Due to the global pandemic crisis, museums and galleries the world over were forced to close back in March, and months later, they remain closed. So, as you might imagine, Exhibition Reviews will look a little different this summer. Museums and galleries in recent months have moved quickly to redirect their visitors towards digital offerings, which presents us with the unique opportunity to explore such offerings and delve into the world of digital and online exhibitions.
Given that I cannot physically go to a museum exhibition at present, I decided to cast a wide net (pun intended) and find something far from home and foreign to me; and so I landed upon “From Tides to Tins: Salmon Canning in BC,” an online exhibition about the history of Canada’s west coast salmon canning industry from 1870 to 2017.
“From Tides to Tins” was produced in collaboration by the Gulf of Georgia Cannery, which is a historical site, and the Virtual Museum. The latter is currently run under the auspices of the Canadian Museum of History as a funding program to help institutions mount their own online exhibitions, which they then host on virtualmuseum.ca.
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| This page could function much like an introductory panel. It lays out what the exhibition will consist of. (Source) |
Most exhibitions work very hard to immerse you. They employ evocative visuals, purposed lighting, and looping soundscapes. With an online exhibition, housed solely on personal technology and more critically within your home, it is very much up to you to create the atmosphere. Times being what they are, my current residence is filled with the myriad cacophony of my family and dog, to say nothing of the dishwasher, washing machine, and dryer running in the background, and so interruptions are a constant. As such, I headed over to YouTube to see what I could find in terms of soundscapes (here are a few). They tended toward the fantastical, but the sound of water, with seagulls echoing behind it, did the job well enough.
“From Tides to Tins” consists of four overarching sections: Timeline, Working the Line, Map, and Game. The timeline takes you through more than a hundred years of the west coast fishing industry: from time immemorial to our very recent past, divided into distinct periodical segments. It is enormously comprehensive, covering early trade agreements between Indigenous people such as the Stó:lo and fur traders, mechanization, immigration, and the labour movement.
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| The timeline portion of the exhibition. Interestingly, you can either follow it temporally or by theme (i.e., global events, social change, environment) - a good use of its digital format. (Source) |
In telling the history of this region and trade in this fashion, “From Tides to Tins” acknowledges, early and explicitly, the ethnic diversity of the labourers within the fishing industry, and it does not shy away from the racism inherent to policies of the time (i.e., the Head Tax) and how they influenced and were influenced by whichever industry required labourers at any given time. In doing so, the timeline endeavors to tell a more complete and comprehensive history of this region and those who laboured within it. This is also shown in the photos used to demonstrate the various steps of “Working the Line:” the various archival sources are representative of the Chinese, Japanese, Indigenous, and European men and women who worked either on fishing boats or in canneries all along the Canadian west coast.
The timeline also notes the rise of over-fishing and accompanying regulations such as the Wilmot Commissions (1890 & 1892) and the Pacific Salmon Treaty (1930/37), which brings ecology into the conversation and invites the visitor to consider how this successful industry may have affected local salmon populations over time.
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| From the portion of "Working the Line" entitled "Cleaning." The caption below the photo reads: "Indigenous women wash fish during canning preparation at a BC cannery. The photo is courtesy of the Delta Museum and Archives. (Source) |
“Working the Line” and the “Map” portions of the exhibition paint a comprehensive picture of just how numerous and widespread canneries were along the western coast of British Columbia as well as what work within one would have entailed. The exhibition breaks this down into a fourteen-step process, from unloading fish from boats to packing and shipping. Each step details precisely how it would have been done and is accompanied by a short video from an industrial film depicting commercial salmon fishing and canning released in 1948.
The “Map” is interactive. A sliding scale allows you to move temporally from 1870 to 2018, thereby watching canneries on the west coast diminish in number as time goes on. You are able to click on each one to get a little bit of detail about the cannery in question.
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| The map in question! Each red dot is a cannery, which you can click on to learn more about it. (Source) |
As you might imagine, the fishing industry of the west coast is fairly far – both physically and figuratively – from my Ontarian suburbanite upbringing, so I found that I learned a lot. The great strength of it being an online exhibition was that I was able to experience local history without being local to it. While it may be felt at present that the in-person experience of museum-going cannot be replicated by the digital, the digital does allow you to go farther than you might be able to ordinarily.
That being said, the reality of online exhibitions is that you’ll do a lot of reading. Which is not to say that that isn’t what you do in a live exhibition, but it’s usually accompanied the act of walking between panels, by immersive soundscapes, and by videos or hands-on activities.
That brings me to the final part of this exhibition: “Build Your Own Cannery: A Game,” wherein you are put in charge of a new cannery and told to keep costs down and can as much salmon as humanly possible.
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| You can choose your location along the B.C coast, your time period, and the name your cannery. I am now the proud proprietor of "Nothing Fishy Here" Cannery. (Source) |
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| This is what I get for listening to my employees and keeping their hours low when they were upset. (Source) |
Check out “From Tides to Tins” here!
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