Group Search & Memory Palace

Inside the Library Curatorial Initiatives

A project of the City of Vancouver Public Art Program in partnership with
Other Sights for Artists’ Projects and Doryphore Independent Curators
Lorna Brown and Karen Love, Editors

Please join us to celebrate!

February 16^th- 1 p.m.
Read Books — Emily Carr University of Art + Design
1399 Johnston St
Vancouver, BC

Other Sights for Artists’ Projects and Doryphore Independent Curators, the Vancouver Public Library and the City of Vancouver Public Art Program are delighted to announce a new publication that documents Group Search and Memory Palace, presented as part of Inside the Library Curatorial Initiatives. In a program running from September 2006 to February 2010, these distinct projects commissioned artists to investigate the potential of the diverse public space of the Vancouver Public Library’s Central Branch while addressing the broader philosophical and symbolic meanings of ‘the library’. Designed by Mark Timmings in a ‘tumbler’ format, the book brings together into one volume full colour reproductions of nine site-specific art projects along with essays by Renee Baert, Colin Browne, Vanessa Kwan, Derek Simons, Jordan Strom and the project curators, Lorna Brown and Karen Love.

Curated by Lorna Brown, Group Search [art in the library] presented six projects by Antonia Hirsch, Mark Soo, Marina Roy, Jillian Pritchard & Dan Starling, Laiwan and Kathy Slade in the spaces and systems of the Vancouver Public Library Central Branch. Whether working with the library collection, or creating installations or performances, the artists drew upon a fascination with languages, organizational systems, and popular or specialized culture in all its forms.

Memory Palace [3 artists in the library], curated by Karen Love, presented three projects by Angela Grauerholz, Carol Sawyer and Esther Shalev-Gerz. The resulting artworks took the form of installations in the public areas of the library and atrium, bringing forward the artists’ perceptions of the multifarious roles of the book, and the systems, sociality and sensuality of the spaces in which books circulate.

Deadhead, the Bomfords

A co-presentation with Pre­sen­ta­tion House Gallery

In the summer of 2012, Vancouver-based artist Cedric Bomford in collaboration with his father Jim Bomford (a retired engineer), and brother Nathan Bomford (an artist and builder), began construction on a large-scale installation in a purpose-built studio located on the False Creek Flats. Conceived as a structure to be mounted on a barge, towed by tug, and moored at different locations, Deadhead interprets the ecological, archi­tec­tural, and indus­trial his­to­ries of Vancouver’s regional water­ways. Intended to be boarded and explored, this floating sculpture is designed to func­tion as a mul­ti­pur­pose social space, which through its evolv­ing activ­i­ties, will be acces­si­ble to a diver­sity of publics. In the spring of 2013, the piece will be transported to, installed, and launched in the Burrard Inlet to begin an undetermined duration of life on the water – a floating future dependent upon the curiousity and vision of host coastal communities.

Each of the Bomfords’ individual experiences, understandings, and deep interests in the rich and often unknown histories, cultures, and legends of this Province drove the summer’s period of intense production. Inspiration for Deadhead came from the family’s research trips up the east coast of Vancouver Island, Malcolm Island and Alert Bay. Their sculptural vocabulary was formed from the vernacular and provisional architectural expressions evident from the resource-based economies and rural communities of the British Columbia coast.

For this work, as with some of their past collaborative projects, the Bomford team employed a methodology of ‘thinking through building’, an approach that forgoes preliminary plans and 3D renderings to move directly into a process of construction and response. Working within a model of familial cooperation, they tested ideas, building, dismantling and re-building to present a structure for behavior consisting of overlapping and intersecting sections — some of which are fitted with a tailored suit of printed photographic scrim. Portals and platforms for viewing the surrounding land and seascapes were built to coexist with a more internal focus, directing attention to a hierarchy of power – making distinctions between pulpit and lectern, crows nest and diving board. Whether experienced on board or as a phenomenon viewed from shore, the piece challenges perceptions of what is known and understood while conjuring ties to this region’s past.

Deadhead was curated by Barbara Cole and Helga Pakasaar.

Cedric Bomford is a Vancouver based visual artist whose practice is gaining international recognition. He recently participated in a Creative Residency at The Banff Centre for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts residency program in Berlin, Germany. He received an MFA from the Malmö Art Academy, Lund University, Malmö, Sweden in 2007, and a BFA with a major in Photography from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2003. He has exhibited internationally, including solo shows in Canada, Germany, Sweden, and Australia, and group shows in Germany, Sweden, Iran, Australia, Taiwan, and Canada. Several of the Canadian installation projects have been realized in collaboration with his brother Nathan Bomford including the architectural enivironment that was part of the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition How Soon is Now and Bamberton: The Contested Landscape at Open Space in Victoria. Nathan Bomford has an MFA from the University of Victoria and a BFA from the Nova Scotia Art and Design. He has exhibited across Canada and internationally.

