The Refeatured Landscape:

The performance resulted in an exhibition of de Courcy’s project alongside new collaborative work by Martinez, Rojas and Santizo at the

grunt gallery from May 10 - June 8, 2013.(11) The exhibition included a series of programs – artist talks, discussions around social cartography

and a sound walk – that activated the project beyond the gallery space. Further, in May 2013 an interactive project website was launched (http://thisplace.grunt.ca). It documents the 1972 and 2012 routes using Google Maps, by locating photographs, video and audio on the

online map of Vancouver and allowing users to upload their own content. These elements considerably extend the life of the original performance and its documentation, opening the project to further participatory and collaborative opportunities.

 

Process is evident everywhere in the gallery installation and web project, which raises the issue of collaboration and its questioning of authorship that Shaw points to as being central to artistic endeavors on the West Coast since the sixties.(12) Where de Courcy planned the routes that were executed by his collaborators,(13) Martinez, Rojas and Santizo undertook planning and execution in dialogue with one another, working in and through the productive tensions that collaboration entails. The website's participatory element allows viewers to further question how Vancouver, as a place, is made, though currently this aspect of the project has been under-utilized, suggesting the necessity of structured parameters and focused invitation for meaningful engagement to occur in projects such as this.(14) This is made more acute due to the relative longevity of the project's presentation on a dedicated website compared to earlier participatory art projects that were event-based and ephemeral, oftentimes without much documentation. The role of documentation has shifted because of the contemporary ubiquity of photographic images, making the presentation of photography alone inadequate to reflect the complexity of lived experience, which the exhibition is conscious of in its use of multiple modes of image delivery.

 

In the 2013 exhibition, an inverted map of Vancouver is constructed from collaged maps donated by artists and friends. Also included on the map are found images of sites and objects, natural and man made, from around the world as well as artists and artworks pertinent to Vancouver’s cultural community. The map, in this instance, becomes a record both of the research/thought process as well as the multiple and often conflicting histories and bodies that are mapped by and onto the city. An image that reads “YOU ARE ON INDIAN LAND SHOW SOME RESPECT” is placed near an image of an ancient Mayan pyramid, suggesting narratives of time, land claims, displacement, migration, colonization and cultural heritage. The map itself is made up of maps of many places, themselves inverted, perhaps from different times, denoting Vancouver as a city that is evolving, layered, unique yet similar, embodied and in process.

 

Another composite map in the form of a newspaper insert connects the project more specifically to the Latin American heritage of the artists. A map of Guatemala is overlaid with a map of Vancouver, contrasting language, mapping strategies and land use patterns. This is especially evident in the map's key or legend area, which is placed over the grid-like structure of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, showing Oppenheimer Park and the industrial development along the coastline. These boxes remain faintly evident beneath the larger-scale map of Guatemala’s land features and elevations, populated areas (marked in zones) and winding roads. Published in La Revista,a Spanish language newspaper produced in Vancouver, the map recalls the insert into the March 8, 1974 edition of the Vancouver Sunof de Courcy's Background / Vancouver photo-mural as a fifteen by twenty-four inch collectable that accompanied a text by critic Joan Lowndes (http://www.michaeldecourcy.com/background-vancouver/archive.htm) More than that, however, it points to the immigrant experience(s) of the city by Martinez, Rojas and Santizo that position the artists' responses to de Courcy's original project in a particular manner.

 

The photographic process or the method of image delivery by technological means is also an important element of the exhibition. In the room following off the main gallery, known as the Media Lab, is the installation Anachronic Darkroom (2013). Developed photographs and prints of negatives from de Courcy's project, many of which were edited out of the final selection, hang from wooden clips on string as if they have just been developed and left to dry. The room is bathed in red light as if the viewer has just entered a darkroom. On the Media Lab's work table sit three photo-enlarging apparatuses, which have been converted into projectors that screen videos made in Google Maps of the routes traveled by the artists in 1972. Essentially web-based reenactments of the original performances through the technology of surveillance, the videos act as a contemporary lens into the experiential nature of the performance, which is omitted in the final work. The darkroom thus makes the processes of selection, erasure and representation at work in photography and the archive apparent in the mixture of contemporary (digital) and vintage (analogue) forms of technology.

 

The installation is hyper-aware of the multiple histories it inhabits, giving the viewer the uncanny experience of repetition, contrasting the contemporary lived experience of the city to the single frame photograph. The viewer is often made aware of this aspect of looping when viewing both the web project and exhibition. A phrase that begins “LOOPING BRINGS THE PAST AND FUTURE TOGETHER IN THE PRESENT TENSE IS THE WAY I WRITE TO TALK ABOUT THE WOUNDS OF THE PAST AND THE TRAUMA OF TIME MARKS IN THE BODY...” is applied to the wall beneath the collage in the gallery and is echoed in the installation's sound component and performance Enlarging Circles (2012), in which Martinez and Rojas slowly unwind a roll of paper by walking backward from their starting point, standing nose-to-nose in the middle of a bridge, until the delicate material finally breaks apart only to be reconstituted as the performance is shown in reverse through a digitally edited loop. The location of the performance in the Nitobe Memorial Garden, with its careful attention to the authenticity of plant choice and placement as well as the reflection of symbolic and natural forces, makes palpable the connections between Japan and Vancouver. The bridge where the performance takes place is itself meant to signify “a bridge over the Pacific,” calling attention, once again, to the multiplicity of place.

