An oceanic experience is the first wave of a revamped Sechelt Arts Festival. A multimedia installation by filmmakers Nettie Wild and Scott Smith opened at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre on March 15, inaugurating the festival’s months-long emphasis on the Salish Sea.
Go Fish is a three-screen immersive video that depicts the annual herring run within territory of the K’ómoks First Nation, near Hornby and Denman islands. During the 14-minute film, birds, marine life and fishing crews produce a visceral symphony. Their massed forms, pictured from the skies above and at fin-level perspective in the milt-rich depths, create shifting kaleidoscopic patterns.
Thousands of herring are hauled into massive seiner nets, glistening and writhing. Scores of sea lions jostle for nourishment. A newly laid herring egg trembles as its microscopic inhabitant achieves locomotion.
“I’m glad that we’re talking about ecology,” said District of Sechelt Mayor John Henderson, who spoke at the exhibition opening. “The work within the arts community and its creativity spawns ideas about how to deal with issues of climate change and sea level rise.”
A three-year contract to produce the Sechelt Arts Festival was awarded by the District to the Sunshine Coast Arts Council earlier this year. Under the direction of the council’s curator and director Sadira Rodrigues, the festival (formerly held over several weeks in October) will grow into a series of thematically linked exhibitions and workshops.
During the March 15 opening, shíshálh Nation members Jessica Silvey and Robert Joe acknowledged the historic relationship of Salish Sea fisheries and the people of the shíshálh swyia (homeland).
“This [exhibition] made me so emotional,” said Silvey, who grew up in Egmont and recalled traditional herring harvesting by her family. The recent resurgence of the annual spawn, after being pushed to the brink of extinction by overfishing, gave her hope. “It’s been amazing to see that come back. We need to just tread carefully and never repeat those mistakes we made before.”
The creative collaboration by Wild and Smith premiered in 2023 at the Comox Valley Art Gallery, where a crowd-funded campaign enabled the purchase of touring playback equipment.
“When you make a piece like this, it’s really important to ask over and over again: what the hell are you doing?,” said Wild. “What is the point of view? After a while, we knew it wasn’t our job to tell people whether or not they should fish. We started to think if the herring sets the table, who comes to dinner?”
Wild received the Governor General’s Award in Media Arts in 2023 for her career spent creating documentaries that explore social and ecological transformation. (Her 2017 installation Uninterrupted also involved marine life, projecting images of wild salmon on Vancouver’s Cambie Bridge.) Smith, a part-time resident of Hornby Island, is a 25-year veteran of the film and television industry. He seized the opportunity to work with Wild, sensing an opportunity for innovative drone photography and provocative cinematography.
“When you first finish a film, you know every frame, every cut,” said Smith. “It goes out there and you think you know what it is. Now after a year, I see it as a very separate thing. It’s like a little lighthouse that we set up and people come to it. It has its own life now.”
“It really changes depending on who’s looking at it and where they come from,” added Wild. “[The experience] is lovely and complex.”
Go Fish remains on display at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre until April 13.
The filmmakers will return for an artist talk on Friday, April 12.
