Geoffrey Farmer: The Sound of Footsteps as Summer Walks Away
West Vancouver Art Museum, West Vancouver, BC - To Dec 14
Geoffrey Farmer was part of a sunburst of Vancouver artists born in the 1960s who emerged in the 1990s, six of whom—Myfanwy MacLeod, Damian Moppett, Steven Shearer, Ron Terada, Kelly Wood and Farmer—were included in the Belkin Art Gallery’s 1998 exhibition 6: New Vancouver Modern, and all of whom went on to have successful art careers. Farmer, for instance, had a string of high-profile solo shows in Europe and North America, capped off in 2017 by representing Canada at the 57th Venice Biennale. After that, a period of relative silence.
For the past seven years, Farmer has been living on his estate in Kauai, Hawaii, where he has turned his attention to sustainable agriculture. Whether this exhibition of recent works marks a return to the art world is up for debate; what we do know is that this current show is part of the West Vancouver Art Museum’s ongoing series featuring artists from West Vancouver, and that Farmer’s previous tendency to go big with his paper, wood and metal collage/assemblage installations was out of the question given the museum’s relatively low ceiling and limited floor space.
Key to the exhibition is Farmer’s interest in Carl Jung’s Active Imagination technique, a play-based exercise that allows the subject to integrate contradictory psychological elements from their past toward a more balanced conception of self and a greater sense of becoming. In his realization of Jung’s ideas, Farmer incorporates for his breathtaking dioramas deaccessioned books from the West Vancouver Memorial Library, which, it should be said, the artist and the museum recognize as an “in partnership” contributor.
