Land Acknowledgment
The Cultch acknowledges that it is on unceded territories belonging to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
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The Cultch acknowledges that it is on unceded territories belonging to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
© 2023: The Cultch | A not-for-profit registered charity No. 11928 1574 RR0001
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4th and Fir
Paintings by Clint Robertson
These paintings are the ultimate result of a series of photographs taken in 2013 of the old ABC Photo building on 4th Avenue and Fir street, immediately after it was demolished. I was drawn to the abstract relationship between the wooden beams, the broken concrete, and the twisted rebar. The ABC Photo building was relevant for me for a variety of reasons, and its destruction to make way for a new condo and car dealership became for me a metaphor of the changing face of Vancouver. The landmarks that remind me of the Vancouver of my youth have increasingly been reduced to rubble to accommodate the inevitable change of a growing and evolving city. In the days after ABC’s demolition, as I walked by the broken remnants of the building, I was increasingly drawn to the lines, shapes, textures, and colours of the building materials. Eventually, I returned with my camera, and recorded the debris. As an artist, I have long been fascinated by the relationship between old and new, destruction and beauty, and perhaps most immediately, abstraction and representation. As such, the “rubble” photographs that I took that day have provided the source material for all the paintings and prints that I have produced since. Over time, the shapes of building debris became less literal as I became more interested in compositions that suggest urban forms, but not enough so that I would consider them urban landscapes. Like the work itself, the titles of these paintings were chosen to suggest meaning or purpose, without providing information that would lead the viewer to interpret the images in a pre-determined way. My hope is that these pictures contain enough visual information that they can sustain a long-term relationship with an audience that is able to interpret the forms in a way that makes sense to them and that can evolve over time – much like the city itself.