Opening on January 15 at downtown’s Legacy Gallery is Paul Walde: Weather Conditions, a double exhibit of site-specific video installations by Visual Arts professor Paul Walde, curated by the Art History & Visual Studies department’s Williams Legacy Chair, Carolyn Butler Palmer. Both these installations reflect art history in unique ways, highlighting remembrances of famed Canadian painter Tom Thomson and American artist Geoff Hendrix, notably of the Fluxus art movement. Walde rarely exhibits locally, so Weather Conditions offers the chance to see his work in a gallery setting — with two pieces that have never before been shown in Victoria.
“This is an opportunity to give the community a taste of the work I’ve been doing in relation to environment, landscape, performance and the human body,” says Walde. “I really wanted to share these works, particularly because they haven’t been seen a lot: they’re both made for audiences, they’re not meant to be scrolled away somewhere.”
On view will be the 55-minute Tom Thomson Centennial Swim (2017-2019) and the 30-minute Of Weather (for Geoff Hendricks) (2018-2024): two video installations which showcase one-time, site-specific performances and both featuring soundtracks for which Walde composed the music himself.
“A lot of my work takes a while to do,” he explains. “It takes a lot to initially stage the events and then to reimagine them into standalone artworks that can operate on their own. You can’t reproduce the live performances, but you can use that raw footage as material to make something new.”
Recent work on view
The Tom Thomson Centennial Swim (shown right) is a bold, real-time video installation of Walde’s 2017 site-specific swim across Canoe Lake in Ontario’s Algonquin Park, where Thomson died, accompanied by a team of synchronized swimmers and a canoe-based brass band, both of which are featured in the video alongside footage shot both from his perspective and from a distance.
Of Weather engages with issues of climate and ecology by featuring people struggling to carry large-scale photographs of clouds, bringing weather down to a very human level. Legacy will also offer two performances (Feb 28 & March 28) where people will handle the images while accompanied by Walde’s live score.
“I would say Tom Thomson is more like me confronting the myth around his death, literally putting my body in that space on the very anniversary of his drowning,” says Walde. By approaching it like a sporting event — with branding, a band and surrounding performances — he also acknowledges some of the competition and the hierarchies within art history itself.
Human impact on climate
Of Weather, however, speaks more directly to how humans are affecting weather. “Because of the warming oceans, the greenhouse effect is affecting the type of clouds that are being produced: we’re getting more high-level clouds that actually trap heat and less low-level clouds that reflect heat,” Walde explains.
That concept is shown in the exhibit via the size of the images his team are carrying. “We have the weight of responsibility to struggle with these things, and using art handlers to do that also shows some of the invisible workforce that goes on behind the scenes to make the art world mobile. Right now, we have mobile biennials and art fairs happening all over the world, and there’s an environmental impact to that.”
Be sure to save the date for a pair of live performances of “Weather Conditions” as well: 2pm Sat, Feb 28 and 2pm Sat, March 28, both at downtown’s Legacy Gallery.
“Of Weather Movements” will feature the pictures in the exhibition being activated by a team of art handlers in a live performance based on motion-picture camera movements and editing techniques, accompanied by a live performance of the Of Weather music score by a string quartet.
Coming up next
Currently, Walde is working on his latest video installation — a new opera, Forestorium, which he calls “the best thing I’ve ever done” — the filming for which undertaken in July 2025 when he took 100 people into the unpopulated traditional Ma’amtagila village site of Hiladi on the east coast of Vancouver Island (near Campbell River). which will hopefully be seen in 2027.