21 July 2026 – Mist hangs in the air as our shuttle bus prepares to leave downtown Vancouver for Whistler, some 120 km to the north…
mist still with us, as we drive the aptly-named Sea to Sky section of Highway 99 that will take us there, threading its way between the Pacific Ocean and mountain ranges, beneath a great brooding arc of sky…
and mist still, though beginning to clear, as I approach the building that has called me here: the Audain Art Museum.
More precisely — though the building itself is a joy — it is the current exhibition that has called me here.
Takao Tanabe 100: Inside Passage celebrates the life and extraordinary eight-decade career of this BC artist, who will turn 100 years old on 16 September 2026. I think of Tanabe in terms of his iconic coastal scenes — for example, Rivers 1/01: Jordan River, 2001. These works breathe mist. Today’s weather is an appropriate homage.
But the exhibit teaches me that the words “Inside Passage” in the title refer to more than these coastal scenes. They also honour Tanabe’s life-long curiosity, his own internal or “inside” passages that have been reflected in his evolving artistic expression.
Pure abstractions early on, during a 1950s stint in New York (here, Interior Arrangement with Red Hills, 1957)…
a brief period of hard-edged abstractions, in the 1960s…
followed by a fascination with the Canadian prairie landscape, as of the early 1970s (here, The Land 10/72).
Curatorial notes refer to the “hard-edged discipline” of this 1972 work, one of the earliest of his prairie pieces, “announcing the shape of an entirely new direction.”
I look around, and admire the prairie era as a whole.
I also admire the building — the way it serves the works and frames the forest beyond. Later I visit the Patkau Architects website, the Vancouver firm that designed this building, and read their intention that its form and character be “deliberately restrained [so as] to form a quiet backdrop for the collection.” Bravo.
I go upstairs to visit the linked exhibit Vistas: From Takao Tanabe’s Travels, where I again think about art galleries and their architecture.
The power of this space!
Yet it does not overwhelm the art (NWT 1/97: Beaulieu River, 1997). I pulse between the art and the space, the space and the art.
I remember my volunteer years at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in the days when the Frank Gehry expansion was still very new, and the joyous reaction of visitors to the building itself — not as informed architectural connoisseurs, purely as people who liked where they were. The little boy, for example, who barrelled into the atrium, spun 360 degrees, gulped and spluttered and just had to blurt it all out to somebody. I was the somebody. “This is so cool!” he cried. “And… and, and… and I haven’t even got to the art yet!”
I do not spin 360, but I do spend some additional vertical time with the building itself — namely, outside and underneath.
To quote that little boy: “This is so cool!” Hard-edged, like Tanabe’s prairie paintings, but at home with the surrounding shaggy forest, just as Gehry’s AGO extension is at home with its own busy neighbourhood (where Gehry’s grandparents lived and very much part of his childhood).
Then I take myself back up to ground level, back onto sidewalks and gangways.
And a good thing, too.
It puts me at a safe distance from which to enjoy this bit of … oh, let’s call it… street theatre.
A black bear ambles out from under the building, and begins a leisurely snuffle of the shrubbery.
I keep a watchful eye out for bears as I walk through Florence Petersen Park en route the bus depot…
but none jump out from behind these old logging stumps.
By the time we are rolling back south, the skies are bright and blue.
WALKING WOMAN 