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Title:
Stan Douglas : Every building on 100 West Hastings

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Summary:
The 100 block of Vancouver's West Hastings Street is the gateway to one of the most contested and controversial inner-city neighborhoods in North America – Vancouver’s infamous and impoverished downtown eastside. Lining the south side of the block are Edwardian-era buildings which have born the brunt of shifting market forces over the years. Developed in the wake of Vancouver’s "emergence" as the terminus for the country’s national railroad, the buildings in the area have been in decline since the 1930s, when the locus of the city’s commerce began moving. But the "story" of the 100 block is not strictly one of global market forces, nor does it belong to those who, through whatever political stripe, lay claim to it. The book is based on a monumental-sized digital print of the 100 block of West Hastings Street by Stan Douglas who utilized current technologies to create a 16'×3' panorama of epic scope, photographing each building and compositing the individual prints to assume a fantastic, impossible perspective; which is reproduced in the book as a removable full-colour poster, 5½" tall and 30½" wide. Essays by Denise Olekszijuk, Nicholas Blomley, and Neil Smith use Douglas’s photograph as a template for assessing the state of Vancouver’s contested downtown eastside; its moral, economic and social implications. Ultimately, how can art affect society in a meaningful way? Scattered throughout the book are additional images highlighting Vancouver’s history as well as work from other artistic ventures that informed Douglas’s project. This book unravels the dynamics of history and sociology, combined with photography and art, to create a compelling and visually arresting document that informs our understanding of what makes a neighbourhood.

Title:
Geoffrey Farmer

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Summary:
This book accompanies Geoffrey Farmer’s installation "The Blacking Factory" which comprised two interrelated works: a sculptural installation in the form of a large truck trailer, and a film work depicting a window of the Contemporary Art Gallery shattering from an explosive concussion. With these works, Farmer utilizes the technological expertise of the film industry to create analogies between increasingly sophisticated mechanics of display and the artifice behind the social production of meaning and value. The truck trailer is fabricated in mimicry of those used by movie production companies — an increasingly common sight on the streets of Vancouver — and alludes to the transportation of such necessities as props, lighting systems and costumes necessary to the creation of illusions. The catalogue includes texts by Nanaimo-based poet and critic Peter Culley and exhibition curator Reid Shier.

Title:
Scott McFarland : cabin photographs

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$20.00
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Summary:
This book accompanies and exhibition of the work of Vancouver artist, Scott McFarland, whose photographs are highlighted by meticulous staging that document a discrete range of subjects in serial format. The exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery concentrated on one of his ongoing projects : a large body of photographs detailing the interior and exterior of a rural cabin on BC’s Sunshine Coast. McFarland’s naturalistic staging and close cropping emphasized and valorized objects and personal artefacts accumulating within the cabin, and stress an ongoing relationship between the site and its depiction.