ID in NV Industrial Design in North Vancouver
Image Courtesy Mark Teasdale
This exhibition is up for just a few more days. Comes down on October 14. Catch it while you can!
An industrial design exhibition curated by Adrian Boston, ID in NV: Industrial Design in North Vancouver celebrates recent, innovative work by five North Vancouver firms Arc’teryx, Cove Bikes, Kelvin.23, Bull Monkey/G3 and Rayne Longboards. While offering a platform for the acknowledgment of interesting stuff going on in our midst the exhibition implicitly gives rise to questions about how communities negotiate living identities in the context of constantly emerging material culture.
The Press Release:
Curator provokes community to consider the collection and exhibition of contemporary cultural objects
Does the North Vancouver Museum and Archives own a Cove Bikes SHOCKER DH prototype? Or an early model Kelvin.23? Or any recently, locally designed objects of the North Shore? If so, how effectively are they empowered to make the local community aware of such a fact? The current exhibition at the Café for Contemporary Art, ID in NV: Industrial Design in North Vancouver, curated by Adrian Boston, features and celebrates a selection of objects recently designed on the North Shore. The exhibition provokes and facilitates an ongoing conversation about how we go about constituting and negotiating our collective memory. One of the central questions apparent in the exhibition surrounds the relationship between design and place. Ours is an increasingly virtual world that, on the surface seems to have lost its need for a notion of place. However, some local designers, while finding markets both at home and abroad, are designing specifically out of their experiences of this place. Considering these objects, this exhibition has us looking for answers to questions our community needs to ask itself; What do these objects mean about who we are? How do they reflect our current needs as a culture? Are we even a we? And how do these objects feature in the idea of that we? Is there actually ID in NV? And if there is, is it something to be NV’d, shared, questioned or what.
With the recent development of condos, a hotel and more to come in the Eastern Quarter of Lower Lonsdale, a great though long decayed monument to a particular aspect of local history, shipbuilding, has been lost. We are now left, with more than simply the task of completing the site’s redevelopment. We face huge questions around how this ever changing community (especially as its demographic shifts with an increasing wave of new residents from near and far) will go about giving form to collective memory while leaving space for present and future developments in the notion of who we are.
What can we bring together and celebrate collectively? How can different aspects of the community come together to learn about how one another’s local presence came to be and what contributions they might have to offer? Under what frameworks can old and new relationships be negotiated and allowed to prosper? What is our place in an increasingly global and virtual world?
Culminating in this current exhibition, over the past year and a half the Café for Contemporary Art has been very seriously engaged with these sorts of questions. Our second exhibition The Sinixt Don’t Make Totem Poles Either: Public, Art, Memory, set a Canadian case of genocide as the backdrop to an examination of how a new generation of British Columbian artists, self-aware as inheritors of a colonial history, shift their posture vis-à-vis the landscape to which their identity is expected (Group of Seven, Emily Carr) to be anchored. With Seung-Young Kim’s Self-Portrait, we were introduced to a post-colonial Korean who through artistic projects has sought to constitute a new notion self. Kim’s has been a very personal journey whereby he has not only sought to bridge the tricky waters of the relationship between Korea and its former colonizer, Japan, but in an increasingly transnational world has found himself swimming against strong tides of racial prejudice to actualize a colour-blind approach to personal and social relationships. Exiled and non-exiled Persian cultural voices, that sense a loss of modernity from a perhaps unexpected angle, were the focus of the Nowruz Arts Festival and the exhibition of Mansouri Moslem’s The Final Word: A Film about Shamlou. Their loss is one of a historically rich and relatively free arts scene, characterized not by its reverence for Islam, but rather by its secular celebration and examination of the human experience. With Adrian Buitenhuis’ exhibitions of Woodfibre and Highway 99 we have watched a young local film-maker/artist contemplate memory and loss in the very specific context the Howe Sound region in transition. And with VERSITILE a photo exhibit that coincided with the opening of the Pinnacle Hotel, artist Marie Berg reminded the community of what the place looked like not so long ago.
