Gallery Visits

Yesterday I walked to Equinox Gallery to take in its shows. From there to Macaulay & Co. Fine Arts, grunt gallery, finally to CSA. This stretch is among the proposed routes of the new Skytrain extension that would pass through the building that houses Equinox and Monte Clark Gallery, tunnel past the grunt and MFA, before popping up at the southeast corner of Broadway and Main, across the street from CSA.

Moving to and through these spaces I could not help but look at their exhibitions with the Skytrain extension in mind. Perhaps a review is in order, one that uses an infrastructural alteration (the extension is not unlike the Great Northern Railway's filling-in of the east end of False Creek in support of its 1917 railway terminus) as a framing device for a sequence of events that, like boxcars (or Skytrain cars), unite and uncouple, unite and uncouple... I could call the review "Walking the Line", after that lyric from the last line of the last verse of the Louvin Borthers' 1959 song "The Christian Life".




The picture atop this post was taken at the northwest corner of Thornton Street and Great Northern Way -- a creek vignette, like the other creek vignette at the northwest corner of 8th and Scotia Street, across the street from the Western Front. Why a creek motif? Because years ago these creeks were the final leg in the road home for the salmon, whose spawning grounds could be found as far south as 33rd Avenue. With the arrival of settler colonists, these creeks were culverted and, like the east end of False Creek, smothered in land-fill.

Something to think about the next time a condo developer is asked to supply the neighbourhood with a cultural amenity: not a sculpture of a creek -- but the unearthing of a real one! Who knows, maybe it will bring back the salmon?