I pulled my luggage behind me from the Granville Sky Train station to the Vancouver Art Gallery a few blocks away. The museum has four floors, three of them with current exhibits and one in transition. I was expecting to enjoy the top floor exhibit, "In Dialogue With Emily Carr" but it didn't seem particularly arresting.
What was amazing was "Waste Not" by Song Dong, a Chinese dude who collaborated with his mother to create a deeply moving exhibit. His mom had fallen from middle-class to scrabbling poverty in China, and as a result, saved things like bits of soap, pop bottles, scraps of fabric, mismatched shoes, cardboard, wash basins, and other artifacts of daily life. Ten thousand of these objects were laid out, sorted into categories, in several of the rooms. I was reminded of the things my mother said about her own experiences with poverty as I walked through this exhibit. I'd look at a display of rolled-up wire, short and long, and remember our own garage when I was little, full of objects salvaged from our profligate neighbors' trash cans - screws, hinges, wire, and broken-handled hammers.
When people are wealthy, they have the option to manifest their idiosyncracies, but when they're poor, there are stereotypical behaviors that seem hard-wired to help us survive.
Another amazing thing was an art-encrusted car, pictured below. The driver was parked, smoking dope with the windows open. It's a foreign country!
What was amazing was "Waste Not" by Song Dong, a Chinese dude who collaborated with his mother to create a deeply moving exhibit. His mom had fallen from middle-class to scrabbling poverty in China, and as a result, saved things like bits of soap, pop bottles, scraps of fabric, mismatched shoes, cardboard, wash basins, and other artifacts of daily life. Ten thousand of these objects were laid out, sorted into categories, in several of the rooms. I was reminded of the things my mother said about her own experiences with poverty as I walked through this exhibit. I'd look at a display of rolled-up wire, short and long, and remember our own garage when I was little, full of objects salvaged from our profligate neighbors' trash cans - screws, hinges, wire, and broken-handled hammers.
When people are wealthy, they have the option to manifest their idiosyncracies, but when they're poor, there are stereotypical behaviors that seem hard-wired to help us survive.
Another amazing thing was an art-encrusted car, pictured below. The driver was parked, smoking dope with the windows open. It's a foreign country!
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