industrial grace

"You want a picture of that ugly building?!" asked the old guy dismissively as he climbed into his car parked near to where I was standing to take my shot.
Without lowering my camera, I smiled at him and nodded yes. He didn't wait for an explanation.
If he had been really interested, I would have told him that I frequently sought out old industrial buildings particularly for their disheveled and dilapidated state - that I find a certain solemn aesthetic quality in their decrepitude and the worn integrity of the utilitarian materials used, and that often the cubistic massing of structural forms resulted in an overall unexpected architectural grace...blah, blah, blah...
And he would have laughed in my face and gone away wondering about my sanity - but without a second thought to that monumentally humble temple of industry again...

GRACE Canada, Inc.
460 Industrial Avenue

windowlessness

""Keep your eyes open!

You're seeing this for the last time!""*

*selected lines from 'The Open Window' by Tomas TRANSTROMER, 1970 [translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly]

[this house has since been demolished]

unwindowed

Norman is a friendly guy and his produce is as cheap as they come on the Drive, but you have to wonder about the concatenated neurosis that goes on behind this graphically barricaded window on the side wall of his building... 

the chains of light squeezing through the bars of nondescript darkness dangle in casual defiance of a blinded quarry...

door no more

 "Ara baixare les escales que donen a l'exterior i no penso defraudar."*
[Now I'll descend the stairs that lead outside and not worry about letting anybody down.]

*the last line from "Stairway, 1949" by Ernest FARRES, translated from the Catalan by Lawrence Venuti, 2009 [from Edward Hopper: Cinquanta poemes sobre la seva obra pictorica (Fifty poems on his pictorial work; Barcelona: Viena, 2006)]

emily carr grad show:: upspotting

This year at the Emily Carr Graduation disgorgement, I pointed my lens upwards in the high- ceilinged Concourse gallery and found an agile curation of coolly minimal and starkly lyrical installations...

 from a linear pair of stiff L-shaped rods piercing the wall at varying angles to create optical variations from various perspectives...[Ivan Mickovic, Untitled]

 to the softly draping cascade of black cotton strands that reject any angular intervention whatsoever...[Kit Kilgour, "Weftless"]

 to a single thick red rope hanging like a stream of corded blood emitted from a spot-lit source...

to convolute into a single knot beneath a piece of nautical hardware pointing towards three panels of marine blueness...[Roy Munz, "A Poetic Visual Interpretation of 'Time and Free Will:...' Henri Bergson, 1889"]

 to the tilted shiny sculptural soupcon of a suprematist ode, which by chance reflects partial views of the double paintings on the near wall, and hence unwittingly smears its purist constructivist mode...[Evgueni Saiapine, "Phase 1"]

 the upper abstracted explosion of those two paintings looms over the viewer in a downpour of virulent colours and feral forms...[Andrew Smith, "The Meeting"]

 and one last twirl around this desolately contrived tropical extravaganza of kitschy pink flamingos perched high above and far from any suburban lawn and a precariously elevated  stemmed glass vase with a palm seedling sprouting obliviously away...[Eun Kyung Kim, "One Night in Bangkok"]

[damn you, Eun Kyung Kim, now I can't get that song out of my head!

"like the devil walking next to me..."]

Emily Carr University of Art and Design
2012 Graduation  Show
May 5-20

ravaged reMains

There is a section of Main Street between the gentrified so-hip SOMA stretch and the beige colonizing of Chinatown that has been dying a slow death amidst drawn out efforts to revitalize the area...
Some indecorous vestiges of the seedier elements still standing, but barely...

sweet lulu swing

 she may be old and creaky now, but she can still swing open for the big boys needing to get through...

 the heavy freight trains keep rumbling along her dark trestle legs, and yet, when out of sight, out of mind...

 sweet old lulu island bridge, she be hanging on to the north arm of her strong river Fraser for a while yet...

[Lulu Island was purportedly named after an american showgirl known as Lulu Sweet who had been up to entertain the Royal Engineers in Vancouver in the mid-1800's]

 ***

 across from lulu's old trestle are tart cranberry fields lying around in russet fallow in the spring sunshine...

Lulu Island Bridge at 2100 Block of River Road, Richmond [Lulu Island]

downtown westside:: the sexy sixties [episode one]

Soaring glass behemoths squeeze around the odd oldie still holding out on its tiny piece of developer's baitlot...
they may be sleek and shiny, with self-contained promises of high efficiency appliances and measured to the millimeter space-planning illusions, but these 21st century luminous colossi have none of the idiosyncratic sexiness of some of the modernist structures implanted on downtown soil in the oh-so-long-ago 1960's when Vancouver was nary a blip on the world map of architectural avant-gardism...

The well-hung Westcoast Transmission Building at 1333 West Georgia Street [1968-69, by Rhone and Iredale] has ridden out the decades in suspended glass-sheathed immutability...and has recently been transformed into a QUBE-full of too-cool condos for dark shades wearing sophisticates...

The virginal white and coquettish detailing of the East Asiatic House building at 1201 West Pender Street [1963, by Gerald Hamilton and Associates] still marks her as a delicately alluring stand-out amongst the leggy glamour-glazed models now posing all around her...and almost half a century on, her proportional compactness and fineness of features have been left relatively unmolested by over-excitable upgrade casanovas!

[after all, her corner stone had already once been laid by a suave and elegant danish royal!]

sinosigns

 be they painted over...

brushed onto stone...

 gilded onto glass...

 affixed onto walls...

scripted horizontally or vertically,
these signs in Chinatown have no need of english translations to convey the character of the sites they adorn...

*this should be an auspicious post to announce the release of the first album of my son Enzio's band Half Chinese..."We were Pretending to be" (Sad Games Records, 2012)

sun yat sen:: upspotting

a classical chinese garden enclosed by high white walls crouches on the edges of Vancouver's Chinatown and the downtown eastside - an intrepid tourist destination to be sure, but more so a serene gracenote in this gritty neighbourhood, an elemental sanctuary from the burgeoning urban dissonance, a reined in tranquil refuge for asian sensibilities...

on one very cold afternoon a week after all the chinese new year celebrations were over, I felt the urge to capture some quiet non-festive pieces of traditional chinese heritage within this verdant landscaped and architectural formulaic courtyard - I panned down for the water reflection series in the previous posting and I glimpsed upwards for this one...

latching onto structural details that are weathering in the most artful fashion - the worn mossy rooftiles softly presenting the pale pink blooms of an early blossoming cherry, the staccato splashes of providential reds in a patinaed palette of greys and whites, the calligraphic web of bare branches against the signage of intricate chinese characters, and the pre-spring budding in the warmth of the peeling red lacquered gateway...