Gross Density Parcel
AgentC Gallery
July 23 - October 1, 2015
Gross Density Parcel is inspired by a vacant lot in South Surrey. Many years ago, the landowner, upon leaving it, left many of his possessions there to decay. The assorted detritus — consisting of items such as athletic equipment, children’s toys, tools, photographs, building supplies and much, much more — came to decompose alongside natural and foreign plant species. These artifacts prompted a creative investigation into the history of the property and those who lived there.
The exhibition featured original artworks created by ten professional Surrey and Vancouver based artists who came to the property to gather materials, images or video footage to assist in the making of their work.
CURATION | Rhys Edwards, Debbie Westergaard Tuepah, with AgentC Projects
July 23 - October 1, 2015
Gross Density Parcel is inspired by a vacant lot in South Surrey. Many years ago, the landowner, upon leaving it, left many of his possessions there to decay. The assorted detritus — consisting of items such as athletic equipment, children’s toys, tools, photographs, building supplies and much, much more — came to decompose alongside natural and foreign plant species. These artifacts prompted a creative investigation into the history of the property and those who lived there.
The exhibition featured original artworks created by ten professional Surrey and Vancouver based artists who came to the property to gather materials, images or video footage to assist in the making of their work.
CURATION | Rhys Edwards, Debbie Westergaard Tuepah, with AgentC Projects
curatorial essay
The city of Surrey is defined by its attempts to make itself into a place. Tacit within the prevalence of technological and infrastructural investment into the city centre, the emphasis on extended study programs at local universities, and the rapid construction of real estate developments required to meet the housing needs of an ever-growing immigrant population, is the message that Surrey itself is endemically incomplete. It is simply not quite done yet. Indeed, the slogan of the municipal government is: “The Future Lives Here.”
Combined with this emphasis on thinking of the city as an as-yet-realized reality is the common conception that Surrey is in some way a periphery, or more precisely, a periphery to Vancouver’s own periphery. Its populations of ill and homeless peoples are more widely dispersed, the variety of its ethnicities is more diverse, and its crime is perceived by the media to be both higher in volume and more pernicious in nature than that of any other city in the region. This association of characteristics belies a lack of social cohesion; a sense that, in the everyday experience of commuting to, working, and living in Surrey, there is an absence of some broader sociohistorical narrative (outside of the trauma and displacement of the local Kwantlen and Semiahmoo First Nations) that would invite a richer aesthetic and social harmony with the immediate suburban environment.
This antipathy is embodied by the provenance of a formerly vacant lot located off of 136th avenue in South Surrey, near the Crescent Beach area, a popular destination for Vancouverites, Surrey residents and American tourists. Once the property of a wealthy landowner, the lot—once advertised in real estate lingua franca as a ‘Gross Density Parcel’—and his home on the adjacent property were sold off in 2014. Many years prior, the owner renovated the original family home only to ultimately tear it down and build anew; rather than disposing of his least desirable possessions, and parts of a deconstructed home, he simply dumped them and left them to decay. Over the years, the growth of local plant inhabitants has reclaimed these items, imbuing them with dirt and burying them in sediment. Douglas Fir and Western Red Cedar specimens, which were once topped to prevent their unruly growth, have nevertheless sprouted new shoots; their combined lifecycles have immersed the lot in a layer of organic detritus, further shrouding the man-made objects located on the site. These objects speak to personal history—tools, architectural drawings, exotic big-game trophies, ironman paraphernalia, personal documents, photographic slides, athletic equipment, and children’s toys. Yet, the act of dumping contrasts with objects that evoke a passion for natural resources—bee-keeping boxes, wood-planers, a chicken coop, gardening tools and a multitude of bird houses.
Like many Canadians, the man who once lived on this Gross Density Parcel was not a man who had externalized and abstracted the world; to a greater or lesser extent, he actively inhabited it. The practice and celebration of sports and family, along with flora and fauna cultivation, signify an interest in place-making; for it is only in the realization and inhabitation of physical space that we are enabled to lead an active life. Yet, the lot was abandoned.
Now the lot is being developed anew, just like the majority of Surrey. The past will be shorn over. But the past is never completely terminated; it always breathes through everything else. Though Surrey would like to make itself anew, it has forgotten that it has forgotten; that, growing through bushes, murky swimming pools, and thrown-away beer cans lies a repository of lived experience.
