The WALL

After reviewing a large selection of the city’s archival photographs, certain narratives around settlement and industry persisted in the historical documentation. Given Vancouver’s extensive pre-colonial, Indigenous history, questions regarding the under-represented communities and narratives in the archive informed the artist’s approach to producing the image. What history can be understood and given form when the archival material reflects a certain vantage point?

Looking at the historical photographs, it is difficult to situate their locations within the city due to the dramatic changes that have occurred in Vancouver’s evolution from a frontier town to a major international hub. With the urban renewal programs of the 1960s, the development of the waterfront for Expo 86, the current housing bubble, amongst many other changes, the city of Vancouver is in constant flux. The majority, if not all, of the buildings used to create this image no longer exist, pointing to the disappearance of countless older properties, creating an historical amnesia. This explicit sense of disorientation and dislocation is represented in the destabilized structure of Excavations.

About the Artist

Michael Love is an artist and curator based in Vancouver, BC. He attended and now is an arts educator at the University of the Fraser Valley and Emily Carr University of Art + Design where he completed his BFA. He received an MFA in photography from Concordia University in 2009. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Roloff Beny Travel Fellowship (2009), Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grant (2010) and a BC Arts Council Project Assistance Grant (2014). He has exhibited nationally and internationally and was a founder and co-curator of Gallery 295.

All images used in Excavations are courtesy the City of Vancouver Archives.

Featuring two photographs of a home taken before it’s demolition, in Picture window the artist’s hand is the hand of a labourer. The geometric pattern painted throughout this image is a found pattern from the home’s kitchen, where the stripe was painted on a cinderblock wall. It has been carefully carried throughout the home, touching every room, before going out the bedroom window. This line is transformed into a representation of the gaze of someone living in this house. It is positioned at head height and follows a line of view through the home, pausing where a piece of art once hung, then continuing out the window.

At the same time, it is the line of gaze from outside the home into a bedroom. From embodiment to inhabiting, the life of a home is both an extension of the body and a microcosm of society at large. Who lived here in the past? What was their life like? Who will get to live here in the future, in the new home constructed on this site? Who designed and built these homes? Who cleaned and maintained them? What is lost with the demolition of the old home? What is gained by the building of the new home? Who suffers from rising house costs and who gains?

About the Artist
Emily Neufeld was born and raised in Alberta, but now lives and works in Vancouver. She has her BFA in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Her work focuses on the layers of memory and traces of psychic history that accumulate in particular domestic spaces and investigates that lived history through the dialogue between the materials she uses and the spaces she creates. Emily has exhibited across Alberta and British Columbia and was a recipient of a BC Arts Council Grant in 2016.

The boundaries of the downtown core were taken from the municipality’s parameters – the west side of Main Street to the east side of Burrard, False Creek to Burrard Inlet and the jut of Coal Harbour, beginning on the north side of Georgia and ending at the water. The temporal boundary of the project (1954 onwards) relates to the fact that on December 16, 1953, CBUT (the CBC precursor) became the very first television station broadcasting in Western Canada, marking the moment when Vancouver had local televisual news for the first time in its history.

Research, both online and at the City of Vancouver Archives, revealed that the number of buildings that have come down in this period approximated 1500 – with high-density areas of destruction taking place in the industrial areas of Coal Harbour and False Creek. The CBC Archive, the sole archival resource for the images of buildings in this project, contained footage of 47 of these buildings in the process of being demolished or burnt. Looked at another way, approximately 3% of the destruction was recorded and delivered up to the public as news.

The high number of buildings that have gone missing from our collective landscape is indicative that humans are notorious for forgetting, and that what is normal is always shifting. Vancouver has a (short) long history of development in the pursuit of density and profit.

Faith would like to thank Colin Preston, the Wall project partners, the staff at the CBC and the City of Vancouver Archives, Alex MacKenzie, Paul Levine, Bob Ellenton and Lillipilli Ellenton. She’d like to dedicate this work to Archivists everywhere – analogue, digital, other. You have the best of both worlds – enchantment and order.

About the Artist

Faith Moosang is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Vancouver, BC.  Her work centres around inquiry into spectacle culture, media, mediated imagery, and the notion and materiality of archives. She has an MFA from the School for Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University and a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. She also works as a historical researcher, a writer and curator, and has published books, articles and blogs relating to culture, pop culture, history and photography. More information about the artist and her work can be found at faithmoosang.com

Visit the down. town. website here.

Laiwan has also created a parallel web project that extends the exploration of fluidity throughout the city, bringing together the oral and natural histories of nearby communities. This virtual public space, a communal archive, is open for all to contribute, to create a shared flow of ideas over time.

Visit the web project here.

About the artist

Laiwan is a Vancouver based interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator. This project is curated by independent curator and writer Joni Low with the support of  Centre A participating arts organization.

the people are the city … relies on a vernacular experience of architecture and is composed of two distinct elements: an archival image and a text component, both retrieved from the CBC archives. The image is from the CBC Archive’s collection of photographs by Franz Lindner and shows an instructor with his students at the Vancouver Vocational Institute in 1963. The text “The people are the city” was a headline taken from a copy of the CBC Times, a weekly programming guide published during the 1960’s. “The people are the city” was the title of a radio program covering a winter conference which aired on January 28, 1966 about the practice of local democracy and was a joint venture between the CBC and the Canadian Institute on Public Affairs.

