Alex Morrison is the latest in a series of artists to put a large-scale work onto the Dal Grauer Substation building on Burrard St. in Vancouver. It’s part of the Capture Photography Festival.
Alex Morrison’s diverse practice explores architecture’s role in reflecting and shaping ideologies, with an interest in how these ideologies fail and shift while the buildings embodying their beliefs live on. By analyzing architectural forms, Morrison explores how alternative narratives and histories trouble and intertwine with those prescribed by an architect. Moreover, through his interest in counterculture signifiers and facade-ism, he points to potential failings of aesthetic identification on a grand scale.
Reflecting thematically upon the fragmented nature of Vancouver’s story as a city, Morrison’s Brand New Era Social Club, his site-specific work for the Dal Grauer Substation, comments on both digital and analogue forms of representation and their importance in the construction of past narratives and contemporary reality. The multimedia work questions the nature of photography today and represents more broadly the aims of the Festival to drive photography discourse forward and encourage critical thinking and visual literacy.
An interesting historical note about Dal Grauer is that when he was CEO in the 50’s of BC Electric when it was a private corporation he was an advocate of regional and community planning.