Born in Duncan BC, Jim Bomford received his Bachelor of Applied Science (Civil Engineering) from UBC in 1971 and practiced as a civil, structural and environmental engineer in British Columbia until his retirement from Professional Engineering in 2010. He has contributed his engineering expertise on a number of large-scale sculptural installations as part of the Bomford collaborative team.

Conversations at the Bomford Studio took place throughout the summer as part of Other Sights’ Future is Floating programming. Please see “Events” for more information.

Related Links

The Games Are Open [K & K]

False Creek [T & T]

STRUCTURES OF POWER

GEOFFREY CARR IN CONVERSATION WITH CEDRIC, NATHAN AND JIM BOMFORD

Bomford Studio, 527 Great Northern Way, GNW campus, Vancouver, BC
Thursday September 13, 2012, 6 p.m.

As a lead up to the launch of the Bomford’s Dead­head (work­ing title) , a float­ing sculp­ture co-produced by Other Sights and Pre­sen­ta­tion House Gallery, Other Sights’ Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Office presents the second in a series of con­ver­sa­tions about build­ing struc­tures, imag­i­nary, phys­i­cal or social, at the artists’ GNW studio.

In the research phase of this project the Bomfords initiated a discussion with Geoffrey Carr about his insight into the relationship between the built environment and colonial power on the west coast. For this event, Carr will present some of his research and insight into the authority implicit in the design and construction of residential schools. A discussion between Carr and the Bomfords will follow.

In collaboration with his brother Nathan Bomford, father Jim Bomford, and with the assistance of Mark Dudiak, and many others, Cedric Bomford has been constructing a structure intended to be mounted on a barge that will be moored at various locations along our region’s waterways. After an extensive research and concept development phase, the artwork is being fabricated in a purpose-built studio constructed of shipping containers and industrial tenting.

Please join us at the Bom­ford stu­dio to see the project at this point in its evo­lu­tion and participate in an informal conversation about the research informing the work. There will be a BBQ to follow.

Geoffrey Carr is an architectural historian and a member of the faculty in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of the Fraser Valley. He holds a PhD in Art History from  the University of British Columbia. His research examines the largely overlooked architectural history of the Indian Residential School system in Canada, as well as the problems pertaining to the preservation and commemoration of these contentious places. In addition, he is also interested in issues related to memorialization, heritage preservation, state apology, and discourses of social reconciliation.

Cedric Bomford is a Vancouver based artist whose practice is gaining international recognition. He recently participated in a Creative Residency at The Banff Centre for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts residency program in Berlin, Germany. He received an MFA from the Malmö Art Academy, Lund University, Malmö, Sweden in 2007, and a BFA with a major in Photography from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2003. He has exhibited internationally, including solo shows in Canada, Germany, Sweden, and Australia, and group shows in Germany, Sweden, Iran, Australia, Taiwan, and Canada. Several of the Canadian installation projects have been realized in collaboration with his brother Nathan Bomford including the architectural environment that was part of the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition How Soon is Now and Bamberton: The Contested Landscape at Open Space in Victoria.

Nathan Bomford is a visual artist mainly working in photography and installation. He is currently based in Shawnigan Lake, British Columbia. Nathan received an MFA from the University of Victoria in 2006, and a BFA with a major in photography from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2003. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Germany and across Canada. Much of his recent work has been completed in collaboration with his brother Cedric Bomford and his father Jim Bomford.

Born in Duncan BC, Jim Bomford received his Bachelor of Applied Science (Civil Engineering) from UBC in 1971 and practiced as a civil, structural and environmental engineer in British Columbia until his retirement from Professional Engineering in 2010. He has contributed his engineering expertise on a number of large-scale sculptural installations as part of the Bomford collaborative team.

About The Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Office:
Late last year, Other Sights formed a Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Office, and we have been talk­ing and think­ing about how The Future is Float­ing in so many ways. Whether it’s melt­ing ice caps, waves of social unrest, list­ing economies or just a gen­eral sink­ing feel­ing, the future is uncer­tain, and flu­idly so. In wav­ing or drown­ing, we pro­pose a series of events that focus our atten­tions, invite new ideas and put us in touch, whether face to face or ear to ear.

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN CEDRIC, NATHAN AND JIM BOMFORD AND JEN WEIH

Bomford Studio, 527 Great Northern Way, GNW campus, Vancouver, BC
Wednesday, August 29, 2012, 6 p.m.

