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.

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