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A Couple in Conversation: Garth Amundson and Pierre Gour exhibit 'Not the Whole Picture' at the Whatcom Museum

By Frances Badgett | Photography by Brandon Sawaya and Lily Mock

WWU Communications

Pierre Gour and Garth Amundson
"Not the Whole Picture"

“Not the Whole Picture,” an exhibit of the work of WWU art professors Pierre Gour and Garth Amundson, reflects the 40 years the pair has spent as partners, individual artists and collaborators. 

Though it is not a retrospective, the exhibit at the Whatcom Museum running through July 27 is a thorough exploration of Amundson and Gour’s paintings, installations and photography.

Collectors and curators of toys, woven baskets, and photographs, the artists elevate these ephemeral collections of kitsch to art. 

The exhibit opens with the largest, boldest pieces: giant mandalas of stitched together photographs. Gour, a painter, assembled the photographs and Amundson, a photographer, sewed them together by hand. Large, colorful, and fascinating in the whole and upon close inspection, the pieces reflect their years together, vacations they have taken, family members they have loved and lost, friends they have made over the years, and, yes, pets.

Gour and Amundson's collaboration "Not the Whole Picture."
"Happy Happy Happy" reflects the joys and challenges of a long partnership. An arrangement of salvaged stereo parts, free sound editing equipment, and brass horns. As a person passes, the horns chant the word "happy" in whispers.

“Our friends come and try to find themselves in this one,” Gour said, pointing to the mandala of friends they’ve made throughout the years.

A haunting piece called “Penetrating Cuts” is a collection of vintage photographs with the faces removed from one piece and reassembled into a separate piece titled “Head(s).” Similarly, "Ghost Written" is another series of vintage images with the eyes excised. Ghostly and strange, these works are beautifully displayed.

“Amy Chaloupka selected from our larger collection of these and displayed them so perfectly,” Gour said. 

Chaloupka is a WWU alumna and Chief Curator at the Whatcom Museum. 

“She really took her time with our pieces and treated them with such care,” Amundson said.

The images of abandoned rural houses conjoined with high-color promotional photos from the 1950s and 1960s expressed Amundson’s sadness, absence, and longing for home—defined as both a physical proximity to his partner and a spiritual space of safety.

Unintentionally topical, their “Sub-divisions” photography series represents their experience with U.S. immigration. After being separated at the U.S.-Canadian border, Amundson traveled to Mexico on a Fulbright, and his body of work evolved into this collaborative project, addressing definitions of home, and bi-national queer identity.

“The Federal Defense of Marriage Act barred queer couples from the right to sponsor an immigrant spouse for permanent residence. Most queer bi-national couples were forced to separate because the U.S. government viewed them as strangers under the law,” Amundson said.

“We were utterly bereft,” Gour said. “And that experience is now happening to so many people.” 

So many of us have boxes of photos stashed in closets and in storage units. So many of us have odd little collections of bottles and baskets and vintage metal toys. Through the eyes of Gour and Amundson, these objects become art that speaks to all of us.

Frances Badgett covers the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the College of Fine and Performing Arts Communications. Reach out to her with story ideas at badgetf@wwu.edu.