All of this was prefaced by We Love You Comrade Navin! an exhibition of the Navin Party. Navin Rawanchaikul and Tyler Russell’s ongoing collaboration, that, in an increasingly transnational and virtual world, looks at the diminishing role of State names and narratives in the constitution of human identities.
ID in NV and its preceding exhibition history are particularly relevant as this community looks to re-envision the function of Lower Lonsdale’s Eastern Quarter, and in particular what has come to be known as the National Maritime Centre site. With visioning sessions and a flurry of proposals on the horizon, it is hoped that the past will be honoured and the present and future empowered, as one of Canada’s last sections of publicly owned, high-profile harborfront is slated for re-development. We are the inheritors of a rich, complex and contested history with a future cultural and material possibility not shared by many others. It is with these facts front of mind that we must move forward, and discover for ourselves whether or not there really is ID in NV and if it is something we can share through conversations with the rest of the world.
Café for Contemporary Art, a 2010 Krups Kup of Excellence finalist and home to the North Shore’s only Clover makes room for art by providing the community with tasty homemade, soups, sandwiches and baked goods and exquisite coffee roasted by Vince Piccolo’s 49th Parallel Coffee Roasters.
We Are Open:
Weekdays: 7am-7pm
Weekends: 8am-7pm
“The Solo Sessions” – aka Acoustic Night Returns!
Big news, people! And I mean Big….after a long 3 weeks with no live music, Acoustic Night is mounting a fierce comeback, with a snappy new name: The Solo Sessions.
This Saturday, between 7 and 9pm, come down to cafca to catch some of Vancouver’s hottest up-and-coming artists! We have eight extremely talented musicians lined up to play, plus some surprise special guests! I don’t know about you but the special guests really make me curious….I’m working, so I’ll be there – will you?
The best part of the event: it’s completely FREE! No cover charge. Now there’s really no excuse not to come out! We’re right by the seabus, close to all kinds of transportation; we have delicious food; and our coffee has been known to change lives! Factor in live, ridiculously awesome, free music and great people….you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do the math.
So to sum up:
- FREE live music
- some of Vancouver’s hottest artists
- AWESOME coffee
- AWESOME food
- AWESOME people
Now the only question left is how many people will you bring along?
See you there!
LOL,
Tim
PS – this night is going to be the HUGE, so if you want good seats – come early!
Sunset @ CAFCA
The sunset after that surprise thunderstorm. More proof that we live in a very, very good place.
LOL,
Tim
Public Meeting Attendees Lend Art Project Overwhelming Support
The attendees of the Pinnacle Square Public Art Proposal meeting lent the project overwhelming support.
While there was one naysayer who left before the meeting got fully underway, the overwhelming majority of attendees seemed to really appreciate how the installation would function to enrich the neighbourhood through Scott and Steve’s thoughtful engagement of the square’s current artwork Launch, by Elisabeth Roy. Roy’s work comes with a plaque that says that the work “acknowledges the site’s transformation, from a workplace for the men and women who pioneered the community, to a place for the next generation to build upon.” Accepting Roy’s invitation Scott and Steve begin the building upon by questioning the foundation, or the basic narrative within which Roy’s work functions. Steve, displacing his zero from the original location of its guerilla installation, re-employs it in a disruption of the assumed temporal parameters of Roy’s work while allowing the consideration of new beginnings. Meanwhile, Scott’s work, a self-portrait/welcome figure that awkwardly hovers in time between a pioneer past and a post-consumer present, questions simplistic and reassuring assumptions about pioneers. Placing this un-selfassured person onto the landscape implies a shift in settler posture and self-image that may, like Steve’s zero, open doors to the consideration of the possibility of new beginnings.
While the attendees of the meeting gave great support for this particular installation, they also seemed invigorated by the fact that none of us are interested in a permanent installation, hoping instead that after a several months or a few years new works could be installed on the site transforming it into a space for ongoing cultural discussion through pubic art. There was even talk of how it might be advantageous to the cultural vitality of the area if the public art agenda of the entire Pier developments could include an ongoing programme of periodically changing public art installations. This discussion of course went hand in hand with talk of the re-location of the Presentation House Gallery to the area.
