Legacy, 2005-6. Panel 1 of 5.

A chronology:

In 1993 or 1994, I bought, for $15, at MacLeod's Books on Pender Street, a copy of the VAG exhibition catalog, Jeff Wall: 1990. Back then I was finishing up an English Honors degree at UBC and had zero interest in visual art, but I knew that one of my thesis advisors, Roger Seamon, liked Wall's photographs and had written about them, and I thought the catalog might make a nice end of term gift.

In the end, Roger never got the catalog, because I started leafing through it. A lot of landscapes I immediately recognized from riding Skytrain, or wandering aimlessly around East Vancouver. The BC Tel building. The Georgia Viaduct. New Westminster's Schara Tzedeck Cemetery. East Hastings Street. All drenched -- at least in my imagination -- in that curious flat grey West Coast light.

Up until then, I think I had always somehow unconsciously associated "high" art with huge cosmopolitan cities -- Paris, or New York, or London. It had never occurred to me that the things I saw and experienced every day might be valid art materials, or that anyone outside of Vancouver would ever accept them as such.

I took some art history courses at UBC, quit writing bad disaster-themed science fiction, and started trying to write better art criticism.

In 2000, the Or Gallery organized a loosely curated fundraiser, Knock Off, whose invitees were requested to remake, mash up, or baldly plagarize a work or works of their choice. I still think that this is the best exhibition I have ever seen at an artist-run center, both for the invitees' choices, some well-known, others totally obscure, and for the complex, subtle, and often moving ways that the choices spoke about the invitees' own work.

Also in 2000, my friend Kevin Schmidt participated in a group exhibition I organized for the Surrey Art Gallery by photographing his rustbucket Chevrolet station wagon against five different "super, natural" landscapes, a la the SUV ads that run during Hockey Night in Canada.

In September 2005, my brother Drew sold me his old Subaru Legacy (340000 kms!). I liked driving again, after 15 years of taking the bus, and I liked the car a lot; it seemed to have acquired a personality in the course of its passage through time.

In October 2005, I drove out to North Burnaby with my new digital camera, spurred by a dim memory of a Vancouver International Film Festival documentary in which Wall described making Coastal Motifs, still my favorite of all his photographs, by erecting a view camera on the roof of his elderly car. My idea was to make a 35mm. study of the same landscape. Learn by doing, & etc. Most of the "study" pictures didn't work out too well (you can see some of them in the Anodyne archives). One exception was a portrait of the Subaru, made right at the end of the day in much the same spirit as Manet's portrait of his elderly parents: a representation that recognizes that its subject(s) are not going to be around forever.

I am a frequently depressed and gloomy guy, but making Legacy's five panels was the most fun I have had in years, even when being chased by a big mean Chow Chow down River Road, or stopped by the Burnaby RCMP. So, thank you JW, KS, and DB. Without whom, & etc. Thanks.
- posted by cjb @ 11:59 PM