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A Postcard from Victoria

Robert Morin & Lorraine Dufour, Raymond Boisjoly, Geoffrey Farmer, Julia Feyrer

Guest Curated by Michael Turner

A Postcard from Victoria is an immersive exhibition that features video, artifact and works on paper.

The video (from which the exhibition takes its name) is the result of a 1983 Western Front Media Residency by Quebec artists Robert Morin & Lorraine Dufour, who travelled to Victoria to make a 16 minute time-based work that tells the eerie story of a visitor from England who is interviewed for the job of tour guide at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage in the Victoria suburb of Esquimalt. As with most of Dufour and Morin’s video work, the narrative is loosely constructed and straddles the line between reality and fiction. At the centre of this work are questions of place, class, authenticity and belonging. Along with the video work, the installation includes a high tea place-setting from the Fairmont Empress Hotel’s Tea Room,where the “tour guide” in the video enjoys high tea before returning home after a day’s work. An array of postcards of the Empress Hotel from as early as 1900 (prior to the erection of the first building) to the 1940s, as provided by Vancouver-based postcard collector Philip Francis, are included in the installation. As part of the exhibition, guest curator Michael Turner commissioned take-away postcards by three British Columbia artists: Raymond Boisjoly (b. 1981, Langley, BC), Geoffrey Farmer (b.1967, Vancouver, BC) and Julia Feyrer (b. 1983, Victoria, BC). These postcards were composed after the artists viewed the video — or were “interviewed” by it, as it were.