There’s an interesting and short – it ends Friday – exhibition in the lobby of the Lasserre building (map). Passing Encounters: Towards a Visual Archive of Vancouver Public Culture was put together by AHVA lecturer Alice Campbell and Prof. Charlotte Townshend-Gault. The exhibition critiques the presentation and representation of a dominant visual culture in Vancouver. I’d say more, but I think the curatorial statement says plenty. From the Facebook event page:
This exhibition offers a visual archive of Art History 376 and 377 students’ passing encounters with the multiple forms of Aboriginal representation that circulate in Vancouver’s public culture. Many of these are forms of Northwest Coast art and design. Others are forms of non-Northwest Coast Aboriginal art while others still are Non-Native produced imagery that trade on widely recognized icons and stereotypes. The ubiquity of these often ephemeral forms in Vancouver ensures that they are genuinely hegemonic: highly visible, yet seldom noticed.
This archive emerges from two class projects in which the students of Art History 376 and 377 (Arts of the Northwest Coast Peoples: The North and The South) in 2012/2013 photographed the Aboriginal and Aboriginal-inspired imagery that they encountered in their everyday lives. They used whatever cameras they had on hand, ranging from cell phone cameras to DSLRs. In both classes, students carefully noted what information about the objects and images is made available to passers-by and what is obscured. Students asked questions about the objects, including how they and the objects came to occupy the same space. They considered their own shifting relations to the objects, and how these are structured by the colonial past and its enduring effects in the present.
The individual photographs, and the archive as a whole, are material traces of the students’ everyday travels, spaces, histories and habits. They offer a situated perspective, determined by the spaces the students travel through, and the objects and images they encounter there. Alone and together, the photographs provoke reflections on the role these objects and images play in our everyday lives. They point to the complexity of Aboriginal life, presence and representation in this multicultural, cosmopolitan city.
The exhibition is experimental with respect to both curatorship and education. It’s an attempt to share the collective knowledge generated in our classrooms with a wider community. Just as these objects have come into visibility for the 376/377 students, we hope our audience will increasingly notice these objects and images in their everyday lives. In other words, the exhibition is not a passive representation of Northwest Coast art, but rather an active incitement to look, to notice, to reflect and to inquire.
+20
About
What I Learned at the Airport
by Nick Thornton
I was not going to join in on the debate and flurry of activity on the recent school shooting in Connecticut last week because, frankly, I didn’t have anything to add to the conversation. I’ve been pretty disgusted and turned off by the fact that everyone thinks they have something to say about the shootings. Yes, it’s nice to know people care and can show sympathy towards people who have had their lives destroyed by these heinous acts but this doesn’t necessarily make someone qualified to make an assessment on the intricacies of mental illness or gun control. For the record, I think those are valid conversations to have and SHOULD be had but maybe not by people who read one article on Huffington Post and are now an “expert” on such complex issues.
Like me, you’ve probably seen your facebook and twitter feed filled with heartbreaking headlines the last few days, usually accompanied by outrage, shock and empathy. Something that has been bugging me though, is the commentary that follows these posts, and the proliferation of the posts themselves. Undoubtedly, it’s important to be informed and to have debates on issues of vital importance but can we stop using people’s tragedy as our spring board for opinions? Yes, let’s have the conversations but how is posting pictures of people grieving being sensitive? It’s disgusting, amoral and sensationalist. Leave these poor people alone to grieve. Sticking cameras in children’s faces and snapping photos of families embracing outside of memorial services might make us feel better because it makes us sad and therefore like we care, but I see it only as one thing: a sick invasion of privacy and a vastly misplaced sense of empathy.
photo by http://americavisajobs.com/page/Arriving-in-America
So carrying around these feelings (and being outraged and shocked at the event) I went to pick up a friend at the airport on Saturday. The weather was grey and unforgiving and there was only one thing on people’s minds it seemed. Everyone had an angle, an opinion. My friend’s flight was delayed so I had to mill about the waiting area for an hour or so, with of course, the full 24 hour “special coverage” of the horrible details of the Connecticut shootings scrolling across all screens. Pundits were weighing in, field journalists speculated on motive and details and news anchors, barely able to contain their excitement over such a “story,” pontificated profoundly stupid questions to people trying to make sense of something horrible. I tried to ignore the news and resorted to people watching to take my mind off things.
After about twenty minutes, a woman who had been watching the news on the big screen turned around to walk away. She had apparently had enough too. Her eyes were red and streaked with tears. It’s likely she had no personal connection to the tragedy. She was just hurt and heartbroken. I doubt that woman, in that moment, had any opinion, any angle, she was just sad. And sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes there isn’t anything to say. Sometimes there just aren’t words.
Amidst all of this, the first batch of arrivals came through the doors off a flight from Sydney. Two young boys came racing through the automatic doors and actually did a full on “drop your bags and jump up on the people you’re waiting for” airport scene. It was pure, unbridled joy. They were so elated and more and more people came through and repeated this behaviour in more or less the same way. People cried and laughed and hugged each other hard. A group of young women waited jumping up and down for their long departed friend to arrive. There was one teenaged guy in the group who was determined not to cry but when his friend finally ran down the hallway, he burst into tears as well.
I still don’t have anything to say about what happened in Connecticut. Like all of you, I feel a whole range of things and am thinking hard about some serious issues that arise in moments like these. I don’t have any solutions or opinions, anything to wrap around this horrible event and make it all make sense. It doesn’t make sense to me and I’m not sure there is an answer. All I know is that when my friend came through that gate, I hugged her damn hard. Maybe that’s enough.
***Note: Before you comment, please read my opening carefully. I am not for a minute suggesting that debates on gun control and services for people suffering from mental illness shouldn’t be had. I think we would all do well however, to become better educated and listen for a while before spouting our opinions. I deeply hope this is what I have achieved here but am definitely open to criticism of that***