The WALL | Free Artist Talk

ABOUT THE CURRENT EXHIBIT

Interdisciplinary artist Faith Moosang recently led an artist talk explaining the complex research and process that went into her interpretation of the WALL theme, Vancouver’s built heritage. Her work, down. town. uses 164 individual film frames, video stills and digital photographs from the CBC Archives and Wikimedia Commons to respond to questions on demolitions and change in downtown Vancouver between 1954 and 2015. A companion website has also been created to assist the viewer in exploring the complex art work.

Visit the down. town. website here.

Installed in November 2015, The WALL’s current exhibit is by Vancouver based artist Faith Moosang.

From the artist:

down. town. is a large-scale composite photograph created from 164 individual film frames, video stills and digital photographs gleaned from the CBC Archives and Wikimedia Commons. There were three questions behind the work – how many buildings have been demolished in downtown Vancouver between 1954 and 2015, how many of these demolitions were considered newsworthy and how does one represent the notion of absence or missing? The boundaries of the downtown core were taken from the municipality’s parameters – the west side of Main Street to the east side of Burrard, False Creek to Burrard Inlet and the jut of Coal Harbour, beginning on the north side of Georgia and ending at the water. The temporal boundary of the project (1954 onwards) relates to the fact that on December 16, 1953, CBUT (the CBC precursor) became the very first television station broadcasting in Western Canada, marking the moment when Vancouver had local televisual news for the first time in its history.

Research, both online and at the City of Vancouver Archives, revealed that the number of buildings that have come down in this period approximated 1500 – with high-density areas of destruction taking place in the industrial areas of Coal Harbour and False Creek. The CBC Archive, the sole archival resource for the images of buildings in this project, contained footage of 47 of these buildings in the process of being demolished or burnt. Looked at another way, approximately 3% of the destruction was recorded and delivered up to the public as news.

The high number of buildings that have gone missing from our collective landscape is indicative that humans are notorious for forgetting, and that what is normal is always shifting. Vancouver has a (short) long history of development in the pursuit of density and profit.

Faith would like to thank Colin Preston, the Wall project partners, the staff at the CBC and the City of Vancouver Archives, Alex MacKenzie, Paul Levine, Bob Ellenton and Lillipilli Ellenton. She’d like to dedicate this work to Archivists everywhere – analogue, digital, other. You have the best of both worlds – enchantment and order.