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This series of photos started by accident in 2012 but has since evolved into a study of the furnishing of Vancouver-area workplace “break pits”. More specifically, ones where the focus is on chairs.

When I heard the Museum of Vancouver was planning an exhibit of chairs from their collection, ones that told the stories of the city’s evolution, I knew there was a “fit” for this series. Curator Denise Fong agreed and was kind enough to include eight of the images in the exhibit which is now on and runs through February of 2026. In producing this video I hope to give a brief introduction to the work. Who knows where it will go from here!

Filmed at the waters edge on Gabriola Island and at the famed Hipposonic Studios (formerly the equally famed Little Mountain Sound) in Vancouver, this video is a little unusual for us in that the work is by the late, great Finnish “spectral” composer Kaija Saariaho rather than someone from Vancouver or BC. But the performance is by rising violin star Jack Campbell of Anmore BC and the filming location arose because we visited Jack during a residency on Gabriola Island courtesy of the Gabriola Arts Council. That visit then spurred the still evolving collaborations between Jack and Alex Varty and Andreas Kahre, well known fixtures of the province’s new music scene. So to our eyes and ears, it’s all good!

We sat down with Caroline Adderson in the waning days of summer at her home in leafy Kerrisdale to chat about her new book of short stories (currently long-listed for the Giller Prize) and the notion of happiness itself!

In addition to being one the country’s most highly regarded authors (of five novels and two previous collections of short stories) she also created Vancouver Vanishes, originally a Facebook group dedicated to the documentation and preservation of the histories contained in the many early Vancouver houses that have fallen to the wrecker’s ball in the last decade. It eventually became a book and continues in its online form. Caroline also participated in the first VR Media video production; an on-site interview in support of the Vancouver Vanishes project.

Her new collection of short stories is fantastic. We can’t recommend it enough. It is being deservedly well-reviewed via all the regular literary channels and we wish her luck with the Giller! We hope you enjoy the chat!

Vancouver-based photographer Greg Girard is enjoying a great and well deserved late career surge of interest in his work. He continues to explore and expand on themes that originally engaged him in the early 1970s. I recently did a video for Galleries West featuring one his many Asian culture-focused projects; that of the phenomena of the Japanese “Snack Sakura” bars that he has been documenting. During the interview I ventured into other topics and the port of Vancouver came up. So I decided to expand the interview and include a couple of outtings with Greg to talk further and illustrate the topic a little more fully. We hope you enjoy this little snippet of working life on the city’s waterfront over the years!

https://www.gallerieswest.ca/events/greg-girard-%7C-snack-sakura_1/

What does climate anxiety look like? Is there mourning? Anger? Resignation? Hope?

These are some of the things on my mind constantly these days, on top of everything else and in common with millions of others. But it came especially to the fore on a week-long stay on Galiano Island in the summer of 2023, which we now know was the hottest year in recorded history.

After the appalling Lahaina Fire, where embers could be seen spiraling horizontally through the streets on a phone video captured by a desperate, fleeing resident, I could not escape thoughts of a similar fate awaiting any one of a number of locations closer to home. And at an opening of the wonderful Valley Grill on Galiano I spoke with the island’s fire chief about his feelings on climate change and the impact on Galiano specifically, and BC in general. He mentioned that in light of what’s been observed with regards to fire behaviour in the last few years alone, ideas of protecting Galiano with several firebreaks must be revisited. The embers will just blow across. And John Vaillant’s new book “Fire Weather” (which I picked up at the well-stocked Galiano Bookstore) gives further cause for concern as it documents the unprecedented speed and change of the very nature of fires as we crash past environmental red lines.

Mindful of all this I did some filming and photography on Galiano and later at my friend Marian Bantjes’ house on Bowen on an unseasonably warm fall day. I had some vague notion of making a new video poem after “Rig Veda”, the previous video poem done with Christina Shah, was enjoying some success at Spanish and Italian film festivals. So I approached EVENT magazine suggesting it would be nice, in the future, to do some more. But before I could think of a realistic schedule they put a call out! And that’s when Catherine Graham enters the picture.

Catherine has a substantial and highly regarded body of work out which you can check out at the link below. She is also a judge of the CBC Poetry Prize. In any event she showed immediate interest in working together. We met via zoom and got along well. I’d mentioned that I’d like to have a poet respond to the images I make rather than the other way round as is usually the case. I mentioned the Galiano visit and that the images were created with the hot, horizontal winds on the tinder dry islands in mind. I’d read her recent work and it was full of imagery that naturally resonated with me. And there were elements of grief which seemed to connect to a phenomena now attached to the climate crisis.

After bouncing video rough cuts back and forth across the intertubes, Catherine quickly came up with perfection. I had initially used a half-speed recording of music by Brooklyn-based musician Benoit Pioulard for setting the mood but then decided why not ask him to do an original score? And so he did! I was thrilled about this development because on top of it all, he also released “Eidetic”, one of my favourite CD releases of 2023. And the results are also, by my reckoning, something resembling perfection.

Thank you Catherine and thank you Thomas (Benoit)!

So herewith; fireseed.

catherinegraham.com

pioulard.bandcamp.com/music