I like art. Especially Vancouver art.
There is little information on the Internet that contextualizes Vancouver art and artists as a coherent group based on geography. That is, there aren’t many sites devoted to art made in Vancouver and BC’s Lower Mainland that try to identify or catalog the themes and theories that artists in and around Lotus Land tend to explore.
Modern art criticism considers grouping artists according to geographical schools archaic, a relic of late eighteenth-century methods used in museums to physically orient galleries and conceptually orient viewers and readers to see national and ethnic characters engendered by particular places.
I concede that it’s simplistic to assume all art made in Vancouver can be distilled to the same set of ideas, just as it’s simplistic to assume that all Canadian art is derivative of Emily Carr or the Group of Seven.
Vancouver’s position as a ‘terminal’ city, however, one whose growth has been marked by a curious fascination with so-called ‘defeat(ur)ed’ landscapes and a cultural diversity that is extraordinary even by Canadian standards, lends our art scene a distinct ‘Vancouver-ness’ that I believe is quantitatively identifiable.
I also think it’s human to organize our environment, what we see and what we experience, and to try to find similarities and differences between things and, consequently, to draw associations and form abstractions like groups.
That the city of Vancouver, and the province of British Columbia as a whole, are promoted by our government both domestically and abroad as Canada’s Pacific gateway to corporate prosperity and profit is an unmistaken and unabashed truism in today’s economy of commoditization.
That Vancouver has also been known as a terminal city, as being the last meager hope at the dead end of the line for generations of predominantly European migrant workers and disenfranchised Canadians is an inevitability of its location at the western frontier of the nation.
These two contradictory viewpoints, Vancouver as portal to a journey on the ascendant and Vancouver as terminus of a steady decline, co-exist in an uneasy confluence whose conflict flashes before the itinerant visitor’s eyes from block to block and very often within the same postal code.
Translation: Vancouverites make fantastic art.