city haunts

Surreptitiously wandering the aging corridors of municipal power one summer afternoon, the art deco halls were hauntingly silent while I stole a few ghostly images of the original fixtures and detailing still in use from so long ago...

[there was a wall of framed photographs of all the previous mayors of Vancouver - needless to say, they were all male, all white, some with bushy beards...]

Vancouver City Hall, operating since 1936,
designed by the architectural firm of Townley and Matheson,
Captain George Vancouver guiding on...
[façade facing West 10th Avenue, Cambie Street to the right]

MOA outside

Perhaps the most sensitive and intuitive of Arthur Erickson's many prominent creations, the much vaunted Museum of Anthropology rising from the edge of the University of British Columbia campus remains a lyrical and distinguished contemporary depository for the collected and preserved art and ritual objects of indigenous cultures from the Northwest coast and all the continents...
I began my studies at UBC a couple of years after it was completed in 1976 and took a class in archaeology in my second year that enabled frequent access to the museum - thereby spending many fascinated hours exploring the collections in the crowded glass cases and countless drawers...
I have returned sporadically over the years but have never photographed the exterior [except during a totem pole-raising ceremony well over 20 years ago, the photographs from which may still be in a box somewhere!], and on this bright summer's day I am entranced once more by the visual poetry of the raw concrete edifice - Erickson's elegantly minimal interpretation of traditional Northwest coast post and beam structures - and the powerful play of light and shadow on the strong basic forms that are as solid as the ephemeral lives that created them are not...

"At this stage in our history when most forces at work in society are dispersing our energies, fracturing our society, disrupting the ecology of our planet, dismembering our cities, the architect has the opportunity - and I believe the duty, though he seldom seizes it - of being a cohesive force, of providing wholes, "integrities" as Buckminster Fuller would put it in a different sense.  As the mechanization of life and man proceeds on its relentless course, we need to reaffirm that which the machines would atrophy in us - the human spirit."

ARTHUR ERICKSON [1924 -2009]

MOA :: uncategorized objects outside

There may be thousands of obsequiously studied objects from myriad cultures the world over all very carefully housed in the Multiversity Galleries within the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, but outside around the grounds of this Arthur Erickson-designed concrete culture temple staggered above the waters of English Bay are some curious artifacts stumbled upon unobtrusively one hot summer's day...

these few silent and weather-born objects left still in an oblivious state of grace...

behind gallery row

South Granville Gallery Row is "The number one destination for ART" according to its own proclamation -

and true, many of the city's most established and venerable art galleries are strung out along the west side of Granville Street between West 5th Avenue to West Broadway [with a few further south before West 15th Avenue]

Of course, the alleyway behind the galleries is almost as impeccably kept as their interiors, but I managed to expose some accidental art all the same - the raw and rapacious expressions of anonymous artists, unaware, and yet perhaps all too aware, that their rapturous creations may catch the oblivious attentions of dumpster divers pushing their rickety shopping carts as well as gallery owners parking their fancy european models alike...

primitive multi-pole pyro-peel mix-media studies - [also categorized as expressionistic torn-and-torch relief collages]...

[behind Granville Fine Art Gallery]

a partial figurative representation in somewhat random sequential multi-media narrative...

illusionistic photo-based pastiche on paper and wood post with graphic paint running-overlay...

large scale photographed architectural elements surface-collaged onto actual architectural elements...[so very clever indeed - truly brilliant!]

con-textual affirmations as desperate artistic gesticulations, thus provoking such pithy profound insight...as always...

[behind Monte Clark Gallery]

a minimalist study in graffiti-proof grays delineated by the faintly perceptible brick pattern and unexpectedly highlighted by a spot-splatter of "fowl-white" [from an all-natural organic digestive juice paint selection]*... 

[behind Equinox Gallery]

*please indulge me my oddly acculturated and floridly eccentric "artspeak"...just because ostentatious blah-blah-blah about art is almost as much fun as making the damn thing itself...

[Disclaimer:: "I was an art student once - but was never arrogant about my art student discoveries, because it has all been done before! - Really!!"]

terminal avenue

intrepid fleas from the Vancouver Flea Market can skip across Terminal Avenue 

to feast on pampered pooches at the Rex Dog Hotel & Spa...

or snuggle up cozily on acres of plush wool ply at Dream Carpets...

or hop onto rickety railcars and flee town altogether for greener pastures!

[terminally restless but avoiding extermination along Terminal Avenue between Clark Drive and Main Street]

brave face

bravely facing the inevitable...
[I posted about this house last October ["death of a house", Oct. 2009], and so far it is still standing and has even recently acquired a persona of sorts...at least he is grinning in light of his fate!]

marking my clark park:: part I

Clark Park...

where the buffaloes had once roamed...

where the salmon swam up a small creek...

where orchards fruited in the summer...

where Jean still lives in the house she was born in almost 80 years ago...

and remembers the crazy Russian family that ruffled the neighbourhood...

where we breathe in the green air from the old trees day in and day out...

and walk its shaded and meandering pathways...

and gather windfall branches for winter solstice warmth 

for many, many years now...

all because of a generous man named Clark who donated the land in 1889...