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Internal Obsession

By Lance Blomgren

Since returning to British Columbia a year ago, I've been rediscovering a recurring theme about Vancouver—a generalized cultural leaning if you will—that seems to inform the city's definition of itself and drive much of its artistic impulse: a deep sense of introspection and self-analysis.

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I would argue there are few cities that have adopted itself as its own primary artistic subject matter and site of critical/curatorial exploration with such tenacity as Vancouver. Although there are certainly some contenders (San Diego, Berlin and Mexico City come to mind), rarely have I encountered such sustained artistic devotion and theoretical attention to studying, documenting, representing, archiving or commenting on one specific place, seemingly, at times, to the exclusion of all other subjects. This is not to say that other kinds of art aren't being made here, nor that place and local aren't inherently a part of most art practice, but for the past few months, one could easily quip that the art scene has currently adopted a slogan of All Vancouver All the Time.

A spate of recent publications on Vancouver urbanism offer some possible clues to this tendency for self-investigation. Trevor Boddy's "Vancouverism and its Discontents" in the Vancouver Review, Lance Berlowitz's Vancouver and the Global Imagination and Lisa Robertson's Office for Soft Architecture suggest that Vancouver's obsession with its newness, pre-colonial history aside, reveals a city without memory, one actively working to create one. So Vancouver remains in a constant state of redesign and reconstruction, grasping for a sense of its unconscious becoming while under the constant evaluation of how it has been defined for decades: prime tourist destination, site of Expo 86, Hollywood North and the top tier of United Nations' Best City category.

Or perhaps it's the rain. I'm sure this introspection also has something to do with the lack of vision, all that umbrella huddling and looking down—feet and concrete—or fogged up windows. Visibility is often cut close by cloud cover, and as with many things, observance of the physical often points to the root of the psychological.

Regardless, even for a city that has secured its place in contemporary art history compulsively documenting its own likeness under the critical guise of Vancouver Photo-conceptualism—a self-analytic process and often recognizable style that has been developing for decades—Vancouver has been outdoing itself in this regard of late. Spanning the range of commercial galleries, artist-run centres, and DIY spaces, artists and curators have been entrenched in an ongoing investigation of the city's own urban fabric, as well as its socio-economic conditions, particularly the ones that surround the making and presentation of art.

Working out of the local pictorial vernacular developed by Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, and Stan Douglas, Christos Dikeakos' photo exhibition at Catriona Jeffries Gallery and Park—a group-show at Monte Clark Gallery featuring photographers Scott McFarland, Roy Arden, and Chris Gergely—both revealed that Vancouver's well-known structural surfaces and constructed landscapes—backyard gardens, undeveloped lots, and generic 1950s housing—remain fixed as prime subjects of documentation and analysis.

Similarly, Peter Conlin's interdisciplinary Between All and Nothing at Access Gallery this Fall used Vancouver as an investigative flashpoint for his research into spatial politics, notions of public freedom, and collective will.

At the Butchershop, a group of five independent centres came together for an exhibition that adopted the economics of small galleries in Vancouver as one of its primary subjects.

And lastly, this trend of self-investigation was foreground in Artspeak's impressive series of Art and Economies lectures that, for five weeks, dealt exclusively with the role of global, institutional, and market economics of art production in the City of Vancouver.

For this reason perhaps, two exhibitions in this New Year, both by local artists, stand out for providing a bit of breathing room from Vancouver's self-focus, while simultaneously addressing the notions of place and social construction which have come to dominate much of the local critical discourse.

Corin Sworn's Atmosphere and Architecture at Access Gallery (January 7 to February 11) investigates the way the architecture of the workplace—skyscrapers and office buildings—occupy a space of cultural anxiety. Using the metaphor of the ghost, this exhibition is comprised of a series of photographs of urban centres—multiple exposures that allude to the demolished histories of urban development with overlapping, spectral financial towers—and a single channel video projection that takes us through the darkened hallways of corporate space with voiceover testimonials from security guards who have reported experiencing hauntings within these structures. The installation is dreamy, creepy, and entrancing, providing ample meditative space to ponder the relationship between history and urban development, between direct personal experience and impersonal private interests.

And at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Myfanwy MacLeod's Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, (January 20 to March 19) references film noir, drug culture, and rural otherworldliness via two discreet components. One room is dedicated to the overtly fictionalized photo-documentation of an abandoned house for sick children. Like Sworn's installation, this collection relies on the image of the ghost as its primary narrative device. The ten large-format photographs represent the signs of decay of the house in lush architectural detail that suggests the presence of the inhabitants of those who lived there, while a sculpture of a small figure peering through eye-holes in a sheet looks on from the end of the space. In the second room, MacLeod's illusive drawings of indoor marijuana grow-ops are similarly paired up with a carpet featuring a disturbing clump of hair, a wig that has protrudes from one corner, and a tinted mirror which places the viewer squarely within the imaginary world. The title of the show, lifted from Thoreau's Walden, suggests both the yearning and failures inherent in our founding myths, and explores the nature of individuality and community, seclusion and economic reliability.

These two shows are a reminder that, while the introspective nature of Vancouver art has been key to unraveling the multiplicitous psychological and sociological forces that drive our cultural environment, and has certainly been the impetus for ground-breaking work, many of these issues can be tackled through comparative analysis, metaphor, and externalization. In other words, much can be said about the local without taking on the locale as a primary subject.