By: Oscar Alfonso
The Show: You Are Here, Emily Carr University’s annual graduating exhibition, opened on May 6 at the school’s Granville Island campus for the last time. Featuring the work of over 300 graduates in design, media, and the visual arts, The Show was the largest event held by the university, and the largest graduating exhibition in the province.
Unlike smaller graduating exhibitions at other universities, The Show had no central point, no unifying space, and no single structure. Spread across multiple floors in both the South and North Buildings, The Show was a logistical achievement that accommodated graduates, families, friends, and thousands of visitors.
Opening night on May 6 began at 4:00 p.m. and ran until 9:30 p.m., with hundreds of people staying till the very end. More than just an opening, The Show was also a civic event, a spectacle of the arts. A DJ provided a soundtrack as a team of ushers and security kept watch.
A trio of food trucks separated the South and North Buildings and were supplemented by an endless supply of plastic water bottles emblazoned with “You Are Here.” Students, some straight from the graduation ceremony, mingled about, and reveled in their achievements as eager parents and the occasional hired photographer captured the night.
“This year’s Show was also notable for a marked ambitiousness that set it apart from previous years.”
Space in The Show was at a premium as the university’s traditional exhibition spaces, the Media + Concourse and Charles H. Scott galleries, were supplemented by former working studios and classrooms. The resulting arrangement formed a maze of tightly spaced displays and artworks that competed and jostled for attention. They included everything from the work of emergent First Nations carvers to networking apps, modular furniture, and abstract painting to specific subject matter such as a series of Chinese immigrants photographed though their cars.
The Show thus presented multiple perspectives for creative solutions and artistic engagement. This year’s Show was also notable for a marked ambitiousness that set it apart from previous years. It included performances such as a live pottery studio, and a printmaker that allowed you to ‘make your own newspaper.’ These existed alongside large installations and even a two-story painting in the North Building’s Concourse gallery.
As it was the last exhibition on this campus, students in this year’s Show pushed some of the spatial restrictions inherent in a shared graduating exhibition. Their achievements in The Show are thus also statements about their own trajectories, and that of the school they leave behind.
Over the summer, Emily Carr will enter the final stages of moving to a new purpose-built campus in Vancouver’s False Creek Flats. This new campus is located next to the existing Centre for Digital Media, a graduate institution jointly operated by SFU, UBC, BCIT, and Emily Carr. The rapidly changing neighbourhood is also home to contemporary galleries that include major institutions like the Equinox, Monte Clark, and Catriona Jeffries.
Designed to accommodate up to 5,000 students, the new campus will ease long-standing enrolment pressures at the school’s current campus, and with the future arrival of a station as part of the Broadway rapid transit extension from VCC–Clark to Arbutus, it will also be more accessible by transit. The new campus, as the City of Vancouver put it, forms a major part of the city’s broader project to repurpose the False Creek Flats into a more “productive, sustainable, and integrated” area. It will be the the second keystone civic entity alongside the relocated St. Paul’s Hospital on the north side of the Flats.
Graduate students will receive much-needed facilities and support, and the building will also provide expansive exhibition space that will operate year-round, while also presenting a more accessible and permeable public presence to the changing neighbourhood surrounding it. New changes also present new challenges.
The relocation from Granville Island will mean the loss of an active and permanent student presence that will surely impact the dynamic and the economy of the island. Meanwhile, architectural decisions such as the increased use of glass within the building will open up interior spaces while simultaneously challenging studio use and work storage. Certain departments, such as those with a design focus, will see substantial growth in space and support. Others, meanwhile, will remain static, or lose access to existing facilities.
The photography department, for instance, will lose some of its existing analog film developing space, but perhaps more importantly, will also lose the ability to print colour analog and colour photographic prints. This has been an ability which has, thus far, set Emily Carr apart as the last school in the city to offer such facilities.
These kinds of changes and tensions underlie this year’s Show. This isn’t just any graduating exhibition, and it isn’t just any move:. Graduating students and continuing students alike are saying goodbye to a campus they’ve known and laboured in, one which was an integral part of the urban fabric of Granville Island.
Those in the midst of their studies will be welcomed into the new Great Northern Way campus this coming August, with a grand public opening during the fall. The school’s move will reshape Granville Island and play a major part in the development of the False Creek Flats. Until May 22, the school’s outgoing students are showing their final farewell to their campus. In the meantime, ‘You Are Here.’
