Jeremy Shaw: Prescience and Poster Art
Jeremy Shaw Expo 86 Logo (Black) 2009 Installation view Courtesy Jeremy Shaw and Presentation House Gallery
A boom of construction and architectural development has transformed the Vancouver skyline over the past few months in preparation for the 2010 Olympic Games. Now, Berlin- and Vancouver-based artist Jeremy Shaw aims to enact a different kind of visual transformation in the west coast city’s streets with a year-long public poster project organized by Presentation House Gallery. Comprised of 26 unique posters that are mounted on the city’s telephone poles and construction hoardings every other week, Shaw’s project, aptly titled Something’s Happening Here, pays homage to Vancouver’s last major civic event, Expo 86. The promotional materials and documentation from the past event, which seemed futuristic and almost utopian at the time (bombastic slogans like “The Future of Motion” and “Don’t Miss it for the World!” advertised the event with enthusiastic abandon), take on an air of dusty anachronism through Shaw’s representational strategies. The colourful, eye-catching posters not only speak to a past that is nearly unrecognizable only 20 years later, but also act as prescient predictions of how the present might be remembered differently in the not-so-distant post-Olympic future. (333 Chesterfield Ave, North Vancouver BC)
Jeremy Shaw Something’s Happening Here! 2009 Courtesy Jeremy Shaw and Presentation House Gallery
Jeremy Shaw Season’s Pass (Mom) 2009 Courtesy Jeremy Shaw and Presentation House Gallery
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