This exhibition is the culmination of a project inviting local artists to create a new body of work based off of the properties, objects and natural elements located at the lot in South Surrey. Its coordinators envisioned an art exhibition that both re-presents and presents the site. In the representational sense, the artists of Gross Density Parcel function to recover, document, and analyze the specific history that the site embodies, by directly incorporating the objects located there into their works. At the same time, in the presentational sense, the exhibition is a revitalization and reimagination of the site, by allowing for the playful appropriation, manipulation, or re-mixing of these site-specific elements into novel artworks. By extension, this re-organization of site-specific material implicates the broader narratives embodied by Surrey’s profligate urban development. It insists upon an alternative vision of Surrey, one that troubles its current conception of the future via an act of creative remembering. Yet, it also participates in and reflects upon the implicitly human desire to shape our experience via urban development; as such, Gross Density Parcel is not a criticism of economic growth, but a mediation between different interpretations of growth, loss, renewal, culture and place-making.
—Rhys Edwards
Combined with this emphasis on thinking of the city as an as-yet-realized reality is the common conception that Surrey is in some way a periphery, or more precisely, a periphery to Vancouver’s own periphery. Its populations of ill and homeless peoples are more widely dispersed, the variety of its ethnicities is more diverse, and its crime is perceived by the media to be both higher in volume and more pernicious in nature than that of any other city in the region. This association of characteristics belies a lack of social cohesion; a sense that, in the everyday experience of commuting to, working, and living in Surrey, there is an absence of some broader sociohistorical narrative (outside of the trauma and displacement of the local Kwantlen and Semiahmoo First Nations) that would invite a richer aesthetic and social harmony with the immediate suburban environment.
This antipathy is embodied by the provenance of a formerly vacant lot located off of 136th avenue in South Surrey, near the Crescent Beach area, a popular destination for Vancouverites, Surrey residents and American tourists. Once the property of a wealthy landowner, the lot—once advertised in real estate lingua franca as a ‘Gross Density Parcel’—and his home on the adjacent property were sold off in 2014. Many years prior, the owner renovated the original family home only to ultimately tear it down and build anew; rather than disposing of his least desirable possessions, and parts of a deconstructed home, he simply dumped them and left them to decay. Over the years, the growth of local plant inhabitants has reclaimed these items, imbuing them with dirt and burying them in sediment. Douglas Fir and Western Red Cedar specimens, which were once topped to prevent their unruly growth, have nevertheless sprouted new shoots; their combined lifecycles have immersed the lot in a layer of organic detritus, further shrouding the man-made objects located on the site. These objects speak to personal history—tools, architectural drawings, exotic big-game trophies, ironman paraphernalia, personal documents, photographic slides, athletic equipment, and children’s toys. Yet, the act of dumping contrasts with objects that evoke a passion for natural resources—bee-keeping boxes, wood-planers, a chicken coop, gardening tools and a multitude of bird houses.
Like many Canadians, the man who once lived on this Gross Density Parcel was not a man who had externalized and abstracted the world; to a greater or lesser extent, he actively inhabited it. The practice and celebration of sports and family, along with flora and fauna cultivation, signify an interest in place-making; for it is only in the realization and inhabitation of physical space that we are enabled to lead an active life. Yet, the lot was abandoned.
Now the lot is being developed anew, just like the majority of Surrey. The past will be shorn over. But the past is never completely terminated; it always breathes through everything else. Though Surrey would like to make itself anew, it has forgotten that it has forgotten; that, growing through bushes, murky swimming pools, and thrown-away beer cans lies a repository of lived experience.
This exhibition is the culmination of a project inviting local artists to create a new body of work based off of the properties, objects and natural elements located at the lot in South Surrey. Its coordinators envisioned an art exhibition that both re-presents and presents the site. In the representational sense, the artists of Gross Density Parcel function to recover, document, and analyze the specific history that the site embodies, by directly incorporating the objects located there into their works. At the same time, in the presentational sense, the exhibition is a revitalization and reimagination of the site, by allowing for the playful appropriation, manipulation, or re-mixing of these site-specific elements into novel artworks. By extension, this re-organization of site-specific material implicates the broader narratives embodied by Surrey’s profligate urban development. It insists upon an alternative vision of Surrey, one that troubles its current conception of the future via an act of creative remembering. Yet, it also participates in and reflects upon the implicitly human desire to shape our experience via urban development; as such, Gross Density Parcel is not a criticism of economic growth, but a mediation between different interpretations of growth, loss, renewal, culture and place-making.
