At the Vancouver Art Gallery’s climate show, a tough assignment: no preaching allowed

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No planes were used to ship dozens of artworks to the Vancouver Art Gallery for its new climate exhibition. All the art arrived by land. Instead of a hefty catalogue, Future Geographies: Art in the Century of Climate Change offers a website, and the text panels in the show were printed on discarded cardboard packaging from the gallery gift shop.

You might say the VAG is putting its money where its mouth is, except this show tries hard not to be mouthy, not to preach environmentalism at the viewer. Mainly it succeeds, but it’s a big ask: The catastrophic state of the environment does lend itself to didacticism.

Covering art from the past 25 years, the exhibit is divided into four sections: Living Knowledge; Consumed Earth; Speculative Worlds; and Material Memory. With work from more than 30 international artists, including heavy representation from Canada and the U.S., the show is at its strongest when striking artworks offer powerful visual metaphors with clear themes. It begins with Teresita Fernández’s Island Universe 2, a map of the world rendered in charcoal directly on the gallery’s wall and depicting the continents as one continuous flowing geographic form. The VAG has been using that image, a highly effective deconstruction of the familiar, to promote the show.

In the most impressive room, part of the Material Memory section, curator Eva Respini, the VAG’s interim co-director, has installed Cetology, Brian Jungen’s spectacular 2002 whale skeleton made entirely from plastic chairs. It hangs from the ceiling; the floor beneath is covered with Liz Larner’s Meerschaum Drift (Blue), three years’ worth of her discarded plastic bottles and clamshell packaging assembled to represent a blue-tinged swathe of sea foam – or the Pacific garbage patch.

Interview: For the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Eva Respini, it’s all about the art. Period.

Jungen evokes a natural history museum with its desire to catalogue and contain nature, but both artists also ask the viewer to confront the scale of our plastics problem. By the time you round a corner to see Jean Shin’s Huddled Masses, an installation resembling a Japanese philosopher’s rock garden made entirely from discarded cellphones and electronic cables, you may feel the point has already been made. Similarly when Abbas Akhavan places a rocky mountain stream on a green-screen platform – as though the natural formation was merely a movie set – the point about our containment or simulation of nature seems rather obvious. (Akhavan’s current work at the Venice Biennale is a subtler expression of similar themes.)

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Respini notes that artists are neither journalists nor scientists, but this exhibition does firmly document what we are currently doing: The Consumed Earth section includes Edward Burtynsky’s large-scale photos of a Mexican oil spill and one of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s forest fire paintings, depicting ravishing flames in the Northwest Coast formline style.

In the Speculative Worlds section, however, we enter the realm of fable and fantasy. The most obvious narrative is offered by the New York artist Josh Kline: In a rubber dinghy, he mounts a video screen showing a fictional interview with two survivors of disastrous flooding in Miami now waiting in a refugee camp in Orlando, recent immigrants to the U.S. haunted by the knowledge that only “legacy Americans” will be resettled.

Jungen’s ingenious whale is a brilliant example of form and content working seamlessly together; Kline, on the other hand, falls victim to the contemporary artistic emphasis on content over form, which is one way of saying that dinghy is pretty limp art. Yet, on its own, the video interview has the plausibility of good dystopian fiction as the viewer grasps the couple’s predicament.

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On a more evocative, less emphatically narrative note, there are a series of sculptural pieces that evoke sentinels overlooking a dying land. Cannupa Hanska Luger, an American artist of Indigenous ancestry who lives in New Mexico, contributes Midéegaadi: Fire Bison, a hybrid figure made of repurposed materials and sporting a massive horned head, suggesting Indigenous adaptability. The theme of metamorphosis, always central in Inuit art, appears again in a large untitled drawing by Kinngait, Nunavut, artist Shuvinai Ashoona that shows a man on a bike stopping to take a picture with his phone: His subject is a comical two-headed monster with one human face and another featuring walrus tusks and bunny ears.

Related: Nature meets culture in Sylvia Safdie’s art

What metamorphosis awaits humans after climate catastrophe? Respini has suggested artists ask questions rather than offer solutions, and yet there are hints of optimism here. Photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier spent several years in Flint, Mich., during the collapse of that city’s water system. Her photos, always shown alongside framed texts featuring first-person accounts by their subjects, focus on the arrival of an atmospheric water generator to replace the residents’ polluted supply. Cumulatively, they point to ingenuity and community as a response to crisis.

These documentary photographs, the rich selection of speculative art, Fernández’s provocative coal map – Future Geographies is filled with reminders that we are entering uncharted waters. Perhaps it’s just human delusion, but that means a sense of possibility hovers over this show.

Future Geographies shows at the Vancouver Art Gallery until Jan. 10; it will be presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from March 3 to Sept. 6, 2027.