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As part of Holly Schmidt’s three-year residency at the University of British Columbia (UBC), the artist created Forecast (2019–23). This work is the latest in a series of short poetic texts that use the language of weather reporting to speculate on collective responses to environmental changes. Reflective mirror-finish typography, applied to various architectural glazing around the campus, allows Forecast to interact with its surroundings, exploring the effects of weather patterns and seasonal shifts on the local campus ecology, including its plant, animal, fungal, and human participants. Initially installed on the windows of the AHVA Gallery at UBC and presented as part of the exhibition …we can know more than we can tell… curated by Christine D’Onofrio, the evolving Forecast texts have also appeared on the clerestory windows of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS).

Ecological and social injustices cannot be addressed through old methodologies and art proposes new spaces to think through methodological shifts. If the right questions aren’t being asked by the right people, who else could pose questions? Plants, the more-than-human?

Melanie O'Brian, "Foreword", Forecast

Contributors

1. Holly Schmidt

   Holly Schmidt is an artist, curator and educator engaging in embodied research, collaboration and informal pedagogy. She creates site-specific public projects that lead to experiments with materials in her studio. As the core of her work, Schmidt explores the multiplicity of human relations with the natural world. During her residency with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery's Outdoor Art Program, Schmidt utilized spaces between campus buildings through a process of collective knowledge production. These artistic and ecological interventions foster relationships with plants in a manner that is both distinct from the formal, university landscape design, as well as from standard notions of gallery space. Schmidt has been involved in exhibitions, projects and residencies at the Belkin; the Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver; AKA Gallery, Saskatoon; Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver; the Santa Fe Art Institute; Burnaby Art Gallery and Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, Vancouver.

2. Bopha Chhay

   is a Vancouver-based writer, editor and curator. Over the past decade, she has worked extensively to address various historical, social and intellectual conditions informing the interplay of visual art and language-based art practices in the region. Chhay's intersectional approach to writing and publishing on contemporary art thus strives to deepen an examination of the social contexts of visual art production. Her curatorial research and writing interests are notably guided by transnational and diasporic histories. Chhay has held positions at Artspeak Gallery, Charles H. Scott Gallery at Emily Carr University, 221A Artist Run Centre, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, an artist-run centre in Wellington, New Zealand and Afterall, a research centre at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Chhay holds an MA in art history from the University of Auckland.

3. Barbara Cole

   has been actively involved in the field of public art working as an artist, curator, educator and consultant for three decades. She was the Curator of Outdoor Art at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery from 2017 to 2023 where she oversaw the University of British Columbia’s Outdoor Art collection, commissioning new projects and stewarding the existing artworks sited across the Vancouver campus. Cole holds an MFA from California College of the Arts, Oakland. She is the principal of Cole Projects, a public art consulting firm that promotes experimental approaches to public art planning and commissioning, the focus of which in recent years has been realized through mentorship and knowledge sharing. She is founder of Other Sights for Artists’Projects (2005-present), an artist-run organization that presents temporary projects in public space, and she continues today as part of the organization’s production team. She taught at Emily Carr University from 1984 to 1999 and worked as a consultant to the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program from 1999 to 2004.

4. Melanie O'Brian

   is Associate Director/Curator at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, and has been the gallery's Acting Director from 2022 to the present. Prior to joining the Belkin, O’Brian was Director/Curator of Simon Fraser University Art Galleries, including Audain, Teck and SFU Gallery, from 2012 to 2020. She was formerly Curator/Head of Programs at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Director/Curator at Artspeak in Vancouver and Assistant Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery. O'Brian has taught at UBC, Emily Carr University and Simon Fraser University, and received her MA in Art History from the University of Chicago. She has organized exhibitions locally and internationally, edited numerous publications and written extensively for catalogues and magazines.

5. Sheryda Warrener

   is a poet, editor and teacher, and most recently the author of Test Piece (Coach House Books, 2022) and Floating is Everything (Nightwood, 2015). Her work can be found in literary journals across North America, and has been selected for Best Canadian Poetry, The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry and the CBC Poetry Prize longlist. A recipient of the Puritan's Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for poetry and the 2020/21 Killam Teaching Prize, she teaches poetry and interdisciplinary forms in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

Co-published with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.

1. Holly Schmidt: Forecast
   $35

   Blind embossed with one of Schmidt's Forecast poems, this volume contains the extent of Schmidt's written works as well as critical and poetic reflections.

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