Northern exposure

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This article was published 15/12/2016 (2944 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Truth be known, Michael Maltzan finished his first design of the Inuit Art Centre three years ago.

Then the award-winning L.A.-based architect flew to the Arctic in July 2013 with his wife and two teenage children. They spent a week bouncing from Iqaluit to Pangnirtung to Cape Dorset, soaking up summer in the North.

And everything changed.

“That was a very vivid experience,” Maltzan said on the phone from his home in Los Angeles. “It was really profound.”

In his role with a firm he founded in 1995, Maltzan has crissed-crossed the globe. In most cases, he noted, there’s “always a sense that you’re not that far from the place you left. Many places are so accessible now. Cultures are accessible.”

“In the North, I really got the sense that for one of the first times, I was in a completely different place on the Earth. It has it’s very own very specific sensibility, culture. You were in a place that was very distant… from what you were familiar to. That’s extraordinarily rare.”

Maltzan sensed the connection between the land, water and sky, in particular during the longest days of the year. He marvelled at walking on the moss-covered tundra, which squished like cushions under his feet. He saw icebergs for first time and was struck by the luminosity that seemed to emminate from inside.

When the architect returned to California, he ripped up much of the original design, despite it already been accepted by the WAG.

“I often believe art looks the best and is exhibited in places that approximate in some way the place the art was made,” he explains. “If you’re looking at classical art or classical painting, it often looks best in classical galleries. If you’re looking at modernist work that was created in the lofts of New York in the ’50s, it looks the best in those types of places. The context for art is very important to the art itself. It’s not neutral.

“You can’t just make a white box and expect all art to look great in it, or feel at home.”

Maltzan’s new design for the four-storey, 40,000-sq.-ft. gallery reflects the scale of the North; how largely diminutive art forms are created in “an enormous, seemingly endless, vast landscape.” The use of natural light was enhanced. The original rectangular shape of the building was scraped, made more fluid with less emphasis on boundaries.

The Arctic journey “gave me a thicker, deeper sense of what that place was like and what the feelings and impressions should be in the gallery to support that work,” he says.

WAG director and CEO Stephen Borys says the new design is much more harmonious with the art works it will display. The design is still being tweaked — the exterior may yet be lined with Tyndall stone from Garson.

“It could not have been produced without that one trip,” says Borys, who was also on the Arctic excursion with Maltzan. “It added the dynamic of the land, the light, the people. The stories all coming together.”

Maltzan openly admits his one visit to the North, while transformative to his design, didn’t push him to overreach on trying to replicate the Arctic visually. That, he says, would become too much of a “cliche”.

“I’m not from that culture,” he says. “I can’t pretend to have as deep an understanding of that culture as the people who grew up there, who’ve lived there for generations.

“Because of that, my greatest ambition, my greatest fear as well, is to try and get that balance right. Making something that relates to their culture in a profound and positive way, but also relates to (non-Inuit) culture.

“I deeply hope that the artists from the North, when they come to this building, when they exhibit in this building, that they think the building is truly sympathetic to their ambitions, their ideas, their culture,” Maltzan concludes. “If I can accomplish that, then I think we will have done our responsibility.”

randy.turner@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @randyturner15