Photographic "frieze" captures the shifts of a homeless encampment throughout pandemic, at The Gallery at The Cultch until June 30
Artist Esther Rausenberg focuses lens on Strathcona Park tents, tarps, firepits, flags, and multistoried constructions
One of the images of collapsed tents in Home-Made: A visual frieze on shelter.
The Gallery at the Cultch presents Home-Made: A visual frieze on shelter until June 30; opening reception from 5:30 to 7:30 pm on June 8
DURING THE early months of the pandemic in 2020, Strathcona Park became a homeless encampment, seemingly overnight—at times numbering up to an estimated 500 people.
Through photographs, East Vancouver artist Esther Rausenberg captured its shifting states of deconstruction and reconstruction over the year. The result is a fascinating document of a time and place, gathered in Home Made—A visual frieze on shelter, showing now at The Gallery at The Cultch,
In it, the photographer focuses, with a nonjudgmental eye, not on specific portraits of the inhabitants of the park, but the structures that sprang up across the urban greenspace: tents, tarps, firepits, flags, and multistoried constructions. Later photographs depict those structures’ collapse and demise as the pandemic grinds on and policymakers step in.
“The story unfolded over time, revealing how residents of this temporary community demarked and personalized their allotted space, creating order and an element of distinction out of chaos,” Rausenberg (who is also the artistic and executive director of the Eastside Culture Crawl) says in her artist statement. “The documentation of these stages of construction, and subsequent deconstruction. I was impressed by how each temporary home is ‘different’, each eloquently speaking of the lives within.”
With barely a trace left of the city-within-a-city that rose up in Strathcona Park, Home-Made bears witness to a time when homelessness in Vancouver was made visible.
Gallery hours are Monday to Friday, 12-4 pm.
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