Farmworkers are Canada’s forgotten workers. They work in the fields and harvest the crops that feed us. They work in slave-like conditions for 12-14 hours a day and are paid piece rate. They travel in overcrowded buses to the fields or live in converted chicken coops. Many suffer chronic health problems because of exposure to pesticides during every working day.” – Canadian Farmworkers Union spokesman Charan Gill, June, 1994.
From Different Perspectives: Photographs from the Agricultural Landscape tells three stories of forgotten workers whose struggles on the landscape have been forgotten or ignored and reveals a landscape of opposition where workers are both represented and see themselves represented in ways which will challenge dominant views of the agricultural landscape. Each of these artists uses their own visual vocabulary in the form of engaged social documentary to expose the realities of farmworkers in British Columbia, Ontario and Washington State. These artists have defined their art practice around the facilitation of dialogue among the diverse farmworker community and are exploring the concept of dialogue as a form of social engaged art practice. From Different Perspectives will be a catalyst for dialogue and collaboration with the public and explore how socially engaged art can connect with others and create community.
Craig Berggold’s exhibition, I would like to tell you a story is a series of photographs accompanied by farmworkers’ testimonies, newspaper articles and narration. Each photograph is a visual representation of an actual event where farmworkers and their children have been poisoned, injured or killed while at work. Carole Condé’s and Karl Beveridge’s work, Salt of the Earth, depicts the arrival of migrant workers, their exposure to chemicals and injury and their departures in Ontario. It is part of a larger project on the four elements that include The Fall of Water, Under Fire and a video AIRwav. Salt of the Earth was produced in collaboration with migrant farm workers in Southern Ontario. Elaine Brière’s, R-E-S-P-E-T-O Mexican Farmworkers in the Yakima Valley is a striking series of photographs that document the lives of Mexican apple pickers in Washington State.
In conjunction with From Different Perspectives, The Reach will display photographs from our art collection of a series of photographs of farmworkers in the Fraser Valley that were taken in the early 1980s and artefacts from its permanent collection that tell the stories of farmworkers throughout the twentieth century. These images and artefacts explore our rich agricultural history and provide an historical context for the From Different Perspectives exhibition.
