Steveston is a small town that has become part of neighboring Richmond, a port city that has expanded exponentially over the past two decades as a result of globalization. Named after the first white family to settle in the region in the late 19th century, Steveston was the heart of the salmon industry in Canada, and considered, at one point, to be the “Salmon Capital of the World.” The Gulf of Georgia Cannery was one of the largest and westernmost canneries in the area until it closed in the 1970s. In 1993, it became a Parks Canada National Heritage Site open to the public.
The Gulf of Georgia Cannery is a monument to the massive iron machinery of the industrial era, as well as the men and women, and abundant fish that created the local community. Most of its gigantic equipment was left intact and on view for the public, surrounded by didactic panels, large scale black-and-white photographs and vitrines full of different scenes, such as models of the Cannery at different time periods, documenting the growth of the industry. The exhibition space where Ruth Beer, Kit Grauer, and Jim Budd installed Catch + Release runs parallel to the canning line, where people, mainly young women and ethnic minorities, stood in freezing cold temperatures for hours on end, receiving and processing the daily catch of salmon and herring. Above the line, which is now an archive of fishing artifacts, navigation, boat parts and equipment, children used to work feeding cans onto a rotating belt that dropped them into the machinery line below.
Salmon were the major catalyst in the region, first for the many local Aboriginal tribes who settled there because of the abundant food source, and post-contact, created its modern economy, drawing people of diverse backgrounds to the settle in the area. Today, salmon stocks are at an all-time low. Fish farming has wiped out most of the wild salmon population, pollution has made the ocean highly acidic and scientists have predicted that our generation will live to see a fishless ocean.
Just as the closure of the Gulf of Georgia Cannery marked an economic shift in the region, from dependence on primary and secondary fishing and factory-processing to post-Fordist modes of production and an increased reliance on tertiary industries like tourism and leisure, Catch + Release examines salmon from a contemporary and interdisciplinary perspective to create an interactive and diverse social portrait of the geocultural landscape. The goal is to insert a diverse range of voices and opinions about the salmon industry into the temporary exhibition space to make visitors more aware of their relationship to the local ecology. In this way, the project aims not to create an exhibition in the space, but rather to use the space to exhibit the place in which it is situated.