“Everyone Loves a Parade, Right?”

I first became interested in “mega-events” when my home city of Vancouver made a successful bid for the Expo in 1986. “Everyone loves a parade,” as the saying goes, and the majority of the residents jumped on the bandwagon, welcoming the opportunity for economic growth offered our city by this opportunity. There was “money to be had” and it would be just “plain good fun” for the local residents to attend the event. Looking back, I realize I could never have anticipated how this event would affect my own life and how it would ultimately alter the city’s cultural, social and economic landscape. In the months preceding Expo ’86, the real estate market inflated, and many properties and houses were converted into condominiums. As a result, we received an eviction notice. When looking for another place to rent, we found that the rents in Vancouver had tripled, and anyone who had an available room, suite or apartment was renting it out to Expo visitors. This situation created a “zero" vacancy rate, but as a result we became homeless. We eventually found a new place to live once Expo finished it’s run in Vancouver.

It is a common observation that people tend to include memorable public events among the milestones passed during the course of their lives. However, looking more broadly at the social/political structures of such events, Maurice Roche defines them as,

Large-scale cultural events, which have a dramatic character, mass cultural appeal and international significance. They are typically organized by variable combinations of national governmental and international non-governmental organizations and thus can be said to be important elements in official versions of popular culture.

Currently, Vancouver is preparing for the next parade that is coming to town, and every aspect of Roche’s definition is being applied in the process. Vancouver’s initial bid for the 2010 Winter Games incorporated an aggressive and sophisticated mobilization of images that packaged our city in symbolic terms in order to win. The intention of this strategy was to cultivate economic gain through tourism, political agendas and transnational investment.

With regards to my art practice, I am interested in exploring the critical discourse of the representation of “place” as a “consumable commodity” through growth machine politics. For this purpose I have chosen to design a series of posters that focus on the current debates about the 2010 Olympics. My methodology interrogates the images and visual metaphors referenced within the historical framework of the Olympic poster. ,However, I have juxtaposed their compositions with images of my own that aim to depict the impact of the Olympic machine upon our city. My intention within this work is to create a visual narrative that can address controversial social / political intersections within our contemporary world, so as to encourage public awareness and engage dialogue.