Monday, March 13, 2017

Oh, How I Long For Home



Yesterday's post quoted a passage from George Woodcock's Ravens and Prophets (1954) that refers to the ostensible oxymoron of the "visiting Indian." Taken in context, this visit can refer to indigenous people from northern BC communities like Kispiox, Kitwanga, Kitwancool and Gitsegukla coming to Vancouver after the Nass and Skeena River salmon canning season to explore the PNE, purchase a new guitar, catch a football game -- any number of things.

For most of the past year, SFU's Teck Gallery has hosted an installation by Marianne Nicolson, entitled Oh, How I Long For Home, which "addresses a persistent idea of the city as a conflicted promise" -- or the downright failure of a Eurocentric "program" of modernity, modernization, and their PR Department, modernism, to improve the lives of those who live in or visit such cities.

The installation is comprised of "photographs the artist found of her relations on Vancouver's streets during the 1940s and '50s;" her more recent photos taken of existing neon signs along Hastings Street; and a neon Kwak' wala text translated from the exhibition's English title. For more on the Oh, How I Long For Home, click here.

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