From personal experience, I’ve always held the belief that in order to remember something – a place, a name, an idea – I need to say it three times. Similarly, the people are the city … appears three times almost as a reminder that architecture is informed by our experiences of it. And while the work academically and visually references photo-based artistic practices that Vancouver is well known for, the people are the city … nonetheless tries to evoke a visceral, personal and emotive response. It is an attempt at creating significance out of our banal and everyday interactions. the people are the city … comments on architecture’s social responsibility, that architecture and social spaces are fundamentally conceived and built from personal and vernacular histories that ultimately builds communities and contributes toward collective and official historical memories.

About the artist:
Born in Manila, The Philippines where he studied Engineering, Paul de Guzman immigrated to Canada in 1986. Currently living in Vancouver, his self-education in art was achieved by reading texts on art, theory and architecture. For the past few years, his nomadic artistic practice has been characterized by a conceptual and linguistic approach toward the institutional nature of architecture through the creation of transient and temporary structures using linguistic and architectural strategies. His work has been shown widely in Canada and abroad, and has participated in artistic residencies at Stichting Duende in Rotterdam, The Netherlands and the Darling Foundry in Montréal, Canada.

Unlike the theatre, where the set is viewed as a whole, for television only part of the set will be seen on camera at any one time. The set must be so arranged that the picture is engaging to the viewer. The art of the designer is to frame a setting in which the producer can arrange the actors to get the most striking effect.

CBC Vancouver Staff Photographer Alvin Armstrong’s framing of the production still, Room at the Roxy, captures such a moment. Armstrong worked as a photographer at CBC from 1954 to 1973. Among his other photographic responsibilities, Armstrong shot still images of CBUT TV productions for design reference and production promotional use. With Alvin Armstrong’s mise-en-scène, the viewer is witness to a critical point in the action of the studio-shot local drama, Room at the Roxy. Reminiscent of contemporary artist Jeff Wall’s work, the image gives the illusion of capturing a real moment in time. A widowed mother is searching for her drug-addicted son. She arrives at the rain-spattered front door of a dingy Skid Row Vancouver hotel.

In 1957, the size of a television screen was no larger than 21’’. The image viewed was smaller than life-size. By enlarging Armstrong’s original 4×5” photographic negative to a different perspective, larger than reality, a view is created that is not normally seen. This perspective was neither intended nor produced for such an application. It blurs the line between art and archival document.

The role of any archives is to acquire, preserve and provide access to its content. Archivists must resolve balancing their role as stewards of society’s important textual, sound & image ‘documents’ while simultaneously making the documents accessible to the public. In preserving Alvin Armstrong’s 19 years of work as a CBC still photographer, the CBC Vancouver Media Archives also preserves the documentary evidence of those hundreds of people associated with the productions themselves.

About

Room at the Roxy – Screenplay, Paul Power; Producer/Director, Frank Goodship; Set Designer, Dave Jones. Cast: Doris Buckingham (pictured), Derek Ralston, Lillian Carlson, Ted Greenhalgh, Earl Matheson and Jim Gilmore.

The Agitational Stand, or Agit-Prop (Agitational Propoganda) designs, employed a variety of strategies to disseminate information in the public realm in order to shape public opinion and sentiment. By creating vertically-oriented structures that projected sound and images, these designs pre-dated the technological capacity to create multi-media environments which are now de-rigeur in the urban landscape.

The newly renovated plaza and upgrades to the CBC building in many ways fulfill this prophecy: satellites that rest on top of the building gather information from around the globe, while inside the building this information is processed and formatted for re-distribution. In the plaza, a public space that includes café’s, seating areas and carefully positioned greenery surrounds strategically positioned information displays, such as a scrolling LED sign of current headlines, and a large-scale digital screen displaying a continuous feed of images.

By reflecting back on the function of these Constructivist designs and creating a playful connection to the context within which it will be viewed, News of the Whole World examines the role of information dissemination in the creation of a public.

Echoing the current rapid migration of construction sites from one street to the next throughout Vancouver’s downtown core, Deis has transplanted Last Chance to the 700 block of Hamilton Street. Using a printing medium commonly associated with full colour advertising and real estate marketing, Last Chance asserts a distinctly quiet, black and white presence. Its scale suggests a distant view, yet focuses upon a recent past. Compressing into one image the last house, the last tree, and the last chance for pre-construction pricing, Deis’ photograph captures a somber and familiar moment of transition in Vancouver’s built environment.

About the artist

Eric Deis is a Vancouver-based artist who has exhibited in North America and Europe. His minutely detailed large-format photographs expose extraordinary moments hidden within regular circumstances.

Last Chance was curated by Barbara Cole, Executive Director of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects. Other Sights is a non-profit society dedicated to forging unique partnerships in the presentation of projects that consider the aesthetic, economic and regulatory conditions of public places and public life.