—Rhys Edwards
the artist's work
Memories are fallible, but this is not to say they are unmeaningful. The human mind continually molds its memories in reflection of the present moment. Each look back into the past is a novel recapitulation of our present anxieties and dreams. This is why creative memorializing is invigorating: because it is how we authenticate our present lives.
The artists of Gross Density Parcel are creative eulogizers. 'Creative,' because their works are not about a family they knew – the individuals who inhabited the lot in South Surrey – but because they are new constructions of that family. Rather than lamenting the fundamental lack of formal connections between this family and their own lives, each artist has instead appropriated the former possessions of that family, and the property itself, with the idea of fomenting an alternative past. The truth of this past does not reside in empirical research, but in the purely creative act.
Rosemary Burden, for instance, has allowed the vacant lot on 136th Avenue to inspire the generation of a new 'family' of artworks. Mona, Lucy, and Nelhi are quasi-anthropomorphic sculptures composed of found objects. Thousands of butterflies, stamped from discarded chequebooks and architectural plans, traverse Mona's flowing dressage, while a flash photography bulb illumines Lucy's head. The rusted aggression of Nelhi's nailed headdress looms from her diminutive stature. These are new, distinct identities. They are oriented toward the present and future, but draw from a history they did not themselves experience.
Aaron Moran's Columns, complemented by the print 3155 136 (white), are also new forms. But the imagery of these forms alludes to the purely creative act. The impulse to stack items on top of each other is a fundamental method of marking out sites of human habitation. In their arrangement, Moran's objects defy the will toward historicization; denied their utilitarian value, objects which formerly had no meaning in relation to each other now make sense only as parts within an organized whole. In this way, Moran's works reflect the need to organize the fragments of the past.
Roxanne Charles' Fragments focuses on isolating and analyzing the objects of her investigation into the site. Her archaeological forays result in a sprawling survey of items which stand out on their own terms. Charles' careful curation and installation of artifacts on the gallery's walls does not only suggest that they are worthy of contemplation as oddities; they foment a visual ethnography of domestic experience, manifesting through worn-down tools, furniture items, and tape cassettes. These items have their own power; they have not been so much as 'rescued' as found.
With the photographs Estimated Threshold of Influence and Estimated Amplitude of Reach, Andrew Keech draws attention to our perception of the environment. In Threshold, a rock rests impossibly upon a piece of rebar descending into the bowels of the earth; in Amplitude, an impossibly perfect rectangle looms from a space within foliage. Far from suggesting that these environments are 'natural,' Keech emphasizes the intrinsic relationship between the act of spectatorship and the construction of the environment. They suggest that meaning is not found within a place itself, but brought to it by an artist or visitor.
While the above artists have created works which instigate new ways of interpreting and making sense of the past, other artists have spoken to its abstraction or distancing. Paul Bucci's installation Peek evokes the experience of walking past a family living room at night-time while a television set murmurs behind closed curtains. Much like memory itself, such an experience can only ever be sensory in nature – we cannot develop a detailed knowledge of the lives led within this space. Instead, we are left only with an alienated, emotive spectre. Although the window in __ was found at 136th Avenue, it has become a universal window, suggestive of the veiled possibility of historical intimacy.
Paradoxically, the will to understand can incite the decomposition of knowledge. Helma Sawatzky's dibond triptych Trace elements Site One: Theme + variations features a hyper-textured agglutination of organic and artificial matter found at 136th Avenue. The high resolution treatment Sawatzky lends to her subjects allows us perceive them with detailed, near-clinical insight; but their juxtaposition and layering harks to the entropy that permeates through the organization of experience. Sawatzky blurs the boundaries between place, time, and subject within a visual phantasmagoria, and in doing so, questions the veracity of digital photography itself.
