Paul Kyle Gallery proudly announces the opening of The Collaborators, a pivotal retrospective of Nettie Wild, one of Canada’s leading documentary artists. The exhibition is an inaugural tracing of Wild’s evolution from film to public installation, unfolding over decades through collaboration and sustained attention.

​

Guided by curiosity and perception, Wild and friends reclaim “documentary” by pushing past the first image, framing the familiar in unfamiliar ways to yield the unexpected. Wild's critically acclaimed films have brought her audiences behind the frontlines and headlines of revolutionary change. Her installations build on this work, provoking vital reflection on emergent environmental issues. She was the recipient of a Governor General’s Award in Media Arts in 2023, the BC Film Critics Circle Award in 2010, and was named one of British Columbia’s “most influential women” by the Vancouver Sun.

​

Central to The Collaborators is its ecology of relationships: cinematographers, filmmakers, editors, sound designers, producers, composers, technicians, activists and community members who bring the works into being. Chasing light, repeated action, and embracing contradiction, Wild and her collaborators confront precarities of the human condition; they approach with risk and give way to surprise. Together, they demonstrate how documentary art becomes a communal act of discovery when the camera stays long enough to listen and be changed by what it hears.

​

The works in the exhibition are answers to what happens when one dares to allow contention and human texture to generate their own truths. GO FISH (2023), co-created with Scott Smith, is a three-screen installation portraying the annual herring return to the Salish Sea, recognising the sea’s ecological and cultural abundance as bound to stewardship. UninterruptedVR (2021) reimagines Wild and her team's digital projection of the Pacific Salmon’s upstream passage onto Vancouver’s Cambie Bridge (2017) through virtual reality headsets. We will also showcase Wild’s moving paintings, Guangxi Totem and UninterruptedEYES, images on the wall that behave like cinema.

​

Special event screenings of each film and installation will be followed by discussions with Wild and her collaborators exploring the creative challenges of produce each work. The works will span Wild’s documentary catalogue, from A Rustling of Leaves: Inside the Philippine Revolution (1988), Blockade (1993), A Place Called Chiapas (1998), FIX: The Story of an Addicted City (2002), and Konelīne: our land beautiful (2016), to her most recent film work, Klavierklang (2024), as well as installations including Smith and Wild's GO FISH (2023), and UninterruptedVR (2021).

​

The Collaborators invites viewers to see art as a meeting ground, where attention is shared, and difference is held. Through this exhibition, Paul Kyle Gallery celebrates Nettie Wild and her friends as visionaries whose collective approach sheds light on the wonder and stakes of drawing close with and within our natural and social worlds.