As a lead up to the launch of the Bomford’s Deadhead (working title) , a floating sculpture co-produced by Other Sights and Presentation House Gallery, Other Sights’ Communication Office presents the first of a series of conversations about building structures, imaginary, physical or social, at the artists’ GNW studio.

In collaboration with his brother Nathan Bomford, father Jim Bomford, and with the assistance of Mark Dudiak, and many others, Cedric Bomford has been constructing a structure intended to be mounted on a barge that will be moored at various locations along our region’s waterways. After an extensive research and concept development phase, the artwork is being fabricated in a purpose-built studio constructed of shipping containers and industrial tenting.

The Bomford’s process of construction marries pragmatic and structural concerns with speculative thinking, experimentation, research, learning, invention and failure. This mode of engagement enacts the operative core of the Bomford’s process of thinking through building— the simultaneous attention to the contingent and investigative dimensions of working and to the making of a thing, to both the means and the end.

Please join us at the Bomford studio to see the project at this point in its evolution and to take part in an informal conversation about making. A BBQ will follow.

Cedric Bomford is a Vancouver based artist whose practice is gaining international recognition. He recently participated in a Creative Residency at The Banff Centre for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts residency program in Berlin, Germany. He received an MFA from the Malmö Art Academy, Lund University, Malmö, Sweden in 2007, and a BFA with a major in Photography from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2003. He has exhibited internationally, including solo shows in Canada, Germany, Sweden, and Australia, and group shows in Germany, Sweden, Iran, Australia, Taiwan, and Canada. Several of the Canadian installation projects have been realized in collaboration with his brother Nathan Bomford including the architectural environment that was part of the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition How Soon is Now and Bamberton: The Contested Landscape at Open Space in Victoria.

Nathan Bomford is a visual artist mainly working in photography and installation. He is currently based in Shawnigan Lake, British Columbia. Nathan received an MFA from the University of Victoria in 2006, and a BFA with a major in photography from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2003. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Germany and across Canada. Much of his recent work has been completed in collaboration with his brother Cedric Bomford and his father Jim Bomford.

Born in Duncan BC, Jim Bomford received his Bachelor of Applied Science (Civil Engineering) from UBC in 1971 and practiced as a civil, structural and environmental engineer in British Columbia until his retirement from Professional Engineering in 2010. He has contributed his engineering expertise on a number of large-scale sculptural installations as part of the Bomford collaborative team.

Jen Weih is an artist, arts educator and par­tic­i­pant in Other Sights’ Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Office.

About The Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Office:
Late last year, Other Sights formed a Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Office, and we have been talk­ing and think­ing about how The Future is Float­ing in so many ways. Whether it’s melt­ing ice caps, waves of social unrest, list­ing economies or just a gen­eral sink­ing feel­ing, the future is uncer­tain, and flu­idly so. In wav­ing or drown­ing, we pro­pose a series of events that focus our atten­tions, invite new ideas and put us in touch, whether face to face or ear to ear.

by Joseph Hart, PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 23 NO. 2 • ISSUE 46

Download (PDF — 1.3MB)

Last summer, residents of Vancouver’s Southeast False Creek neighborhood were drawn into an unusual artistic experiment. On a vacant lot littered with the rusty remnants of the neighborhood’s industrial past, artist Holly Schmidt led volunteers in designing, building, planting,and harvesting a thriving container garden.

“I’m not a great gardener; I’m just average,” says Schmidt. “So it wasn’t so much me being an ‘expert.’” Instead, she invited passers-by to join in the work of creating the garden. The idea, she explained, was that folks “would come in and help out and learn from each other.” A wide variety of people got their hands dirty. Master gardeners and designers collaborated on the site plan. Artists contributed their own projects. Meaghen Buckley, for instance, wove handmade nets onto an old industrial structure to serve as a creative climbing gym for runner beans.

Other volunteers just happened onto the project while strolling nearby walking paths. One curious elderly resident dropped by to offer a flat of tomato plants. “She ended up helping out throughout the whole project,” Schmidt says. And her tomatoes thrived.

A Critique—and Solutions

Schmidt’s project, Grow, is one of an increasing number of innovative, artist-led experiments that explore urban farming or attempt—in a practical way—to clarify and decode the notion of sustainability, especially as it relates to our food.

In large part, projects like Schmidt’s reflect recent changes in our relationship to what we eat. In the past 20 years, our food system has come under increasing scrutiny. Books like Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma have advanced a critique of industrial agriculture that is becoming embraced by the American mainstream.

