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Rodney Graham, "Spinning Chandelier," 2019, stainless steel, LED lights and more than 600 polyurethane crystals, 25.5' x 14' (photo by Lukas Dong, courtesy of Westbank)

Year-End Views: Vancouver

A tale of two cities: world-class exhibitions, but affordability crisis is hitting artists.

by

The other day, I stood under a bridge and looked at a chandelier. 

Rodney Graham’s new sculptural installation, Spinning Chandelier, was officially unveiled at a public event in Vancouver on a dark cold night. 

Weighing in at more than three tonnes and costing $4.8 million, the piece performs a little dance twice a day, descending from the undercarriage of the Granville Street Bridge like a fat sparkly spider, spinning for a few minutes, and then lifting back into place beneath the bridge deck. 

The underside of bridges are normally where you would dump a body or set up a homeless encampment, so in this context, a big glittering chandelier, with its connotations of wealth and ostentatious display, seems, if not totally gauche, at least a little ill-considered. 

As people assembled in silent groups, a cover band performed off-key versions of ’80s hits. A couple of elderly hippy/hobo types swayed back and forth in front of the stage. Construction crews were still at work and orange security fencing blocked off heavy equipment and mounds of dirt that skirted the staging area. There wasn’t much to do, other than wait for Ian Gillespie, the CEO of Westbank, the development company that bankrolled the chandelier, to arrive and make a speech. 

Standing there, in the cold, gave me some time to think about the current cultural moment in Vancouver. In all honesty, it’s a bit Dickensian, along the lines of: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

First, the best news. A lot of extraordinary art happened in Vancouver this year. Christian Marclay’s screening of The Clock, at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, was followed by another major installation by Wael Shawky, including a screening of his film Cabaret Crusades. Both works were on The Guardian’s list of the "best art" of the 21st century: No. 6 and No. 7, respectively. 

The Vancouver Art Gallery featured major exhibitions by Cindy Sherman, Alberto Giacometti and hometown artist Vikky Alexander, and also announced funding for its new building. The gallery will be searching for new leadership after the departure of director Kathleen Bartels, after 18 years at the helm.

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Automatic Negative Thought, the first major solo exhibition of Maryam Jafri’s work, was filled with puckish wit and prankster humour. The gallery followed Jafri’s show with its current offerings, an equally remarkable collection of work from Ingrid Koenig (Navigating the Uncertainty Principle), Sreshta Rit Premnath (Those Who Wait) and Olivia Whetung (Sugarbush Shrapnel). The New Media Gallery in New Westminster continued to hit it out of the park with wildly inventive resonant shows, and the Eastside Culture Crawl grew exponentially. 

It was also a terrific year for Indigenous artists, with major shows and installations, including Spill at the Belkin Gallery, Transits and Returns at the Vancouver Art Gallery and Marking the Infinite, a stunning collection of work from nine women Aboriginal artists from Australia, at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology. 

And now for the worse news. 

Art was at the centre of a number of street fights in Vancouver, as the chasm between the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy continued to crack wide open. 

Earlier in the summer, protestors gathered on the street in front of Chip Wilson’s palatial west-side home, hoping to bring attention to his continued efforts to devour Vancouver. Wilson’s company, Low Tide, has set about acquiring $1.5-billion worth of property by 2026, much of it on Vancouver’s Eastside. 

Billionaires like Wilson, the founder of Lululemon Athletica, and Westbank’s Gillespie have anointed themselves as cultural arbiters in the city. In this, Graham’s sculpture comes at an odd moment. While wealthy folk donate money to cultural organizations and events in the city, art-washing that acts as a public relations tool to gloss over social cleansing and gentrification, continues to leach away at affordable spaces to make art.

Galleries, including the Equinox and Monte Clark, were under threat from redevelopment or climbing rents, while other spaces like the Glass Onion Studio, home to 30 artists, and The Old Foundry, another space that housed artists, shut completely. Another departure was the Spirit Wrestler Gallery, closed after 24 years. 

As affordable studio spaces, galleries and venues continue to close in rapid succession, artists are being priced out of neighbourhoods. There has been something of a creative exodus as people give up and move away. The city’s cultural leadership is also in major flux, with a long list of recent departures.

As one Vancouver arts organizer said about the continued attrition: “The arts are often the canary in the coal mine.” When a derelict warehouse on Vancouver’s Eastside is worth $2 million, you know things are a bit insane. But what happens to a city when artists can’t afford to live or work here anymore?  

Back under the Granville Street Bridge, free hot chocolate and cookies emblazoned with the Westbank logo didn’t do much to warm up the proceedings. As Vancouver’s mayor, Kennedy Stewart, called Graham’s work “the most important piece of public art in the history of our city,” his voice echoing against the bare ribs of concrete overhead, people huddled in the dark and the cold, waiting to be dazzled by a giant shiny statement to a city splitting in two. ■

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