Excavations is a composite image made from numerous archival photographs of Vancouver, with the earliest images dating back to the 1880s. Elements from selected photographs were reconfigured to build an impossible architectural structure growing out of a landscape destroyed by logging. Excavations expresses the challenge of piecing together a complete history through the archive and its inherent biases, while also retaining the complexity of Vancouver’s history and ever-changing built environment.
After reviewing a large selection of the city’s archival photographs, certain narratives around settlement and industry persisted in the historical documentation. Given Vancouver’s extensive pre-colonial, Indigenous history, questions regarding the under-represented communities and narratives in the archive informed the artist’s approach to producing the image. What history can be understood and given form when the archival material reflects a certain vantage point?
Looking at the historical photographs, it is difficult to situate their locations within the city due to the dramatic changes that have occurred in Vancouver’s evolution from a frontier town to a major international hub. With the urban renewal programs of the 1960s, the development of the waterfront for Expo 86, the current housing bubble, amongst many other changes, the city of Vancouver is in constant flux. The majority, if not all, of the buildings used to create this image no longer exist, pointing to the disappearance of countless older properties, creating an historical amnesia. This explicit sense of disorientation and dislocation is represented in the destabilized structure of Excavations.