In short, this critique focuses on the “green” (read: chemical) revolution of the 1960s. Since then, farms have become larger and less diverse, with severe consequences for farmers, our environment, and our health. Today, just 12 percent of the nation’s farms produce 84 percent of our food (and receive billions in federal subsidies), according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The other 88 percent rely on off-farm income. Not surprisingly, few young people are interested in farming; the fastest-growing age group in farming is people over 65. Mono-cropping wears out soil, with petrochemicals making up for the depletion. Centralized food systems also require vast carbon-dioxide-spewing transportation networks. Meanwhile, processed foods are linked to a range of conditions, from obesity and diabetes to pesticide-related cancer.

Responses to this critique represent a range of efforts, including calls for better food labeling and food security, attempts to maintain and improve the USDA’s organic standards, and lobbying to reform the political landscape that currently favors industrial farming.

More recently—and most interestingly—come the efforts of food activists: farmers, enlightened consumers, and artists like Schmidt who encourage us to attend to our personal relationship to our food and its production. The rapid growth of farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture, as well as the locavore movement, which encourages us to eat seasonally and locally, all come under this umbrella.

“Art farmers” whose projects and practices focus on food issues range far and wide. They include, to name just a few, artists like Matthew Moore, a fourth-generation farmer who has transformed his family farm in Arizona into an artistic commentary on encroaching suburbia, and who constructs practical farming interventions like hanging portable vegetable boxes. The Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc has facilitated several large-scale projects including water collection developments; a rooftop rice field in Anyang, South Korea; and a seed and plant bank in Paris. Fritz Haeg focuses on front-yard gardens with his Edible Estates project.

Not only do these artists and projects advance a critique of our industrialized food system, but they are also actively engaged in the search for solutions. Whether by demonstrating more holistic techniques and sources of food production or by exploring new, collaborative forms of community interaction, they’re helping to define a new day for agriculture.

The Art of Growing

As a curator and cofounder of ecoartspace NYC, Amy Lipton has worked with a number of artists who are advancing practical solutions to the problems associated with industrialized agriculture.

In one 2009 project, Lipton gathered a group at Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, which also runs a working farm. Each participant in the exhibition Down to Earth: Artists Create Edible Landscapes built unique, living gardens with inventive structures that ranged from a rainwater collection system to a sculptural fence designed to keep deer in check.

Lipton’s interest is tied closely to her passion for environmental justice. She ran a traditional New York gallery in the 1980s where, among others, she worked with artist Mel Chin. In 1990, Chin collaborated with a USDA researcher on Revival Field, an artwork that used heavy metal–absorbing plants to clean up a brownfield in St. Paul, Minnesota.

“This work is in a new territory where it’s hard to put labels on it,” Lipton says. “Even among the artists, no one is super comfortable with terms like ‘eco-art’ or ‘land art.’ It’s not like minimalism or cubism that sum up very easily.”

For Chin, this ambiguity had a concrete consequence: a grant he’d received from the National Endowment for the Arts was rescinded. “They were questioning whether it was an artwork at all,” says Lipton. Chin fought the decision and the grant was eventually reinstated.

Amy Franceschini’s Victory Garden project in San Francisco provides a striking contrast. Launched in 2006 at the city’s Museum of Modern Art, the program enlisted residents to plant back– and front-yard edible landscapes and provided  workshops and tours of participating gardens. Franceschini, a founder of the collaborative group Futurefarmers, also created a demonstration Victory Garden in front of City Hall. The highly successful program has since become an ongoing, cityfunded initiative and a model for other urban agriculture projects around the country.

The idea, Franceschini told the Los Angeles Times in 2009, was to declare “a victory of self-reliance, independence from the industrial food system, and community involvement.”

Today, she describes the impact of the project in even broader terms. “It addresses the disconnection we have with everything we consume,” she explains. “It’s a point of initiation to a deeper connection with food. As soon as people started farming and realizing how difficult it was, a lot of other questions unfolded.” Ultimately, these questions included the pressing environmental issues of the day, including climate change, transportation, and the challenges of population increases.

More recently, Futurefarmers took up the issue of soil health in Soil Kitchen. Timed to coincide with the 2011 Environmental Protection Agency’s National Brownfields Conference in Philadelphia, the project took over an abandoned building, outfitted it with a giant windmill, and turned it into a community gathering space.

The heart of Soil Kitchen was a testing project: Neighbors traded soil samples from their yards for a bowl of soup. Like the Victory Garden program and Schmidt’s Grow, the project included workshops and hands-on demonstrations on topics like sustainability, composting, grassroots community financing, and alternative energy. The soil samples were tested by EPA conferees, and the results were posted online. Residents with high contamination worked with the EPA to gain more knowledge of remediation. The initial project is over, but local residents plan to carry the program forward for another year with the blessings of the city.

