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Queen of Vancouver art: Catriona Jeffries

December 6th, 2010 · 13 Comments

Every so often, it’s great to take a break from Vancouver politics and do something totally different.

This time, I got to spent time with gallerist  Catriona Jeffries at her unique art space in the False Creek Flats — a little like going on a mini-trip to Berlin or a quiet corner of the Tate Modern in London.

Jeffries represents a whole group of artists who have come to define Vancouver to the outside world.

And to us: Her artists also seem to be favoured choices in Vancouver these days for public art, i.e. Myfanway MacLeod’s giant sparrows in the Olympic village plaza.

Categories: Uncategorized

  • Lewis N. Villegas

    Like urbanism, you have to see art “in the flesh” to appreciate it. I haven’t seen Catriona Jeffries’s work, so I can’t comment.

    However, I live a few blocks from the east van cross that you inform me is by Ken Lum (there is no good photography of the work in the first five google hits… here’s a bad night shot).

    http://www.straight.com/article-281162/vancouver/what-heck-east-van-cross

    This is art in the idiom of commercial signage. The pylon, the fluorescent white light, the strategic placing vis-a-vis a major intersection, the proximity to skytrain VCC-Clarke, and the scale, all speak to what Robert Venturi analyzed in his 1970’s “Learning From Las Vegas”. (The lesson was—you can’t learn from Las Vegas).

    The sign reads best at night, when the fluorescent light has the same effect on the retina as every other piece of commercial signage, painting the sky black all around it.

    The sign’s chief provocation comes via the cult world of pop artist Madonna. This is a cross, a religious emblem of Christianity, appropriated as a gang-land symbol, to be worn on stage on a chain across flung across the chest complemented by a sleeveless muscle shirt.

    It’s siting “dominates” the False Creek Flats and looks across to the residential towers of the new “downtown”. It is sited to stand as an affront—a territorial claim and a gateway symbol: this is here, that is there.

    Yawn. So much force and fury signifying nothing more than another work that turns its back on the public realm and abandons any claim to human scale or human sense awareness.

    Cold and stupid. Dumbed down art facing the the denuded life of a decimated public realm that once used to be the street. Once the spine of neighbourhood life, open car sewer today now complete with another shinny trinket.

    We really should build a little strip mall adjacent to it, co-op the art to play dual role as advertising by calling it the East Van Square, then use some of the commercial rent revenues to pay the bill for another turd—this time not on plaza, but alongside the arterial.

  • Diane

    Um, Lewis, Catriona is a gallery ‘owner’, not an artist – but the ones she represents are first class.

  • Lewis N. Villegas

    THNX Diane… Is that what Frances meant by “gallerist”. I’ll check it out.

  • Frances Bula

    @Lewis. I was told while researching this piece that “gallerist” is the new term, preferred to “art dealer.”

  • Ken Lum

    Lewis N Villegas is entitled to his opinion. (I’m glad my work piqued him so). What he is not entitled to use is a reference in support of his argument so utterly in error. He has either not read Venturi and Scott Brown’s ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ (as he so implies to have done) or worse, he completely misunderstood it. There was no irony to the title of Venturi and Scott Brown’s seminal book–they took an agnostic view to the usually negative assessment of the Las Vegas strip and saw a kind of order to the chaos, particularly from the vantage point of someone in a car. Indeed, they argued one can learn a lot from Las Vegas. Their text had enormous implications for both a return to vernacular language in architecture as well as questions relating to ornamentation–including signage–in an age of ascending doubt regarding modernist architecture.

  • Lewis N. Villegas

    Shows just how easy it is to get out of the loop. It had the ring of an artist with a storefront gallery.

  • Chris Keam

    Hey Ken:

    Love the cross. I don’t know if you collect images of people ‘referencing/paying homage/stealing’ its imagery, but if so, please email me off-list as I have an image I’d love to share with you. All you have to do is click on my name above this post to get my contact info.

    cheers,
    CK

  • Lewis N. Villegas

    Publicity for the artist—any publicity—is good news. I am happy to provide that for this work. It is deserving of public vetting. However, the bar is set higher for the ages.

    East Van Cross is “in our face” alright. The question is whether or not it will stand the test of time. Let’s await to see what the passing of time will unfurl. I question whether the artist surrendered too much when he failed to control the location for its siting (newspaper articles reported he had envisioned it standing somewhere on Main Street).

