Domicile/drift
November 25, 2005 –
January 16, 2006
“Photography, among
all other attempts to understand the modern city as a constructed world,
grew up with the city and opened our eyes to the
unique and strange culture of the metropolis.”
Jerry Zaslove, “The City Speaks to Us” School of Communications, SFU
Domicile/drift is a selection of photographs that consider the imaging, communicating and naming of the city. My interest is in urban typologies,
and how the shrinking open spaces, the “terrain vagues” featured and featureless urban landscapes, now meet the narcissistic glass towers of
the downtown
homes, requires a post-conceptual photographic project in order to counter a city of official planning, and indeed, the arbitrariness of development.
Postconceptual strategies which include the use of multiple photographic genres from the “unimposed” style to the documentary provide responses
to the complexity of recapturing the subject and the critical potentialities of photography. The framing and picturing of the experience of the parts
and whole of the city, of what lies over and under the urban surface is a very different perspective from urban planners to sociologists who define
and communicate the experience of the city.
How the city is currently taking shape and then looks back at us is both presented and opened up for questions. In the group of photographs there
are single family homes—framed in the context of urban-and-neighbourhood disparity—but also images that represent the unauthorized and
individualistic and provisional alternatives in finding a domicile (from the needs of the squatter, and “the desperate”). It can be a case of necessity
as the mother of invention, but in very real and simple terms, it is a roof over one’s head. In some way—the irony of metropolis contradictions—it is
an “invisible city” that “ordinary” citizens do not recognize as such.
The current body of work is hung in paired sequences of large and small photos that underscore and contrast, as well as offering overlapping themes
or thematic elements. This approach, hopefully, will elicit responses of how we see and communicate with the various urban and architectural
cityscapes depicted in domicile/drift. There is as well, the necessity for a cultural/historical memory—in the act of documentation—in contrast to the
staging of the (impending and constructed) official cityscape. It is hoped that these pictures will also inform a consciousness that communicates
more than what appears as experience in the everyday. It is there nonetheless.
At the centre of Yellow Blanket is a large concrete drainpipe. It has been nominated and occupied as refuge for an urban drifter, akin to—if one wishes
to consider the analogy—that of a hermit crab shell. For most passersby, the drainpipe exists/rests in an in-between state—it needs to be buried to
fulfill its function. Yet it also has a perverse quality of being an ultramodern thing if it is recognized as domicile. By the same token, that idea would
horrify “respectable” citizens. The yellow blanket becomes a melancholic cipher which is cast out and abandoned by its owner. A few yellow irises
growing wild just a few meters away led me to this site.
Folded Cardboard documents another nominated and temporary shelter, but much more dangerous and provisional. Cardboard is what we use to pack
and transport things and products, but is, itself, disposable. This one is situated in a loading/parking stall: a man’s shoe is barely visible under a folded
cardboard shelter. There are other accidental element readings, such as the Ellsworth Kelly look-alike monochromes above—an ironic readymade of
high formalist art. It becomes a consequence of the photograph, and for the viewer, but not for the drifter who uses the shelter.
Bonus trim presents a rupture—a mediocre multifamily home that has been saved, but the beneficiary is the developer to gain a bloated high building
density. The old building sits on steel stilts and is overlooked by an upscale residential tower—the modern city invasiveness, like all the glass and grid
towers that look down and
overshadow the “everyday.” Single family homes are becoming unattainable and
unaffordable in
results in tracts of houses such as
those beyond even
—the anathema—disasters and nightmares of domesticity. These are extreme scenarios of defunct traditional nuclear family households. The modest
and once tidy domestic family home
(
rapidly multiplying blackberry bushes. The wild, unruly and derelict nature takes over where the functioning community of affordable family homes no
longer can sustain life in this part of the city.
In comparing and pairing single family homes, one from the east side downtown—which has always been predominantly an immigrant, and a less
affluent area—and one from the wealthier and established/stable west side, is the common and predominant garden motif of the flowering rhododendron
bush. They have become a feature of the urbanscape, and, in a dramatic way, announce the coming of spring on the West Coast.
The east side home—with a bright saturated pink of the rhododendron blossoms—is in soft focus and the photo has been enlarged to a borderline
maximum size. At close inspection the photograph rests at the limits of acceptable fine photo quality standards. By collapsing the poor ruinous photo
surface with the subject’s paint peeling garage and vinyl siding surfaces of the downtown eastside home… a “poor or bad” picture attitude ironically invokes
the late 1960s conceptual photo practice. However, the scale and the soft focus of the rhododendron from an unlikely vantage point of a back alley in spring
makes an expressive spectacle.
The
smaller corresponding west side photograph is a symmetrical, prim and tidy
home, with close-trimmed lawns and a large purple rhododendron that
seems to bookend this west side and upscale property.
This is both a straight photo and “real estate” genre picture. The east and
west side demarcations
of the city are cautionary tales of social worth and
class status and economic realities.
Tugboat/houseboat, on first appearance seems
to be the odd choice for this grouping.
The vintage tugboat is now used as a squatters (drifters) home,
docked close to the stern of a large ocean scow. It is a site that was once commonly
referenced in lyrical modernist painting of the West Coast. The
economic activities of resources --logging, lumbering and
fishing -- were recorded and idealized, but these sites rarely appear in
contemporary BC art. The
amnesia of the abundance of the modernist westcoast picturesque is partially invoked here by the old
tugboat/houseboat nestled in its makeshift dock.
The
False Creek basin, which provided thousands of blue collar industrial jobs and
was the economic lifeline to the city via these resource industries, has
nearly vanished, abandoned or in transition, as it has
been for thirty years. It is impossible
to predict what it will look like in twenty years from now, but we
know that it will be radically altered, and beyond recognition. Not necessarily for the better -- but
something else.
Nothing in
fabric reveals many things, not the least of which are value systems in a sliding scale of opportunism. The indexing and scanning of material urban reality for
continue to scan the shrinking and underdeveloped land tracts of the city. The earth cut, arte povera genres which radicalized the way we consider sculpture
now signal themes of urban anxieties of both social and environmental collapse and chaos. This is also the site of the abject boundaries of the distressed
and lowly i.e. the future development tracts of the city. In the drift pictures there are piles of large ice age erratic boulders located on sites of current real
estate speculation and a more recent tire barricade pile—a past memento of the Vancouver Indy spectacle situated on or close to monumental urban renewal
projects for the 2010 Winter Olympics spectacle. The only constant is the change—the “correction” by government planners and land developers and its
various publics to situate
Chris Dikeakos