Slow Dirt: A Multi-Site Public Art Exhibition
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September 23 – October 31, 2015
Signage: Al McWilliams
40 East 10th
Corner of 5th and Quebec
Corner of 3rd and Ontario
Corner of Keith Drive and East 10th
1st and Cook St
(If you live or work in Mount Pleasant and would like to have a sign erected in front of your home or business, please contact us)
Reading: Meredith Quartermain
How to Remember
October 3rd 1pm
Outside the Western Front
303 East 8th
Inflatable Sculpture: Other Sights collective
On the Western Front
303 East 8th
At the invitation of The Western Front, Vancouver, Other Sights presents a three-part artwork created for Urgent Imagination: Art and Urban Development, a multi-site public art exhibition and 2-day conference that focuses on development in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.
Slow Dirt responds to the accelerated, often manic, conditions of real estate development in east Vancouver by focusing on the slow, deep and generative production of the humble earthworm. Bearing characteristics and employing methodologies that are worthy of emulation, the earthworm creates ’surplus value’ on a sustainable timetable. It is sensitive to the local, immersing itself in the underlife and lifespans of the city and all that grows here.
A series of photographic notice boards by Vancouver artist Al McWilliams that combine images of lively earthworms with the text “Development Proposal” are installed at eight locations around the neighbourhood. Poet and writer Meredith Quartermain performs a reading from How to remember, which poses the question “Could there be a human version of this lazy, tangled wormflesh…?”
Cascading from the roof of the Western Front an enormous inflatable presents a buoyant, celebratory figure to inspire a development that brings ecological riches, an awareness of mortality and a manageable pace to our urban spaces and lives.