Art exhibit asks viewers to contemplate protection and refuge

Arts June 4, 2025

Architectures of Protection—an exhibit currently running at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV)—examines themes of refuge and safety. Specifically, AGGV curator Toby Lawrence says that it asks viewers to reflect on what the idea of protection means to them.

“The exhibition is essentially looking at and trying to consider the idea of protection within contemporary art, and so the exhibition really does build out threads of consideration across and between the different artworks,” she says. “It’s trying to ask us to consider and reflect on what protection might mean to them. How might we think about protection with regards to ourselves, with regards to our community, with regards to our knowledge, and different forms of knowledge, also to culture, and then by way of that, identity, and then bringing everything back to land and our relationship to land. It’s a way to offer space for contemplation with regards to all of the artworks in the exhibition.”

Lawrence says that she’s trying to create dialogue about present issues in the daily lives of viewers.

“I think much of what I’m trying to do with this work is to present some really interesting, engaging, and very sort of timely conversation,” she says. “There are artists in the exhibition who are really looking at a number of contemporary issues that we’re being faced with on a day-to-day basis, and they are providing us with a space to consider how that might impact us in our own personal lives.” 

The ideas of protection, refuge, and safety hearken back to our own recent experiences with COVID-19; Lawrence hopes to generate discussion on this topic. 

“Maybe it offers a little bit of refuge, so there are some artworks that are dealing specifically with this idea of refuge and the reflecting on a lot of questions that might have come up during the pandemic with regards to what might we have learned during that experience,” she says. “What might have shifted our individual and collective understanding of how we feel protected, and what might protection be for some and not for others.”

Lawrence says that artwork, while appearing purely aesthetic, may have the alternative function of creating experiential knowledge within the creator, as well as eliciting a response within the viewer.

“We can never know how someone responds to art, and so I think that’s why we need to continuously offer a large variety of different art offerings. Even if something appears to have a solely aesthetic function, I think it could be argued that it does have an alternate function as well,” she says. “I would imagine that [for the artist] there was an enormous amount of learning and growing, of understanding of the material, of themselves, of their own environment.”

Lawrence hopes that viewers will find meaning and inspiration in the different layers of an artwork, and this has a way of helping us reflect on our own experiences, our culture, and history. 

“They might all of a sudden feel inspired or feel moved, or feel that there is some kind of meaning in that object in so many different ways: the way in which it was made, the way in which it was presented, what they see in it, the cultural relationship they might have to it that allows somebody to gain some kind of understanding, to learn something new, to move them, to think differently about something,” she says. “I think it’s really what propels us to keep looking at the ways in which art impacts our society and also the ways in which art can help us understand ourselves or understand history or reflect it back to us and provide us a new way of looking at things or feeling through objects or experiences.”

Architectures of Protection
Until Sunday, October 26
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
aggv.ca