FYI, a handout presented at the meeting laid out the proposal in the following manner:
The Proposal:
Scott August and Steve Hubert propose the addition of two works to Pinnacle Square, namely Scott August’s twenty five foot tall die cut photo of himself representing a cowboy welcome figure wearing oven mitts and cut-off jeans and a replica of the zero Steve Hubert added to Vancouver’s Centennial Sculpture in October 2008.
3 Reasons to welcome the Pinnacle Square Public Art Proposal:
1. The artwork enriches the neighbourhood by opening up a chance to imagine its past, present and future with a perspective that while inclusive of shipbuilder’s history is not solely bound to it.
2. By showcasing a sense of humour, and a sense of being open to knowledge we don’t have full mastery or control of it welcomes the formation of a vibrant creative community that might not have otherwise been possible. This, if Richard Florida’s theories about the implication of the rise of the creative class on real estate value have any meat to them, would in turn have positive effects on local real estate values.
3. Rather than setting out First Nations and Settler narratives as parallel stories, it opens up a chance for narrative engagement between the communities.
Pinnacle Square Public Art Proposal – Public Meeting May 16, 3pm
Scott August & Steven Hubert, Pinnacle Square Public Art Proposal, 2009
Passerby Views Public Art Proposal Billboard in Pinnacle Square
Totem pole next to the Credit Union building, Edgewood, BC, 2005 Photo: Jutta Ploessner; http://www.firstnations.eu/invasion/sinixt.htm
In some ways and for some people I guess the proposal can act as a kind of clandestine cognate to the the Sinixt’s totem pole, which was erected by BC Hydro in the late 1960s as a memorial to an extinct race. This was some 10 years after the Sinixt had been declared extinct, and the Columbia River Treaty had been signed, and a massive portion of Sinixt traditional territory had been flooded out with damns. Among the many problems with that public art commission were the facts that the Sinixt weren’t extinct and that they, like most Salishan peoples including those who once lived in what is now known as Stanley Park, never made totem poles anyway. It just didn’t/doesn’t make sense.
Considering the way in which much of our art (public or otherwise) continues to inform our understanding of the territory we live on (here in BC, but probably elsewhere too), it makes sense to grasp for other possibilities. And rather than just going ahead and confidently offering an alternative set of narratives it is probably worthwhile to welcome broader questions about our concepts of time and the constitution of memory. Perhaps signs like Scott’s and Steve’s are in order. In their abstraction, absurdity and bold humour they have already proven to act as a play on the orientation of the cultural tables. Who knows, in the long run they might actually be able to help crack open some space for broader understandings and imaginings of the territories they engage with. Who knows…
The Sinixt Don’t Make Totem Poles Either: Public, Art, Memory
Tonight we open our second exhibition! If you have a chance come on out!
Where: 140 East Esplanade, North Van.
When: May 7th, 6-9pm
What: An array of works by Scott August, Steven Hubert and Marilyn James that may come together to percolate discussions about memory, our relationships to the landscapes we inhabit, the role of public art, how diverse communities relate to one another and so on…
ps: We now serve Flat Whites and we are featuring Ethiopian single origin coffee this month…
Now Open
We are now open! Finally.
Our opening exhibition: WE LOVE YOU COMRADE NAVIN, featuring Navin Party projects, Navins of Bollywood and Quotations from Comrade Navin is up. And warmly accompanying it are a few opening-appropriate works in our café including: the billboard painting and photo document of Navin Rawanchaikul’s 2001 PS1/Public Art Fund project, I ♥ Taxi; Steve Hubert’s The Dive; and two little works by Scott August, Winter Panda and Bull on Pink.
Meanwhile, the café is serving great coffees roasted by 49th Parallel and Intelligentsia. Our current espresso, for those of you who are interested, is 49th’s Organic. And if you do stop by soon, try the Ethiopian Aricha on our Clover. It is really a coffee to write home about. If you are hungry come have a panini we just started selling them a few days ago.
We are located at 140 East Esplanade in North Vancouver BC, just a short walk from the Seabus terminal at Lonsdale Quay and not far from the Presentation House Gallery where I understand this weekend they are opening Phot(o)bjects, a new show curated by Bob Nickas.
café for contemporary art 
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