    I am not quite sure what the Venturi’s intended with “Learning From Las Vegas” (1972?), their follow up to Bob Venturi’s “Complexity and Contradiction in Modern Architecture” (1961). I have not only read both works carefully… I’ve travelled to Las Vegas to see for myself. Sad to say… nothing much to report.

    “There was no irony to the title of Venturi and Scott Brown’s seminal book–they took an agnostic view to the usually negative assessment of the Las Vegas strip and saw a kind of order to the chaos, particularly from the vantage point of someone in a car.”

    — Ken Lum

    Precisely my point about “human scale”. Travelling inside our cars at 50 km/h we are traversing the urban landscape at fully 10x—one order of difference—faster than walking speed. Our consciousness and our values are altered by the change in speed. What we perceive “from the vantage point of someone in a car” bears no relationship to the “sense of place” typically had walking at 400m/5 minutes or 4.8 km/h. In urbanism, the walking speed makes a world of difference.

    There is nothing to learn in Las Vegas beyond the crassest form of Americanism—the Disneylands a close second. I don’t see the “return to a vernacular language”. What’s vernacular about it? Signage as ornamentation? Consumption as art? Product as progeny?

    Not.

    The “ascending doubt about modernist architecture” cuts both ways. It extends to art posturing in the urban landscape, but failing to engage in issues of urbanism. Outside the confines of the museum, the gallery and the private rooms of the art collector art meets up with a larger public, putting greater demands on the artist.

  • Tiktaalik

    Is it true that it was originally considered to be placed somewhere on Main but then moved eastward? That would be awfully appropriate, as it seems that the imaginary line (not the exact divider at Ontario) dividing the rich west side of Vancouver from the poorer East Van has been shifting ever more eastward.

    My parents tell me that when they were in University Granville Street was considered the sort of centre street of the city, and Cambie was solidly in the “east side”. Now I don’t think anyone would feel that’s the case at all, and many would consider Cambie to be the main centre street. It used to be that Main Street was solidly an east side street, but that neighbourhood has certainly changed in the last few years. Now folks say that Fraser is the new Main.

    Perhaps in 20 years we’ll have to move the sign eastward again to a new front.

  • Tiktaalik

    By the way this was a really interesting article Frances. Thanks.

  • Lewis N. Villegas

    “The corner of East Sixth and Clark wasn’t his first choice. He wanted something on Main Street but after a community review, the city decided on the prominent spot-on city-owned land in an industrial area. The city hopes to have the monument installed by mid-December.”

    With apologies, I meant to provide the link:

    http://www.vancouversun.com/life/westcoast-life/constructs+icon+rule+over+East+Vancouver/2265765/story.html

  • Lewis N. Villegas

    Another issue concerning resent public art installations in our city extends to the East Van Cross, those giant sparrows at OV Plaza, the fountain at Emery Barnes Park (Homer & Davie), and some of the public art on view near the foot of Davie on the North Shore False Creek.

    All of these works posses a strange kind of super-scale. This is not Pop Art, or Kitsch. We’re are too far removed for the 1950s-1960s in hip and post-war NYC for that. What I suspect, and I won’t be able to prove it until I can actually check it out with a camera in hand, is that this is art of a scale meant to be appreciated from the tall heights and the private views of condos in towers. If this is so, then the scale of the art is not so much determined by an artistic consideration of the public realm, but rather by a shrewd calculation of what will serve the residential towes that pay for these public improvements in the first place.

    This would be an appropriation of public realm for private use of the first order.

    The spiky crown of thorns that is the roof of BC Place under construction plays the same aesthetic of scale change. However, the change here results from a huge structure, not a sign pylon, or fibreglass birds. The stadium roof under construction presents in a manner that I find captivating. The scale of the boom-crane-like structures that one imagines will be roof supports today stand starkly against a backdrop of condo curtain wall. Visible from many vantage points, including standing outside the Costco next to Millenium Chinatown-Stadium station, I find the juxtaposition worth seeking out when in that part of the city. And it works equally well from a walking or a driving perspective.

    It is not heroic, but it is monumental.

  • Gilles Hebert

    Lewis? Is that you?
    A voice from your distant past here.
    Just checking in and acknowledging you and your work. Say hi to your brother.