Elusive Beasts

Forgetfulness is a symptom of urbanity. Streets are triumphantly named, and over time, we all forget what Mr. Cambie even did. People come and go, some leaving sweet lament, others only vague recollections of some European city they migrated to (probably Berlin).

Maybe the most ephemeral of a city’s collective memory is the commercial art gallery. Often chasing or charging gentrification, the commercial gallery location is an elusive beast. In a place like Vancouver, where ubiquitous unaffordability is as mundane a conversation topic as the rain, small galleries are lucky to have a show past the one-year mark.

”If you’re opening up a gallery, you’re going to get kicked out,” artist Randy Grskovic laughs. “People have this unrealistic expectation that it’s not going to happen to them, but it happens to everyone.” Before Grskovic opened his now-closed Good Luck Gallery on Union Street in 2012, he had galleries in both South Granville and Crosstown. “It was always about this idea that there was a hole in Vancouver that needed to be filled: the space between an artist-run-centre and a commercial gallery. I billed [Good Luck] as a kind of artistrun gallery, a hybrid between the two.”

In Vancouver, even just a few years can feel like decades. In 2006, Bob Rennie made little waves when he purchased the historic Wing Sang Building in Chinatown. In accordance with either the chase or charge theory of gentrification, artistrun centres like Unit/Pitt, Publication Studio, and Access had begun to relocate to the neighbourhood as well (the commercial bigwigs moved to what is now hollowly marketed as “The Flats”).

Surrounding the non-profits, smaller start-up galleries with less-defined commercial modes also began populating the area. Trench Contemporary Art on Alexander Street focused on showcasing Vancouver’s seminal artists of the 1960s and ‘70s. A standout show featured new photography from Jeff Wall exploring the East Vancouver studio of the late sculptor David Marshall. Around the corner, Lee Plestad and Erik von Muller’s The Apartment gallery next to Wing Sang was exhibiting theoretically audacious shows with artists like Derya Akay and Vikky Alexander.

“I was seeing this kind of weirdness happening in Chinatown then,” Grskovic, now located in Toronto, recalls. Good Luck Gallery’s signage was in both Mandarin and English. “We just wanted to let people in the neighbourhood know what we were doing and that we weren’t trying to gentrify the neighbourhood.” Good Luck ran on a kind of incomprehensible turnover in order to combat the high rent and low sales that plague the commercial gallery model. “The idea was that every week we would flip a show,” Grskovic explains. “So we would open every Friday night, and then it would be open for the weekend and then it would be a short run, but every artist that showed at the gallery would also have work at the gallery.” In its short but influential span, Good Luck showed the very early (and much more punk) work of Andy Dixon and Ben Skinner.

Chinatown’s foremost DIY venue was Shudder Gallery. Run by Sylvana d’Angelo and Mysa Kaczkowski, it was the kind of space now rarely seen in Vancouver: a mix of living space (upstairs where Kaczkowski lived), a storefront (where Shudder was located), and a multi-use basement fit for shows and performance-based experiences. “Money was absolutely the biggest challenge,” d’Angelo says. “The community was extremely supportive in attendance of the exhibitions, shows, and workshops, and without this we would have been unable to keep the doors open for so long.” Throughout the challenges, d’Angelo and Kaczkowski put on shows with Walter Scott, Soledad Munzo, Patrick Cruz, and Guadalupe Martinez.

Peppering the shows with performance work and other experimental mediums meant sacrificing a chunk of change to help foster the next one. “I had been involved with exhibition spaces in Toronto before arriving in Vancouver, and was not new to this type of challenge,” d’Angelo explains. “However, with a much smaller pool of artists and creative supporters to pull from, we had to be constantly on our toes with contemporary ideas to keep patrons coming through the doors and spending a bit of money in support.”

Others, too, have passed out of our memory. Mount Pleasant’s Gallery 295 and Hot Wet Art City number among the recently fallen. Heck, who even knows what happened to the phenomenon that was once The Cheaper Show? (Did we all end up buying cocaine instead of art after all?) In resilience, as well statistical ignorance, art spaces in the city continue to open, through old and new models. The closed galleries of Vancouver’s past are not tombstones or warnings, but, ultimately, success stories. After all, you can always move east.

words by alison sinkewicz illustration by benjamin t. stone