Don Li-Leger's film and sculptural installations underscore the abstraction of the past with traumatic mystery. The short film Family Detritus highlights slides depicting an unknown family, found at the abandoned property. Insects and moisture have eaten away at their emulsion. Contrasted with a thumping sound score, the recovery of these images provokes the question of how they came to be lost in the first place. In the sculpture Exotic Animals in Surrey, objects of masculine power such as weaponry, athletic equipment, and taxidermy tools threaten to emerge from a found tool box, bound with twine. The box rests upon a podium decorated with the painted skulls of foreign animals. The arrangement evokes a primal narrative of conquest – this narrative is displaced from the immediacy of the present, yet threatens to return.
Lastly, several artists in Gross Density Parcel use their work to generate a creative connection to their own lives, or to document their subjective experience of the property. Polly Gibbons' deer head photo album charts the artists' exploration into the wealth of material found at the previously vacant property. Composed of photographs, a taxidermied deer head, and an assortment of found objects, Gibbons' work evokes the essentially absurd chaos of discarded waste that characterizes the site. Yet, within this chaos, Gibbons identifies traces of meaning: the relation between the self and the mirror; of nature, and man's efforts to sublimate it; and of the underlying harmony that traverses everything touched by entropy.
Cora Li-Leger's sculptures, tracings, and film convey a deeply personal connection with the site. The Memory Becomes a Tree includes dozens of rubbing wax tracings, suspended in a floating corona. Each act of tracing reduces an object to pure form and pattern; in this way, Li-Leger identifies and captures a universal, spiritual element that inheres even once all the objects have been destroyed or lost during the development process. This spirit appears again in the short film Afterlife, wherein lanterns created from honey pails found at the site float across a swimming pool on the property. In Japan, floating lanterns (toro nagashi) are released in commemoration of the dead; here, Li-Leger's work is a paean to a forgotten history. Similarly, the notion of the 'forgotten' or 'remnant' surfaces in Oorts – orbs of material named after the balls of thread leftover after crocheting or knitting. Here, the artist rehabilitates otherwise abject materiel, imbuing it with an ameliorative impulse that stems from a fundamentally creative expression of labour.
Carlyn Yandle identifies the site with personal history with Charm Bracelet. Influenced by the expansive jewelry connection of her grandmother – formerly a resident of Newton herself – Yandle's bracelet commemorates a lifetime of skills learnt, labours undertaken, and hardships endured. Rusted tools, bed springs and coils become a transplanted means of expressing an individualized response to the past. But Charm Bracelet is also an analogy for the lot off of 136th Avenue in and itself: a repository of lost histories, linked together via a creative act of memorization.
-- Rhys Edwards
The artists of Gross Density Parcel are creative eulogizers. 'Creative,' because their works are not about a family they knew – the individuals who inhabited the lot in South Surrey – but because they are new constructions of that family. Rather than lamenting the fundamental lack of formal connections between this family and their own lives, each artist has instead appropriated the former possessions of that family, and the property itself, with the idea of fomenting an alternative past. The truth of this past does not reside in empirical research, but in the purely creative act.
Rosemary Burden, for instance, has allowed the vacant lot on 136th Avenue to inspire the generation of a new 'family' of artworks. Mona, Lucy, and Nelhi are quasi-anthropomorphic sculptures composed of found objects. Thousands of butterflies, stamped from discarded chequebooks and architectural plans, traverse Mona's flowing dressage, while a flash photography bulb illumines Lucy's head. The rusted aggression of Nelhi's nailed headdress looms from her diminutive stature. These are new, distinct identities. They are oriented toward the present and future, but draw from a history they did not themselves experience.
Aaron Moran's Columns, complemented by the print 3155 136 (white), are also new forms. But the imagery of these forms alludes to the purely creative act. The impulse to stack items on top of each other is a fundamental method of marking out sites of human habitation. In their arrangement, Moran's objects defy the will toward historicization; denied their utilitarian value, objects which formerly had no meaning in relation to each other now make sense only as parts within an organized whole. In this way, Moran's works reflect the need to organize the fragments of the past.
Roxanne Charles' Fragments focuses on isolating and analyzing the objects of her investigation into the site. Her archaeological forays result in a sprawling survey of items which stand out on their own terms. Charles' careful curation and installation of artifacts on the gallery's walls does not only suggest that they are worthy of contemplation as oddities; they foment a visual ethnography of domestic experience, manifesting through worn-down tools, furniture items, and tape cassettes. These items have their own power; they have not been so much as 'rescued' as found.
