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What distinguishes Terry Graff as director of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum (CCAGM) and what makes him good at his job, is that he is so utterly unembarrassed to think of the Centre as a national cultural institution. Too often, Islanders subconsciously accept an attitude that slyly insinuates that institutions of national importance, by their very definition, have to be in the centre of the nation, in nationally important (that is, big) cities. Terry Graff thinks differently. His job, as he sees it, is to use the CCAGM's wall space to help bring diverse Canadian artists into dialogue, to continue to tell a nation's story through their images and installation, and to show Prince Edward Island's and Prince Edward Island artists' place on the national canvas. He is proud, he says, "to open up possibilities for exhibitions in Charlottetown based on this place and what is happening across the country."
After countless shows curated and installations installed, Terry is proudest "of how the staff [at Confederation Centre] has come together to work as a powerful team to reinvigorate the mandate of the Centre. To produce a program, you need staff who love their work and are committed-and who won't compromise their standards of excellence." And Terry Graff loves his work with them. "Where else," he asks, "would I get to go every day and get paid to look at major works of Canadian art?"
Terry knows a thing or two about less fulfilling jobs. By the time he was 25, he had worked in 30 jobs in Southern Ontario, many of them on assembly and production lines. Part of what set Terry on a path that led him here was "getting fed up with the worst part of Southern Ontario." He describes his family's life in Windsor, where they last lived in Ontario: "We could see in the morning the furnaces, see the fires blazing as they lit them up. We would wake with a film of soot, our blue car would be almost black. We lived kitty-corner to the county jail, with a graveyard across the street. The neighbourhood had too many kids with no clothes or food...and our house got broken into." Eventually, Terry and his wife, Kim, and their two kids got into a car and "just drove." They bought a house near Sackville, New Brunswick, and have been in Eastern Canada ever since.
Terry's own art responds to his industrial experience by incorporating mechanical elements and environmental themes. An installation he created for the Tantramar marshes follows a flock of motorized ducks through a twenty minute migration on wires and poles. An installation at Purdy's Wharf in Halifax consists of fish created partly out of material that Terry found in the dumpster behind the building where the installation is housed-material they were even dumping in the harbour. The fish swim in an ocean of cobalt blue neon he had to order directly from Las Vegas. "Our experience of wildlife, the experience of wildlife in a technological world is in some ways closer to these contraption creatures-because they are disintegrating, falling apart in front of us-but they are also transforming, becoming something new."
Even though he did not enjoy working on GM assembly lines, Terry came to be "fascinated with all the little parts." He came to appreciate that "there's an aesthetic to all the garbage we create." The "kitsch and clutter" in his art help define "what our visual experience of consumer culture really is like."
Not much of Terry's work is on exhibit on the Island. Here, he wants the focus of his work to be his work in the CCAGM. The gallery, he says, is "one big work of art," using many artists' work to create much bigger installation projects in the gallery. Terry is enthusiastic about the role he and his staff can play as catalysts for new work, "discussing an idea where a work doesn't even exist, then working with artists and orchestrating the gallery to make it happen." Terry has not shied from controversies that could lead to a productive discussion of art's role in society. The gallery continues to feature a large installation by a Quebec separatist artist Armand Vaillancourt, and a gallery show was the starting point of a controversy over portrayal of First Nations culture in the venerable "Anne of Green Gables-The Musical." As Terry prepares for a new set of fall shows that will see the "whole place transformed again-top to bottom" he continues to see the gallery's national space as a "natural place for addressing societal questions." "Our attention turns local and regional when the tourists go away. We get to talk more about here," he says. "But we always keep the scope of the national in mind."