The Social Dynamics of Food

Like Schmidt’s Grow, projects launched by Futurefarmers raise awareness of local, homegrown alternatives to the industrial food system. But they do a lot more than that. By creating collaborative, informal, grassroots interaction, they model an alternative social structure as well.

For Schmidt, this interaction is a key component of her work. “Instead of being didactic and telling people ‘This is how it should be,’ I’m always looking at how we can come together and start building something interesting. How can we come together, ask questions, and create a new practice?”

In other words, such artists are challenging the social implications of outsourcing our food production to multinational corporations and gigantic, centralized, and largely invisible farms. They’re questioning why the intricate, complex, sometimes maddening, but entirely defining experience of cultivating, harvesting, cooking, and enjoying a meal is reduced to a series of impersonal financial transactions at the drive-through window and checkout aisle.

When Franceschini planted her Victory Garden at San Francisco’s City Hall, an unanticipated result was that as city workers and elected officials came out to eat lunch in the garden, they came into contact with gardeners and citizens in a new and different way. “They would talk to people, and a lot of issues came out. People became connected to the city,” she explains. “Breaking these sorts of barriers has become an important aspect of our work. We should think of the city as ‘ours,’ and we should know what’s in the soil around our homes, and we should be able to test it ourselves.”

In this context, and against the backdrop of our increasingly troubled world ecology, projects like Franceschini’s are challenging not only the assumptions of the participants in their works, but the role of the artist. “It’s even hard for me to say I’m an artist sometimes,” she says. “I’ve often called myself an educator or facilitator or pollinator. Basically I think it’s whatever title you need to have to make happen what you want to happen.”

In other words, one of the vital offerings that artists—especially public artists versed in the dynamics of community collaboration— can contribute to the food movement is a new social dynamic that transcends economic relationships. Just as farmers learn to cultivate fertile, biodiverse farms, and food consumers learn to embrace a broader range of Earth’s edible offerings, artists like Franceschini can teach us to self-organize around our pressing, common interest in sustaining ourselves with a healthy diet.

Joseph Hart is associate editor of Public Art Review and the director of the Viroqua Harvest Celebration & Parade (www.facebook.com/viroquaharvest).

Informal Communities:
Celestial, Terrestrial and Subterranean Movements

Randy Lee Cutler

Winter: Wetter than Normal
Spring equinox — March 20, 2011 at 11:35 pm
A La Niña pattern this year meant stormier weather for the 2010–2011 season bringing cool ocean temperatures to the Pacific Northwest.

The Grow Project and the Bulkhead Urban Agriculture Lab began germinating long before the first seeds were sown and ended long after the harvesting of carrots, mustards greens, pumpkins, and other crops. A concatenation of performance art, sculpture, social practice and still unnamed forms of emergent creativity, Grow was a year-long event that took up sustainability and knowledge exchange as a fluid process of gardening, workshops, walks and other public events. With its primary focus on ideas engendered through sociability and community, it is not surprising that artist Holly Schmidt invited Duane Elverum and myself to discuss her research and plans: we share similar interests in creative pedagogy and considerations of ecological issues through dialogue and practice. Not far from the project site, the last remaining section of undeveloped seawall situated on the periphery of the Olympic Village in South East False Creek, Schmidt’s studio was an accommodating environment that set the scene for an expansive, and ongoing conversation. At the time of our meeting, she had already spent a fair amount of time working with the City to secure this parcel of land for a temporary art occupation. Proceeding from her cross-disciplinary practice, Schmidt solicited ideas that would further open up the project to community encounters. Often referred to as the Bulkhead, the fallow patch of land posed some challenges for the artist’s vision of an unconventional social space for the sharing of information and practices whether through workshops, walks or volunteer participation in a temporary garden. Still nascent in form we considered the ecology of the site, trying to imagine its exact location and the state of its dereliction. Discussion turned to strategies for gardening in a post-industrial landscape including the challenges of growing food without planting anything directly in the ground and in the absence of immediate access to a safe, potable water supply.

From its inception it was clear that Grow would be an innovative artwork through its blurring of disciplinary boundaries and provocative engagement with community and public space. The simultaneous engagement and suggested critique of contemporary issues around food, urbanization, and everyday life made for a timely encounter. To this end, Schmidt talked about strategies for how she would grow food in large industrial bags previously used to ship bulk sugar and the resources she was sourcing for acquiring donated seeds, plants, earth, etc. Drawing on her training as an artist and an educator, it was clear even at this early stage that Grow would bear witness to a public display of reciprocity and traditional knowledge exchange. The evening ended with a shared sense of anticipation for this extended art work invested as it is in community engagement, sustainability, gardening, food security and emergent forms of dialogue.

