The Collaborators brings retrospective of cinematic art to Paul Kyle Gallery, to March 28
Nettie Wild’s projected and VR-headset works include a mesmerizing three-channel ode to herring migration, the salmon-run-themed Uninterrupted, and “moving paintings”
GO FISH at the Comox Valley Art Gallery. Photo by Scott Smith
The Paul Kyle Gallery presents The Collaborators to March 28
VIEWING THE 2023 three-channel video GO FISH by Scott Smith and Nettie Wild, visitors to the Paul Kyle Gallery are immersed in the annual migration of millions of herring to the Salish Sea. It’s a natural wonder, as the silvery fish attract a wild assortment of wildlife—and, of course, net-toting humans, to the waters.
Watch sea lions, seabirds, and others converge on the crashing waves in this mesmerizing video installation, which has shown everywhere from the National Gallery of Canada to the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. It’s less a discourse on the environmental threat to fish than a celebration of the wonders of nature—while paying tribute an ocean’s abundance worth protecting.
It’s at the centre of an expansive retrospective of works by documentary filmmaker Wild, called The Collaborators: Nettie Wild and Friends, Films and Installations.
In UninterruptedVR, meanwhile, Vancouver audiences can revisit, through headsets, Wild’s milestone public artwork that featured images of salmon in their upstream passage digitally projected onto the Cambie Street Bridge in 2017.
And her newest installations, the “moving paintings” titled Guangxi Totem and UninterruptedEYES, may hang on the wall, but they also move cinematically.
Wild’s work has evolved far beyond her better-known political documentaries, such as A Place Called Chiapas and FIX: The Story of an Addicted City. The Collaborators draws its name from the ecology of relationships that have fed Wild’s work—partnerships with cinematographers, filmmakers, editors, sound designers, producers, composers, activists, and others who have helped bring the works into being.
Special-event screenings of each film and installation at the gallery will be followed by talks with Wild and her collaborators. Upcoming programming includes March 18 and 21’s screenings of Klavierklang, a sonic, cinematic “tone poem” by composer Hildegard Westerkamp and pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, directed by Wild and edited by Michael Brockington—all of whom will be on hand for the post-screening talk. (The video premiered at Music on Main’s Modulus Festival in the fall of last year.)
On March 28 at 3 pm, drop in for a fly-through projection of Uninterrupted, with collaborators Brockington, producers Betsy Carson and Rae Hull, director of photography Athan Merrick, and composer Owen Belton on hand for the discussion.
You can find much more special programming at the link here. 
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