Engaging The Material & The Fluid: Laiwan’s Fountain: the source or origin of anything
There is only the memory of a long-gone Vancouver hidden beneath our feet—a Vancouver where land was shore, the intersecting edge of Chinatown near Keefer and Columbia Streets an extension of False Creek. Fountain: the source or origin of anything (2014) by locally-based artist Laiwan, explores fluidity in relation to spatial transformations in the city, shoring up responses to place through material memory.
Conceived of as a large-scale public art piece site-specific to The WALL, located at the CBC Broadcast Centre Plaza at 700 Hamilton Street as part of a Vancouver Heritage Foundation initiative, the black-and-white image displayed is a still frame taken from the film Summer Afternoon (1956), found through CBC’s media archives. Depicting two young children venturing out on the boat-lined docks beneath the Old Georgia Viaduct, the image is accompanied by Laiwan’s own poetic rendering of sourced text.
“hydrologic marsh / lotic & lentic & fen /
mystery beneath our walk”
Although this poetic inscription may read as cryptic and indecipherable to the casual viewer, the web-based curatorial statement reveals that the technical terms used in the piece were selected from the B.C. Government’s “Glossary of Water Quality Terms.” This knowledge helps to make sense of the title of the piece, Fountain being evocative of a fluid logic, of the natural and something often characterized as a source of inspiration.
Laiwan uses the metaphor of the fountain to interrogate Vancouver history with the knowledge that transformation cannot be construed as beneficial to a whole unspecified public. Although she attempts no explicit moralization, I perceive a sociopolitical intent behind the selection of this specific image that goes beyond simply re-presenting a nostalgic past.
Someone deeply interested in uncovering histories would know that the current Georgia Viaduct, which was built in 1972, effectively split up the neighbourhoods of Black Strathcona and Chinatown with no consultation or respect to community. While much of Hogan’s Alley was bulldozed to make way for the proposed freeway, today “the Viaduct stands an unfinished testament to the power of community organization and resistance to top down and paternalistic urban planning policy…” (Rudder). This landmark’s overarching presence in Fountain centralizes issues of ongoing displacement in regards to land ownership and gentrification projects, all an implicit devaluation of existing cultures and relations.
Having had the opportunity to observe Laiwan’s artistic practice and having attended an artist talk in which she discussed Fountain in relation to her collective work, there was the built expectation of engagement with the archival and the ephemeral prior to viewing Fountain in person. Despite this, what struck me was the interplay between representation and experience. The public nature of the piece, and the scale at which it’s presented, places emphasis on the revealing of invisible spaces that the piece dialogues. By making visible the importance of walking as a performative and transitory experience of place, the space also invites the viewer to stop and question their own (often subconscious) path through the city.
How often do we question the permanence of the land on which we walk and the power structures which construct its value?
How often do we question the impermanence of archival histories?
These are questions that Laiwan presents, interrogates and extends through accessible engagement with spatial politics in Fountain, uncovering an invisible Vancouver in the process.
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Works Cited
Laiwan. Fountain: The source or origin of anything. 2014. The Wall, Vancouver.
Low, Joni. “Curatorial Essay.” Laiwanette, n.d. Web. 11 March 2015
Rudder, Adam. “Hogan’s Alley: The making of a black community in Vancouver.” rabble.ca. Rabble, 18
February 2014. Web. 12 March 2015.
Powerful presentation of dismembering the land and cultures. Laiwan work speaks for many and collective inert action in allowing land and species to disappear without activism. The work not your typical selling theme for more commerce but thus, witnessing of past thus present to become ephemeral before our eyes. I hear of deer being sterilized and causing them to become ill, this response to get the deer population under control. Some species never return, see traffic and wonder and thus see the building while one sleeps. Modernity with a big price. I applaud Laiwan for relentless non-stop commitment, I deeply respect her character her sense of calm presence spiritual sense: yet her steadfast action, seer as witness with an ethical sensibility.