Paul Walde: Weather Conditions

Trained as a painter, artist Paul Walde’s interdisciplinary practice has evolved over the past 30 years to include musical composition, performance, video and installation, with a focus on environmental issues. His site-specific performances are staged in the natural environment and meticulously documented. From these documents Walde fashions audiovisual installations that cover a range of topics, including global warming, deforestation, land use and endangered species.

Curated by Carolyn Butler Palmer, associate professor of art history and visual studies and Williams Legacy Chair at the University of Victoria, Weather Conditions features two installations, both homages to important 20th-century artists, both focused on water-based natural phenomena— a lake in the first instance, clouds in the second.

For Tom Thomson Centennial Swim (2017), Walde, accompanied by a brass band canoe flotilla, swam the length of Algonquin Provincial Park’s Canoe Lake on the 100th anniversary of the Canadian landscape painter’s mysterious death by drowning; for Of Weather (for Geoff Hendricks) (2018–24), Walde choreographed an “image movement” inspired by the work of the noted Fluxus artist (nickname “Cloudsmith”) that had teams of performer/art handlers carry large-scale stretched photographic prints of clouds throughout the Southdown Industrial Area of Mississauga, Ontario, an active manufacturing zone.

Weather Conditions includes two “live” performances. On Saturday, Feb 28 at 2 pm, the exhibition’s pictures will be activated by a new team of performer/art handlers, based on motion picture camera movement and techniques. On Saturday, March 28 at 2 pm, a second activation will be accompanied by a string quartet rendition of the Of Weather music score.

uvic.ca/legacygalleries/