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Selected Disappearances: Part One (Introduction)
By Lance Blomgren
It has taken less than a month for the site of the old self-serve carwash at the corner of Main Street and 23rd Avenue in Vancouver to be reduced to rubble, razed, and finally removed of any trace of its existence.
Within a month, the perceptual crisis brought on by the very physical disruption of this particular streetscape is becoming less and less pronounced as the unfamiliar steadily dilutes into the familiar. The visual reminder of this space—its absence—will quickly disappear. In one more month it will be difficult for the brain to register any discrepancy in the landscape, and soon it will take a conscious effort—a feat of imagination—to remember that the carwash was there at all.
The carwash, it seems, embodies the transitory nature of the recently departed, that relatively short-lived period when an absence can still act as a spatial reminder, an experiential haunting that evokes a vanished presence.
Like an after-image on the retina, the carwash exists in that liminal state where things are neither what they have been nor what will be, the time and space between one context of meaning and another. After this, memory takes its own psychological course, triggered more by external associations—conversations, photographs, and the like—than the site itself. The carwash will fade from the mind, or reappear in rarified flickerings of remembrance.
For the time being, the shock of the site's erasure still allows for a kind of double-exposure, an image that hasn't yet disappeared or formed.
During this time, as an exercise, I began to make an inventory of sites and things that elicit a similar experience. As with many things, once you start looking for them, they begin to crop up more frequently, disrupting flashes often suggesting coincidences and hidden motives that may not be there. It becomes an obsessive/compulsive way of viewing the everyday, and one which lends itself to paranoia.
What follows is a selection of disappearances—largely to do with my immediate cultural landscape—with accompanying notes and eulogistic nods.
