VANCOUVER ARTIST Gathie Falk has called her work a “veneration of the ordinary”—and there’s no better example than the lowly cabbage lifted up to new heights in an expansive new retrospective showing at Whistler’s Audain Art Museum.

Eighteen of the humble crucifers have been rendered in green-glazed ceramic, leaf by meticulous leaf. The vegetable would have been a staple in her diet growing up in a Russian-Mennonite family in rural Manitoba, but Falk has always pushed against such direct biographical readings of her work. Here they transcend their earthly use, each at a different stage of ripeness, suspended by fishing wire and floating ethereally in the air like strange celestial bodies. It’s a surreal cabbage cosmos. 

In Revelations, organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and drawn from public and private collections, the celebrated Canadian artist brings the same sense of wonder to pyramid-shaped piles of shiny ceramic apples and grapefruits; vivid paintings of sidewalk cement; a seminal performance-art video that centres on an old-school wringer washing machine; and shoes lovingly crafted from clay.

The retrospective is a creatively organized ode to the major themes of an artist whose awards include the Order of Canada and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts.

Charting the 95-year-old’s work from the 1960s to the 2000s, and arranged across several expansive rooms at the Audain, the show captures the religiously devout Falk’s extraordinary way of seeing the world around her. Punctuated with bright hues of orange and red, it’s an exhibition that’s full of joy and humour—though darker themes of mortality hover just beneath the upbeat surfaces.

Beautifully curated by Sarah Milroy (who organized the equally revelatory Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment at the Vancouver Art Gallery this year), the exhibition starts with a vast room of some of Falk’s best-known works: richly coloured ceramic-fruit piles, each piece handmade with different dimples and indentations. Arranged in perfect pyramid formations, these early-1970s works were partly inspired by the fruit displays she saw at corner grocery stores. They also speak to a larger fascination with food ceremony from her domestic life growing up in her Mennonite household, the daughter of parents who fled Russia after the 1917 revolution. They’re voluptuous, glossy, and celebratory; but look toward one apple pile, where brilliant red gradually turns black as you move downward—a whispering of decay and death amid the bounty.