Spring: Below-average Temperatures
Another weekend of below-average temperatures made this the coldest April and May on record for Metro Vancouver.

On May 7, 2011 Grow, the art and urban agriculture project was launched with Exploring Sustainability and Urban Agriculture, a walking dialogue through South East False Creek. Although it began with overcast skies, which then descended into a rainy afternoon, the experience was enlightening. Participants shared their thoughts on city planning, the implications for using particular construction materials and the habitation of the area, what had been destroyed and what was in the process of evolving and regenerating. This discussion was followed by approximately fifteen of us traipsing on the now wet bulkhead site and drawing diagrams on increasingly soggy paper designating on one map the “strong center” or locations that shouldn’t be disturbed and on another an area that needed help, that was in fact, calling out for repair. The event concluded with a passionate and informed exchange on current issues in landscape architecture and design. Scheduled walks continued through the spring, summer and fall nurturing peripatetic dialogue on sustainable design that provided a platform for collaborative learning.

Later in the month of May with the wet soil conditions unabated, the Vancouver Design Nerds and some master gardeners joined Schmidt for a workshop at the local community center that explored strategies for growing food in the urban environment. I was unable to attend but was thrilled to see the pocket gardens that were fabricated during this gathering installed along the chain link fence near the Grow project site. Biking along the False Creek south seawall throughout the summer, orange, yellow and red nasturtiums poked their way out of these miniature conical gardens. As a collective experimentation in urban space, local residents, dog walkers, tourists and cyclists alike would stop and enjoy the flowers, talk with volunteers and artists on the site and inquire as to what exactly was blossoming at this strange intersection. Later in December that year, while reading Wendell Berry’s book Bringing it to the Table: on farming and food, I was struck by the author’s statement that “ […] an agriculture using nature, including human nature, as its measure would approach the world in the manner of a conversationalist” and was reminded of the ongoing dialogue that was the very essence of the Grow project. Rather than mere consumers, participants witnessed, indeed engaged with growing and eating as contingent agricultural and social experiences that remind us of our fundamental and embodied relationality with the world we inhabit.

Summer: Heavy Rainfall Warning
Summer solstice — June 21, 2011 at 6:15 pm
On the last day of summer Environment Canada issued a heavy rainfall warning for the entire West Coast of B.C., ending what may be one of the worst summer in years.

By the beginning of July with the sun only starting to make a regular appearance Grow had fully installed itself on the site. Slipping into the local flora and fauna, and grafting some of its own, a composition of elements lay down its roots and rhythms with living organisms coming together in a sociable conversation. On July 24 I attended the Vancouver Henhouse workshop and learned some of the basics in the proper care and keeping of small urban flocks of hens. The “Vancooper” was installed at the Lab on the previous day so that workshop leader Duncan Martin could demonstrate how easy the prospect of fresh eggs can be. I was delighted to be surrounded by participants who were clearly invested in these innovative initiatives and engaging the challenging relations between living beings. Unfortunately I missed Chloe Bennett’s discussion on mason bee habitat and the proper methods of building a mason bee home in the city. The current degraded state of bee colonies (CCD or colony collapse disorder) is such an important issue particularly as bees pollinate more than one third of all food crops. Put another way, every third bite is brought to us by bees. Fortunately, my fascination for insects was somewhat appeased when I returned on August 19 for the Ladybug’s Lunch with Maria Keating, a biological control consultant who shared her extensive knowledge of backyard ecosystems. Grow’s concern for establishing informal communities came into focus and here its members included pollinators, native predators and companion planting. I was particularly taken with the carnivorous flora, what Darwin in 1875 called insectivorous plants that trap and consume insects and promote environmental stewardship.

Throughout the summer Grow demonstrated its capacity for encouraging affective experiences. In a combination of durational lab work and field science, the study of human ethos with its integration of evolution, ecology and behavioral processes, took up residence. “ [This ethological] approach is no less valid for us, for human beings, than for animals, because no one knows ahead of time the affects one is capable of: it is a long affair of experimentation, requiring lasting prudence.” With its extended installation from May 1 to November 30 2011, the Grow garden carried its audience of participants through time in the daily experience of its experimental residency. Precisely because there was no clearly elaborated sense of the whole; because engaging with the project was a contingent experience that changed daily and with the seasons, Grow offered opportunities for strong embodied connections as well as affective aesthetic pleasure and displeasure. Apparently one fellow complained about what he perceived as the site’s disarray and lack of conventional garden aesthetics. According to philosopher Gilles Deleuze “The important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between different velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles.” This is an important reminder of our multiple relationships with a given site, artwork, people, plants and other living organisms. While I attended workshops, read reviews, checked the blog and regularly biked past Grow, the occupation itself was evidence of the proximity between art and life.

