While our Spacing Vancouver contributors continue their well-deserved break, we would like to take the opportunity highlight some of our most popular posts from 2012. Each day this week, we will be posting some of our favourite posts from last year.
The vague terrain of art in the generic city
Originally posted by Don Schuetze on April 9, 2012
The same day Beyond Vague Terrain: The City and the Serial Image closed at the Surrey Art Gallery, Artswest had an exhibition in the new Surrey Library.
Artswest is an amateur artists’ group. If you think of grandmas with paint boxes you’ll get a sense of the type of art here. I’m sure you could find something to match the couch.
The new Surrey Library is part of the development of a city core for B.C.’s second-largest city. Anchored at one end with the Central City tower, straddling the Surrey Central Skytrain station, and reaching north to encompass a recreation centre, the new library, a new city hall (now just a hole in the ground), a spectacular hotel/convention/living tower in the offing, and there is even more potential the further north you go.
The Surrey Art Gallery, in contrast, is 12 blocks due south along the King George Highway, a major north/south artery. That’s a mile-and-a-half. Here’s a bit of trivia: there are eight Surrey blocks in a mile, 12 in a Vancouver (or city) mile. If you’re not driving you’ll need to catch the number 325 bus, grab a cab or walk along the highway.
And somehow this geography and coincidence of exhibitions seems to sum up both the concepts that inform the pieces in Vague Terrain, and the peculiar nature of a public art gallery in this not-quite-urban setting.
