By Geoffrey Webster
Sackville-based artist Graeme Patterson’s third thematic exhibition Strange Birds at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, September 6 to November 10, 2024, showcased his limitless talent and ability to provide a wide range of viewers with a cutting-edge yet accessible art-viewing experience.
From sculpture to virtual reality, Strange Birds ticked off all the boxes of an interactive and deeply engaging exhibition. As the primary art educator for Strange Birds, I found the thematic generosity of the work made my job easy. The artist’s major theme for Strange Birds explores eco-anxiety, a potent fear surrounding the planet’s unforeseeable future due to climate change. Instead of promoting panic, Patterson transforms the alarming topic into an approachable investigation of two protagonists, the heron and the Space Disco starlings.
These two central characters are portrayed as behaviourally oppositional: the heron stoically reflected the ever-changing Tantramar Marshes, while the starlings were depicted as the frantic executors of these changes. The different interactions between the characters reveal representations of our shared experience with the world around us. As viewers, we study the landscape and try to understand the changes we have made within it, like the heron. But we’re also the dancing Space Disco starlings, coping with our day-to-day, reaping what we’ve sown.
Both complex and technical, Patterson’s Strange Birds depicts the elegance of the Tantramar Marshes while also showcasing its changing nature. Viewers can first see both central figures in conceptual conversation through Patterson’s central film, Strange Birds. The film features a stop-motion animated heron, as well as costumed live-action performances of the starlings. The film is projected on a wall in the exhibition space and acts as a portal to a new yet familiar world. Additionally, the sonic composition featured in the film acts as an ambient accompaniment throughout the exhibition space.
Patterson presents another place, a smaller yet equally intricate one: a 1:10-scale model of his Sackville home. This artwork feels in no way a constructed miniature of the artist’s home but a shrunken-down version. It looks incredibly realistic and functional. During my time touring Strange Birds, Patterson’s miniature model generated a lot of dialogue with gallery goers, who primarily commented on how immersive it was despite its size. The carefully crafted details in every room are paired with components like flickering lights and rotating doors, which feel as though you are in the starling’s house of imagination.
The Tree is a sculpture partly made from an actual fallen tree, but it also has an important role as a character representing monoculture tree planting in the Strange Birds film. Diane Langevin, Dalhousie Art Gallery’s Indigenous consultant, explained to me the negative impact this form of tree planting has had on numerous Indigenous communities. Langevin shared how these actions have been part of how the government has made communities non-self-sufficient.
Langevin’s attention was also struck by another sculpture, The House Core. This crisp yet stark model was a cut-out cylindrical section of Patterson’s miniature home but treated as a whole and not a part. It resembles a 3-D blueprint of what a home could look like in the future. While my tour groups and I focused on the distant possibilities of this new technology, Langevin shared that 3-D digital printing technology is currently being used in northern Indigenous communities to build home parts. As a result, Patterson’s sculptures The Tree and The House Core serve as personal and cross-cultural instruments for vibrant dialogue.
The highlight of Strange Birds was the virtual reality room. Set up in the media gallery, VR “Island” transported visitors into the world of the starlings and the heron, which enabled a more interpersonal relationship with the protagonists. I feared that the virtual reality component would detract from the narrative’s ethos, as this sort of technology has proven distractingly theatrical and forced in my past experiences. But with the already introduced and pre-existing world of Strange Birds, Patterson’s use of VR channels the spirit of the exhibition and facilitates an immersive yet appropriate viewing experience. The artist also considered accessibility; if guests were not comfortable with virtual reality or were eagerly waiting to try it out, a clever inclusion of a montage containing key aspects of VR “Island” was projected in the adjacent room. VR “Island” also brought viewers back to the gallery’s entrance, where they could revisit the pivotal Strange Birds short film.
Patterson’s work was thoughtfully considered, but so was the choice of the Dalhousie Art Gallery as a host venue. The space’s circular nature supplemented the cyclical relationship between both principal characters and fostered a strong narrative flow. It was equally remarkable to see how all of the artworks (distinctly the media-based ones) lived within the brutalist exhibition space. Patterson is at his creative peak, and wherever he lands next, it is definite that his artistic brilliance will carry on.
Geoffrey Webster is an artist and writer based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). Currently in the last year of his BFA in Expanded Media at NSCAD University, his ongoing artistic endeavours surround researching digital media, focusing on its interpretation, practices of preservation, and its educational properties and opportunities. Geoffrey has been part of the Dalhousie Art Gallery for almost two years, most recently working as an art educator with the goal of broadening art’s reception through critical yet accessible discussion. He has also been working as a research
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