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Saturday marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Expo 86, the world’s fair that put Vancouver on the global radar and in many ways reshaped the region.<\/p>\n
While plenty of infrastructure remains from the fair, including the SkyTrain and Science World, for many British Columbians all that’s left are sepia toned memories. <\/p>\n
A new exhibit at the Surrey Art Gallery aims to bring those memories back to life.<\/p>\n
In The Shadow of the Pavilions: Expo 86 and Contemporary Art features work that animated the fair from more than 35 artists in all manner of mediums.<\/p>\n
Curator Jordan Strom was just 14 years old when he experienced the fair, and told CBC’s North by Northwest that decades later the impressions the event’s art pieces left on him form the anchor for many of his own memories. <\/p>\n
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Highway 86 by SITE at Expo 86 in Vancouver. (SITE)<\/p>\n
Among the most striking of those was Highway 86 by New York architect James Wines, known as SITE.<\/p>\n
The 216-metre sculpture was made of concrete and grey-painted vehicles including cars, motorcycles, submarines and sailboats. While the sculpture was not preserved, the exhibit includes concept artwork along with photos and posters. <\/p>\n
“It was a giant sort of highway that was undulating, a kind of ribbon highway that came out of False Creek on one side and rose up over the Georgia viaduct on the other side,” Strom said.<\/p>\n
“It was a very interactive piece. People would climb into the convertible automobiles, climb into the motorcycles or the rickshaws.”<\/p>\n
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Surrey Art Gallery curator Jordan Strom stands in front of Colette Urban’s Gambler, an interactive sculpture composed of puzzle pieces inspired by the urban transformations of Vancouver\u2019s False Creek lands during Expo 86. (Margaret Gallagher, CBC)<\/p>\n
Another highlight of the exhibit is photography by Michael de Courcy, who captured upwards of 2,000 candid images for his project One In A Million, which he described as “an anonymous documentary of the visitors of Expo 86.”<\/p>\n
“It’s a time capsule for sure. And it’s a generation and it’s an album for that generation,” de Courcy said. <\/p>\n
The images are projected as a slideshow, each appearing on a screen for 10 seconds \u2014 about the amount of time de Courcy says he spent surreptitiously capturing his subjects.<\/p>\n
“I see this as a public artwork. I see it as an opportunity to give back to those people images of themselves that would remind them of that time, images of their families … to explain [to their children] just how all this went down because most people who were there loved it,” he said. <\/p>\n
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Remembering Expo 86 in Vancouver<\/p>\n
Expo 86 brought the world to Vancouver’s door and marked its coming-of-age<\/p>\n
The role Indigenous art played in the fair is also represented in the exhibit, including a model crafted by iconic Haida artist Bill Reid as an early study for his Loo Tas canoe. Loo Tas was later paddled into False Creek on the opening of Expo 86.<\/p>\n
“This was where he was starting to learn about the physics … and the structure of canoes,” he said. <\/p>\n
“We have a print that shows the design on the paddlers’ vests and some images of … the paddlers paddling the canoe. It’s a key part of the story of Expo 86.”<\/p>\n
Visitors can also put on headphones to transport themselves back in time via the soundscape of Hildegard Westerkamp’s Harbour Symphony<\/a>, an audio piece performed using the horns of 150 boats around Canada Place on Expo 86’s opening day. <\/p>\n
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Downtown Eastside residents face evictions prior to Expo 86.<\/p>\n