By Sept 8 the summer was in full swing with the garden producing an abundance of corn, zucchini, pumpkins, cucumbers, radishes, kale, beets, mustard greens, green beans, carrots, tomatoes, rosemary, mint, fennel, dill, sage, lemon verbena, oregano, basil, chives and of course the delicious and colourful nasturtiums. On Oct 5 as part of the annual autumnal art event called Swarm, the Grow project offered 1 metre to 100 mile organic tastings prepared by urban farmer and wild forager Alexander McNaughton. In the middle of the site, at one of the strong centers left as an open space for congregating, we feasted on heirloom tomatoes, tomatillos wrapped in papery husks, maroon coloured carrots and handmade artisan cheese. What remains are memories of a crepuscular sky, intensive encounters and admittedly anonymous vegetables making acquaintance with my taste buds. How could one not be affected by the local harvest and sociable twilight?

Fall: Balmy Warm Weather
Autumn equinox – Sept 23, 2011 at 9:04 am
September brought balmy warm weather to Vancouver. The long range forecast showed sunshine lasting well into the month with temperatures into the 20’s.

By Oct 22 the celestial, terrestrial and subterranean movements of the seasons were wending their way through harvest to the fallow sleepiness of winter with the final Grow event. Bringing seeds gleaned from my own backyard garden and neatly packaged in homemade envelopes, I attended the Grow Seed Exchange at the local community centre where some rather robust arugula seeds were swapped for mint, kale, mustard, cilantro, dill and lupin seeds. In addition to sowing them in my garden, I was instructed to plant these seeds around Vancouver to ensure that Grow keeps germinating. Now, as spring returns once again and the quiescent life in these seeds begins to emerge, Grow returns as a porous physical and philosophical ecosystem. The project, an encounter with informal communities, challenges our thinking about aesthetics, gardening, learning, local ecology and conversation. Not unlike a master gardener, Schmidt sows the possibility of emergence by opening a space for its expressive potential without knowing in advance what will be elicited and how the project itself might evolve. And that, in a way, is what Grow realized in its yearlong habitation experienced through the material agency of weather, hours of daylight and local ecology.

Footnotes

A conversation between Claire Doherty and Lorna Brown

Founder and Director Claire Doherty discusses the origins and the future of Situations, a commissioning and research program based at the University of West England in Bristol and their current project, Nowhereisland, a large-scale public art project conceived by artist Alex Hartley and commissioned as part of the UK Cultural Olympiad 2012. This island, originating from the Arctic, will journey around the south west region of England this summer, stopping at ports and harbours as a visiting ‘island nation’. Accompanied by its land based Embassy, its six-week journey will finish in Bristol on the 9th September 2012. The public is invited to learn more, become a citizen, and track the new nation’s progress here.

Claire Doherty is a curator and writer who investigates new and unconventional models of curatorial practice. Situations commissions artists’ projects, often outside conventional gallery or museum settings, with an emphasis on new forms of public engagement which span international boundaries. In collaboration with the Litmus Research Initiative at Massey University and a vast network of curators and institutions, Doherty co-directed One Day Sculpture with David Cross, a diverse series of twenty commissioned, 24-hour temporary public artworks across New Zealand. Doherty is a Visiting Lecturer in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art in London and Senior Research Fellow at the University of West England in Bristol, UK. Doherty lectures and publishes internationally. She is editor of Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation; (Black Dog Publishing, 2004); Documents of Contemporary Art: Situation(Whitechapel/ MIT Press, 2009), and co-editor with David Cross of One Day Sculpture (Kerber, 2009), with Paul O’Neill, Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art (Valiz, 2011) and with Gerrie van Noord, Heather and Ivan Morison: Falling into Place (Book Works, 2009).

Lorna Brown is an artist, writer, independent curator and founding member of Other Sights and participant in the Communications Office.

This conversation is the final installment of “The Situation is This: Speakers Series 2011” and a bridge to “The Future is Floating”, a series of Communication Office events that will take place in various locations around Vancouver during 2012.

We are grateful to our Speaker Series partner the Langara College Centre for Art in Public Spaces and project funders the City of Vancouver 125 and the Public Art Program.

About The Communications Office:

Late last year, Other Sights formed a Communication Office, and we have been talking and thinking about how The Future is Floating in so many ways. Whether it’s melting ice caps, waves of social unrest, listing economies or just a general sinking feeling, the future is uncertain, and fluidly so. In waving or drowning, we propose a series of events that focus our attentions, invite new ideas and put us in touch, whether face to face or ear to ear.