 

Perhaps this is the defeatured landscape re-featured, populated with the stories of immigrants, displaced populations, people of different gender identities, classes and races. Through the use of looping to constantly refer to the past, both in time generally and to de Courcy's project specifically, the artists of ThisPlace / Vancouver move from an urban semiotic of repetition and discardability to a recognition of the city in process, becoming itself through the actors that inhabit it, are marked by it and who push against it.

 

Although employing less of a participatory element, David Semeniuk's Perimeter (2013) is a photographic series that similarly utilizes Google Maps in the planning of nine walks around the perimeter of the city, though this aspect of planning is less evident in the final product than in ThisPlace / Vancouver. Undertaken with collaborator Alice Campbell between February 3 to April 7, 2013, the walks began arbitrarily in the northeast corner of the city at New Brighton Park, in view of the Port of Vancouver, the Iron Worker’s Memorial Bridge and the nearby Cascadia grain elevators. Semeniuk photographed the outer edges of the city, skirting places inaccessible to the public because of industry or private property. Other boundaries included in the project are less obvious, such as the transition between Vancouver and the University Endowment Lands, or the small wooden stake demarcating the Musqueam Indian Reserve from the nearby multi-million dollar properties in the Southlands neighbourhood. Issues of class, private property and accessibility circulate throughout Perimeter.

 

The series was presented at the Gam Gallery in 2013 in conjunction with the inaugural Capture Photography Festival, and the installation involved a unique method of presentation. Upon entering the gallery, the viewer stood between two different media for the reproduction of the photographic image: on the left were framed, limited edition glossy photographs, and on the right, large plotter prints in unlimited edition mounted on panels. Plotter printing is used for printing vector graphics, using a pen to draw lines based on x and y coordinates. This technology is most often utilized for architectural plans, technical designs for machines and so on. The resulting images have a highly textured surface created by the hatching movement of the printer, which is generally inefficient at producing areas of solid colour, leading to variation between prints of the same image.

 

The viewer is thus spatially and conceptually located between images that claim to represent the world truthfully (something more akin to the document image of the defeatured landscape) and images that privilege surface, texture, allude to cartography and the art historical concept of the grid. As pointed to by T'ai Smith, the plotter prints represent the matrix of the half-tone print, being the technology through which photography enters into reproduction. The exhibition is therefore more thoroughly entrenched in the development of the technology itself rather than in questions of representation alone, shifting between epistemology (ways of seeing) and ontology (ways of being).(15) The shifting structure of the image form closely parallels its subject-matter, which asks how the city's physical boundaries reflect the active process of defining civic identity.

 

Many areas of the city were inaccessible to Campbell and Semeniuk on their walks, such as the land occupied by Port Metro Vancouver or the Musqueam Indian Reserve, the latter of whose borders are accessible to the general public but not traversed by Campbell and Semeniuk by conscious decision. During the walking performance and documentation, slippages between the routes planned on Google Maps and the decisions made about what areas may or may not be appropriate to enter along with other factors that may have affected movement, point to the totalizing tendency of mapping systems in theory and the lived experience of moving through the city with its stoppages, debates, compromises and re-routes.(16) As in ThisPlace / Vancouver, the walk unfolded in process and through the various tensions that emerged in encountering the city. The decision not to cross into Musqueam territory, for example, was meant to respect the sovereignty of the people and the territory while simultaneously acknowledging (in both the decision-making process and the photograph of Musqueam Reserve Marker) the continuing colonial history that shapes our interactions with this border.

 

In this photographic series, images of domestic spaces and possible domestic spaces (an opening in a chain-link fence leading to some unseen secluded site) are juxtaposed with images of industry and leisure as Vancouver's economy transitions from an industrial to service-based model. The evidence of the walk's embodied experience of the city's socioeconomic diversity becomes evident through these juxtapositions. It is the performance of walking, with its continual negotiations with the urban space that most closely links Semeniuk's project with the defeatured landscape images of the 1960s, though there is a greater self-awareness of the artist's role in this process. This is evident in the dialectical pairing of images of liminal spaces whose reading by the viewer depends on their contrasting qualities, disrupting the urban semiotic of endless interchangeability as discussed by Watson. This is also true of the juxtaposition of plotter prints and glossy photographs, the latter of which are in conversation with later images of the defeatured landscape in the considered framing of the scenes, positioning the work in relation to the history of photographic practice in Vancouver in order to show how the city is actively defined by its perimeter.

 

The lived socioeconomic, cultural and psychological geographies of the city are similarly evident in the work of Sarah Shamash. In Hastings Glean (2014), the artist traveled along East Hastings Street from Cambie to Clark, an area recently dubbed the Hastings “corridor” – “a descriptor reserved for major arterials where development is reshaping the entire look and feel of the surrounding neighbourhoods.”(17) Selecting materials from her walk such as bits of detritus from nature as well as the street's inhabitants, Shamash brought them into the studio to be photographed as singular objects dramatically lit against a white background. The photographs are presented in a grid alongside a single channel video shot from a car driving along Hastings, offering two perspectives or entry points into the character of this area and the changes it is currently undergoing.

 

The objects photographed include a cheap cigarette pack that reads “For sale on native territories,” a torn pawn shop receipt, an empty syringe package as well as a coffee cup lid from Tim Horton's (recalling its upscale cousin Starbucks). These items elicit associations to the economic and racial demographics of the area along with its ongoing problems of addiction, mental health issues and homelessness. The additions of a browning maple leaf and a seagull feather call up further images of the coastal landscape and official narratives of Canadian identity that do not map neatly onto the subjectivities that these objects imply. One is tempted to wonder how this collection of objects might be read by the outsider, by the non-initiate to Vancouver, its particular relation to the Downtown Eastside or its representation in an international art market context.