For some of the most intriguing perspectives on Vancouver, the City, you’ll have to go to Surrey, the Art Gallery. Beyond Vague Terrain is currently underway until March 18:
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Beyond Vague Terrain: The City and the Serial Image shows many sides to cities, especially Metro Vancouver’s.
The ambitious, and in many cases large-scale, artworks include a grid of shimmering graphite rubbings of eroded date-stamped sidewalks on Vancouver’s Westside, a 109 foot long light box presenting a panorama of Metro Vancouver as seen from a moving SkyTrain, and an interactive photographic database of every bus stop in Surrey.
Through photography, painting, drawing, and video, artists have used the strategy of multiple images to create compelling ways of representing experiences of the city.
Many of the images explore urban spaces characterized by vast swaths of street intersections, industrial dead zones, and suburban sprawl. These ‘defeatured landscapes’, as they came to be known, brought international attention to Vancouver’s art scene – particularly photography – in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Though compact, there’s a lot to see when you take the time. 
And there’s more than a few surprises for those who know the Vancouver art scene – for instance, Jeff Wall’s Landscape Manual – yours for 25 cents if you’d bought it in 1969.
My favourite, though, is a rarely seen work by Bill Jeffries (now Director/Curator of the Simon Fraser University Gallery). 
Back in the late 1970s, thanks to a grant from Canada Council, came Panopticon: 103 views of the Scotia Bank Tower (1978-79) – a simple and brilliant idea to take pictures of what was then the tallest building in the city: 103 annotated photographs that reveal not only the omnipresence of the tower but the banal and curious settings from which it could be seen.
Bill (left) hadn’t actually seen the finished work for decades – and at Beyond Vague Terrain it has room to breathe. My enjoyment was partly personal: 1978 was the year I arrived in Vancouver – and so looking at Panopticon was a view back into a past at a city that was both distant and familiar.
Likewise, Background/Vancouver: An Artist’s View of the City, October 30, 1972 by Michael de Courcy (in collaboration with Gerry Gilbert, Taki Bluesinger and Glenn Lewis) comes freighted with meaning and memory. Artists photographed the city as they saw it on that day, and then assembled the images in what was originally a free newsprint map insert in the Vancouver Sun.
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It helps to know that October 30, 1972 was civic election day – one of the most pivotal in the city’s history – that resulted in a TEAM majority under Mayor Art Phillips (certainly one of our best mayors, along with an outstanding set of aldermen). On that day they began to take Vancouver in a new direction, into an era we still occupy. This work shows fragments of the city they inherited.
By the way, the title Beyond Vague Terrain refers to a couple of ideas, as explained by curator Jordan Strom:
As we know many practicing professional artists have chosen to live and work in the downtowns of Canada’s major cities. They tend to be drawn to the infrastructure that is there (the schools and libraries for instance)
and the vibrancy of the downtown (the pedestrian-oriented café culture), and the concentration of other artists (to collaborate and share ideas with) among other attractions.
What I have been struck by, working as an art curator for the past decade, is how much, the spaces that are associated with “the suburbs” for many of these artists and writers still remains a very abstract notion subsumed by historically loaded clichés and outmoded language. Yet, there are some — and increasingly many more – artists based both “downtown” and in the area we associate with these “suburbs” who are creating engaging thoughtful and dynamic works about the broader city across each metropolitan region in Canada. ]
The artworks in this exhibition are representative of some of that activity.
Oh, and the other idea behind the title:
The phrase Vague Terrain also refers to a similar though different idea. In French, terrain vague has historically been associated with spaces on the city – in particular, the outskirts of Paris in the late 19th century and early twentieth century. In this mostly literary usage, the Terrain Vague were characterized as zones in flux, wild spaces, sometimes dangerous, and often teaming with the unexpected and the new.
This French notion sees the peripheries of the city as a rich heterogenous spaces for artistic and social potential – the Spanish architect Ignasi de Solà Morales has taken up this idea and sees this terrain vague as a “space of promise, expectation and possibility,” a space for new forms of urbanism — and by extension a space for new forms of art and culture.
Although Jordan doesn’t say it explicity, “promise, expectation and possibility” might not be a bad byline for Surrey, the City.
UPDATE: Jordan’s remarks are from the opening reception remarks. There will be a Curator’s Tour on February 9 at 7 to 8:30 pm or those interested in finding out more and have a discussion about the work.