This podcast is launched on the anniversary of the 2010 eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, whose free-floating ash cloud covered much of Northern Europe, causing 6 days of air travel disruptions across the continent. The grounding of European flights avoided about 344×106 kg of CO2 emissions per day, while the volcano emitted about 150×106 kg of CO2 per day.

By John Mankie, October 18, 2008 The Vancouver Sun

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The two giant video screens at Granville and Robson normally snap and crackle with quick-hitting, colourful ads for companies such as Telus, Fido and WestJet.

But next week, they’ll be showing something something completely different: two short films by internationally acclaimed artist Antonia Hirsch.

“You really get a contrast,” Hirsch said with a laugh. “Most of those [ad] spots are like 10 seconds long, then you’ll get this epic one minute.”

Non-profit organizations get some access to the screens as part of the agreement to put them up on the side of the building that houses Future Shop and Winners. Normally, the time is allocated to organizations like the Vancouver Symphony: Hirsch’c films are the first art projects to be screened.

The work is called Vox Pop, and deals with the modern phenomenon, the crowd wave at sports games.

Hirsch has been fascinated by the wave for years.

“I found it interesting how it is really exhilarating in a way to be in it and to be participating, but it’s also a bit scary,” she explained.

“Because it has that herd instinct in it, where you really don’t know if any good intentions are kind of driving this.”

One film is a slow pan of a sports stadium, at the same speed of a typical wave. The other shows a lone fan sitting in the stands, doing the wave.

“By isolating this figure, I tried to highlight the kind of oddity of this gesture,” she said.

“Once somebody’s just by themselves, it seems ridiculous, in a way, what they’re doing.”

As funny as it is to see a lone figure doing the wave, Hirsch said “it could also be a bit sinister. It has something maybe of the sort of raised hand ‘heil,’ or [a] very fervent religious gesture.”

The films will be shown in the middle of the regular ad spots, which she thinks might be quite jarring for passerby.

“It is very slow and uneventful compared to the other stuff that’s going up on those boards,” she said.

“I don’t want to annoy people, but I do want to create a situation where people might stop and go ‘Hang on for a second, what is this?’ There is this wonderful moment that can happen by throwing something into a known context that’s a little different — you start to question what you really know.

“It may make you look differently at advertising, it may make you look differently at the type of imagery that’s thrown at us.”

Hirsch, 40, was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and has lived in Canada since 1994.

Her works are in the collections of institutions such as the Vancouver Art Gallery, The New York Public Library, the Yale University Collection of Rare Books, The National Art Library a the V&A and the Tate Gallery Library in London, England.

Vox Popwill start running at 12:01 a.m. Monday and run through midnight next Sunday, Oct.26.

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Nestled among flashy ads and quick-bite movie trailers at Robson and Granville is a new experience from visual artist Antonia Hirsch called Vox Pop.

The Video project features two separate sequences, one in which the camera pans the stadium at the same rate as the sporting-event fans’ wave would be followed.

The camera then rests on a sole male spectator, who rises as if taking part in the wave. Both one-minute sequences are inserted between ads.

Creator Hirsch says the project creates a tension live action and group activities as it screen every three minutes, 24 hours a day for a week.

While the piece is played, there is no name, no website and no information to identify what it is or who created it.

“I play with advertising esthetic. Look at it once, and you look at everything differently,” says Hirsch. “Just plant that seed: What is this?”

Hirsch says the spot is ideal not only for the pedestrian traffic, but also because the screen is high resolution. It’s also fitting that the screen is between signs for Future Shop and Winners.

“Future and winners — I like that,” says Hirsch.

As the man on screen is solitary, Hirsch says he is taking part in the wave evokes an ominous and unsettling moment, yet one that is deliberate and personal.

Hirsch had a specific type of man in mind she wanted for the piece. He had to be in his mid-20s to 30s and Caucasian, which plays up the stereotypical sports fan. He also had to be bald, which plays into the stereotypical sports hooligan.

“He had to be a regular guy, so you could project yourself onto him,” she says. “The wonderful thing about it is that he looks more like an intellectual.”

This form of art is slowly gaining ground in Vancouver, says curator Barbara Cole, who helped steer the project and is a member of OtherSights, a non-profit group that seeks to create a presence for art in public places.

“This is the first project dedicated to cultural content,” says Cole. “It’s really exciting to see what will happen. It will create a difference between art and advertising.”

The effect is to immediately create an audience when anyone looks at it. “You’re not choosing to go to a gallery for an art experience,” says Cole.

There is an opening event tonight at 5:30 at the Lennox Pub, across the street from the billboard. The public is welcome.