. He added that he had only shown two of the 12 images in the series previously.
Darland canvassed Seattle’s Belltown district looking for men who would help determine the best wine with a cost of under $3 per bottle. Darland rented tuxedos and had the three men dress up on the day of the shoot.
“The point here is that you put these men into tuxedos and you can fool yourself into thinking that they are somebody they are not,” he said. As he became more acquainted with the men he discovered they were all well-spoken and came from professional backgrounds.
One of the men had been a physician and the others had worked selling heavy equipment and insurance, he said.
“There they all were living under the viaduct in Seattle,” he added. “Life is so fragile and you never know what’s going to happen.”
The other half of the exhibit is a limited edition of giclée prints, paintings of photographs taken of Tierra del Fuego’s Selk’nam people, one of the last indigenous people to encounter Europeans in South America.
In the 1990s, Darland began a series of trips to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego and was moved by the stories of the people there.
“Money was coming into Argentina and Chile from Britain because there were such resources there in timber and meat,” he said. “They just wiped these people out.”
In the late 19th century, discovery of gold and expansion of sheep ranching in Patagonia and the islands of Tierra del Fuego led to increased migration from Europeans. As ranches ate up the countryside, indigenous people lost ancestral hunting territory. Not understanding the ranch herds were private property, one group of people, the Selk’nam, hunted them. The ranchers responded by organizing armed militias to hunt them in a genocide which led to their eventual disappearance.
German priest and ethnologist Martin Gusinde studied and photographed the Selk’nam and estimated that in 1919 less than 300 people were left from a population of 3,000 only 25 years previous. In 1949 missionaries counted only 25 people left and in May 1974, Angela Loij, the last full-blood Selk’nam person died.
“It’s about the people of Tierra del Fuego lost to resource development,” said Darland. With the show he is trying to draw a parallel between aboriginal people who were removed because they were in the way and people swallowed by the ghosts of addiction and forgotten by society.
Forgotten opens at 8 pm on Friday, October 17, at Studio 56 (5813 Ash Avenue). Admission is by donation.
The Sunshine Coast Art Crawl runs 10 am to 5 pm October 17 to 19. It is organized by the Coast Cultural Alliance, a non-profit society working to enhance the economic vitality of the Sunshine Coast through cultural sector development.
Readers can visit online for more information about the Sunshine Coast Art Crawl.