With the photographs Estimated Threshold of Influence and Estimated Amplitude of Reach, Andrew Keech draws attention to our perception of the environment. In Threshold, a rock rests impossibly upon a piece of rebar descending into the bowels of the earth; in Amplitude, an impossibly perfect rectangle looms from a space within foliage. Far from suggesting that these environments are 'natural,' Keech emphasizes the intrinsic relationship between the act of spectatorship and the construction of the environment. They suggest that meaning is not found within a place itself, but brought to it by an artist or visitor.
While the above artists have created works which instigate new ways of interpreting and making sense of the past, other artists have spoken to its abstraction or distancing. Paul Bucci's installation Peek evokes the experience of walking past a family living room at night-time while a television set murmurs behind closed curtains. Much like memory itself, such an experience can only ever be sensory in nature – we cannot develop a detailed knowledge of the lives led within this space. Instead, we are left only with an alienated, emotive spectre. Although the window in __ was found at 136th Avenue, it has become a universal window, suggestive of the veiled possibility of historical intimacy.
Paradoxically, the will to understand can incite the decomposition of knowledge. Helma Sawatzky's dibond triptych Trace elements Site One: Theme + variations features a hyper-textured agglutination of organic and artificial matter found at 136th Avenue. The high resolution treatment Sawatzky lends to her subjects allows us perceive them with detailed, near-clinical insight; but their juxtaposition and layering harks to the entropy that permeates through the organization of experience. Sawatzky blurs the boundaries between place, time, and subject within a visual phantasmagoria, and in doing so, questions the veracity of digital photography itself.
Don Li-Leger's film and sculptural installations underscore the abstraction of the past with traumatic mystery. The short film Family Detritus highlights slides depicting an unknown family, found at the abandoned property. Insects and moisture have eaten away at their emulsion. Contrasted with a thumping sound score, the recovery of these images provokes the question of how they came to be lost in the first place. In the sculpture Exotic Animals in Surrey, objects of masculine power such as weaponry, athletic equipment, and taxidermy tools threaten to emerge from a found tool box, bound with twine. The box rests upon a podium decorated with the painted skulls of foreign animals. The arrangement evokes a primal narrative of conquest – this narrative is displaced from the immediacy of the present, yet threatens to return.
Lastly, several artists in Gross Density Parcel use their work to generate a creative connection to their own lives, or to document their subjective experience of the property. Polly Gibbons' deer head photo album charts the artists' exploration into the wealth of material found at the previously vacant property. Composed of photographs, a taxidermied deer head, and an assortment of found objects, Gibbons' work evokes the essentially absurd chaos of discarded waste that characterizes the site. Yet, within this chaos, Gibbons identifies traces of meaning: the relation between the self and the mirror; of nature, and man's efforts to sublimate it; and of the underlying harmony that traverses everything touched by entropy.
Cora Li-Leger's sculptures, tracings, and film convey a deeply personal connection with the site. The Memory Becomes a Tree includes dozens of rubbing wax tracings, suspended in a floating corona. Each act of tracing reduces an object to pure form and pattern; in this way, Li-Leger identifies and captures a universal, spiritual element that inheres even once all the objects have been destroyed or lost during the development process. This spirit appears again in the short film Afterlife, wherein lanterns created from honey pails found at the site float across a swimming pool on the property. In Japan, floating lanterns (toro nagashi) are released in commemoration of the dead; here, Li-Leger's work is a paean to a forgotten history. Similarly, the notion of the 'forgotten' or 'remnant' surfaces in Oorts – orbs of material named after the balls of thread leftover after crocheting or knitting. Here, the artist rehabilitates otherwise abject materiel, imbuing it with an ameliorative impulse that stems from a fundamentally creative expression of labour.
Carlyn Yandle identifies the site with personal history with Charm Bracelet. Influenced by the expansive jewelry connection of her grandmother – formerly a resident of Newton herself – Yandle's bracelet commemorates a lifetime of skills learnt, labours undertaken, and hardships endured. Rusted tools, bed springs and coils become a transplanted means of expressing an individualized response to the past. But Charm Bracelet is also an analogy for the lot off of 136th Avenue in and itself: a repository of lost histories, linked together via a creative act of memorization.
-- Rhys Edwards