![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/trees\/files\/2011\/08\/IMG_1559-300x225.jpg\" "\\"old-painting\\"")
<\/a>'Fish boats at the dock.'<\/p><\/div>\n
It’s a small thing (the issue, not the painting).\u00a0 In the greater scheme of things it’s not all that important.\u00a0 Yet, I feel there is something underlying the removal of the painting that at least speaks to a wider issue here at ubc and in this sense is similar to what is happening to trees on our campus.<\/p>\n
Our history is being erased. An old tree is removed and then replaced with a\u00a0 smaller one somewhere on campus.\u00a0 An old painting is taken down and replaced with a digital sign.\u00a0 The names of old buildings and places are deleted (anyone remember the Ethel Wilson Sound Recording Library?) and those with money buy the opportunity to have their name put there instead.\u00a0 And then we forget.\u00a0 New people don’t know the past.\u00a0 We have lost the markers and the capacity to speak about what was.\u00a0 The way it is is the way it has always been.<\/p>\n
Orwell commented upon this in his distopian novel 1984.\u00a0 Of course most later day readers will see that novel as a critique of communism.\u00a0 From the vantage point of the digital world where news is ephemera and the past dissolves and is remixed with out reference to any sense of time Orwell’s ministry of truth speaks to our present as much as it spoke against a mid-20th century form of state socialism.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/trees\/files\/2011\/08\/IMG_1556-300x225.jpg\" "\\"forgetting\\"")
<\/a>'Progress?'<\/p><\/div>\n
So what was that old painting which is now stashed in an empty office awaiting its future disposition?\u00a0 Can I even remember it accurately enough to say anything of value about it?\u00a0\u00a0 The painting reminded me of this place, coastal BC. Even though the world that it depicted -an old fishing boat and a harbour- is a world long passed into history; it is the world that I grew up in, the world that shaped the way in which I think and act, the world that plays a strong role in how my intellectual work proceeds.\u00a0 It was in short an image that made me feel welcome in the university.<\/p>\n
I grew up in northern BC in a decidedly working class community and family.\u00a0 UBC has always been a special place for those of us born and raised in this province.\u00a0 I think that UBC is more than just an ‘excellent’ university; it’s our university, it’s BC’s university.\u00a0 Yet, it was also a foreign place filled with unfamiliar things, and -most exciting- opportunities.\u00a0 In a strange way that painting was something familiar that reminded me that UBC is still our university even as our university leaders seek to enter that privileged international circle that leaves much of\u00a0 BC’s heartland out in the cold.<\/p>\n
I suppose that my colleagues who come from afar or my students who have grown up in a different BC may not have even noticed that old painting.\u00a0 They may not have even liked it.\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 I never asked them.\u00a0\u00a0 I am sad now not to have asked.<\/p>\n
I wonder if people will notice the absence of the old painting this September with the start of the new school year. As they walk by will they notice the bright light of the new screen; will they stop to wonder about what may have been there before?\u00a0 Or will the painting and that BC that I come from slide even further into the mist of time, erased from our view; just another victim of progress.<\/p>\n
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This isn’t really about a tree.\u00a0 It is, however, about the removal of something old without notification or consultation. There used to be an old painting of a fish boat and dock.\u00a0 It was hung on the wall in the … Continue reading