Another highlight of Expo, Strom says, was Loo Taas, a red cedar ocean-going canoe designed by Haida artist Bill Reid and built in Skidegate by a team of carvers. The Surrey Art Gallery doesn\u2019t have the actual canoe on display (it\u2019s over 15 metres long, after all), but it does have Reid\u2019s original maquette.<\/p>\n
Strom says the exhibition he has curated doesn\u2019t turn a blind eye to the numerous controversies surrounding the 1986 world\u2019s fair. The show even includes a copy of Expo Hurts Everyone, a four-track EP by various local bands headlined by D.O.A., whose biting \u201cBilly and the Socreds\u201d takes a swipe at then-premier Bill Bennett and his Social Credit party to the tune of CCR\u2019s \u201cWilly and the Poor Boys\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were some artists and other residents who were a bit frustrated with some of the impacts and effects of Expo, like on housing,\u201d Strom says. \u201cThere was the eviction crisis on the East Side, and people getting pushed out of some of the single resident occupancy hotels, for example, so artists made work about that. There was also some frustration with bringing in non-union workers to build Expo, and so people made work about labour rights. Artists respond to a changing environment, and certainly Expo created a huge impact on many different areas of social life and economic life in the Lower Mainland and in the province.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ironically, one unintended consequence of Expo 86\u2019s exclusion of some local artists was that it spurred them on to find new and innovative ways to get their work seen.<\/p>\n
\u201cArtists organized other projects around the Lower Mainland, just through elbow grease, doing their own things in storefronts and artist-run centres and places like the Surrey Art Gallery,\u201d Strom says. \u201cWe had a show that related in certain ways to the Expo moment, thinking about the idea of landscape and nature and spectacle. It was called Six Projects for Surrey. So we\u2019re showing some of that work here.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the 40th anniversary of Expo 86 fast approaching, expect to see and hear plenty of discourse over the next few months\u2014and for years to come\u2014about the fair\u2019s legacy and what it all means. Strom for one welcomes the conversation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another highlight of Expo, Strom says, was Loo Taas, a red cedar ocean-going canoe designed by Haida artist…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":607644,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194299],"tags":[49,48,87674],"class_list":["post-607643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-surrey","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-surrey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=607643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/607644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=607643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=607643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=607643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}