94 CANADIAN A RT • SPRING 2016 canadianart.ca 95“Jane and Ross have been incredibly generous,” says Ward as she tours
me through The Pavilion’s unfinished interior. “I wasn’t sure what I was
going to do with this thing once my residency was over. There was no way
I could afford to store it—but I didn’t want to destroy it, either.”
Later that day Ward relates how Hill and Irwin came for a studio visit
during Ward’s Langara campus residency and afterwards offered to move
the dome to their Heffley Louis Creek lands. From there, Hill, Irwin,
Schmidt and Ward spoke of the potential for future Heffley Louis Creek
projects, including EDM House and Screen in the Landscape. Scheduled to
open in summer 2 016, the cinema was built with— and will include—the
participation of community residents.
One of the more immediate community residents is Hank Inkster, a
soft-spoken builder and self-professed ski bum who, like Hill and Irwin,
was attracted to the area for its skiing (Sun Peaks is 20 minutes away).
Inkster lives next door to the main house at Rancho Rasdoul and has, since
Hill and Irwin acquired the ranch in 2004 , assisted with the construction
of its outbuildings. Part of his work with Hill and Irwin includes assisting
Schmidt and Ward with theirs, an experience Inkster describes as “a trip.”
Community also extends to like-minded artists and curators living and
working in and around the North Okanagan today, a list that includes Janet
Cardiff and George Bures Miller at Grindrod, Brian Jungen at Head of the
Lake, Tania Willard at the Neskonlith Indian Reserve and Charo Neville at
the Kamloops Art Gallery— all of whom grew up in smaller communities
and spent time in larger centres, only to return to or, in the case of Willard,
maintain ties to these communities.
On the topic of Hill and Irwin’s contribution to the region’s burgeoning
cultural ecology, Neville is both effusive and informative. In a recent con-
versation she mentions how the North Okanagan, like the Lower Mainland,
is transitioning from a resource-based economy, and she hopes that the
“build it and they will come” presence of Rancho Rasdoul has encouraged
local politicians and business leaders to include publicly funded arts initia-
tives in that conversation. “What Jane and Ross have given the local arts
community, even more than tangible economic support, is intellectual
support—the belief that a rich cultural life is greater than the financial
means under which it is written.”
Neville points out that Hill and Irwin supported the KAG in 2 0 11, when
guest curator Patrik Andersson mounted “On the Nature of Things,” an
international group exhibition based, as Andersson stated, on Lucretius’s
identification of a natural world that manifests in “generative acts such asHolly Ward and Kevin Schmidt
The Pavilion, Phase 2 (2 011– )
at Heffley Louis Creek, October
2 015 PHOTO JENNIFER LATOURcollision, stress and rupture.” Not only did Rancho Rasdoul contribute
funds toward the exhibition and host a reception in its honour, but it was
a venue as well.
Among the works included in Andersson’s exhibition was T&T’s
Lighthouse ( 2010 ), a site-specific sculptural assemblage that greets Ward
and me as we climb the slope from the renovated doublewide mobile
home that is Rancho Rasdoul’s main house to take in the view of the
larger valley. An apocalyptic hybrid of automobile and gas lantern, Light-
house is too mannered to be just any car left to rust in the countryside.
As such, it draws attention to that practice, a reminder that, like the ranch
itself, it knows where it is and what it is doing there. The same could be
said of The Pavilion, which Schmidt and Ward affectionately call the
Domestead, and hope to begin using as a studio in the spring.
My second and most recent visit to Rancho Rasdoul follows the October
3 opening of Schmidt’s survey exhibition at the KAG. As with Andersson’s
exhibition, Hill and Irwin host a brunch for area residents (KAG staff and
board, local politicians, visual-arts faculty from Thompson Rivers Univer-
sity), as well as artists, curators, directors and collectors from Vancouver
and beyond.
Moving through the crowd on a warm and sunny autumn afternoon,
I catch fragments of conversations that only an art event can inspire. Most
relevant to the critic are those that pertain to Schmidt’s exhibition, which
is praised for its individual works, their selection and an exhibition design
that most agree is of a high standard, like that found in “bigger cities.”
Other comments are more intimate, based on personal experiences—how,
“after all these years,” Schmidt’s exploration of the experiential, the land-
scape and the sublime, and Ward’s interest in the utopian and notions of
social progress “seem to have come together,” “like Dürer’s hands,” and
that it is “no surprise”—and “about time”—that the two are “testing the
collaborative waters.”
Equally consistent among these fragments is an appreciation of what
Hill and Irwin have quietly made—and are making— of Rancho Rasdoul.
It is here that I learn the origin of the ranch’s name: Rasdoul is a child-
hood derivative of the Vancouver neighbourhood where Hill’s father
started the family clothing store, Hill’s of Kerrisdale. I am reminded of
a story Irwin told me of her 2004 Elsewhere residency in Greensboro,
North Carolina: how that experience inspired her to make Rancho Rasdoul
a place that might generate a residency program of its own.
As is often the case at events like these, I grow exhausted from my
eavesdropping and need to rest my ears and write down some of what I
have heard. So I leave the crowd to commune with my favourite of Rancho
Rasdoul’s outdoor works. Shortly after moving in, Hill and Irwin had Ink-
ster carve a 100 -metre-wide circle into the boggy plain that runs before
their guesthouse, “to see if it would fill.” What resulted was not simply
a decorative water feature, a pond, but a world unto itself, a congregation
of cottontails, fish, a mink and then one day “a line of nine fuzzy ducklings.”
This too is something I take note of before wandering back to the other
congregation, the one around the brunch table. ■What this has given the local arts
community is intellectual support—
the belief that a rich cultural life
is greater than the financial means
under which it is written.
Okanagan_ sp16_17TSLR.indd 94 02/04/16 1:49 PM