Tea at Murchie's
Today I dragged my dad into a total of five art galleries. Fortunately, he only paid admission to the first one, the Vancouver Art Gallery, where we spent the most time (although half of it was closed, between exhibits).
Vancouver Art Gallery
Pendulum Gallery
We also visited the Bill Reid
Gallery, which specializes in what we’re accustomed to calling Native American
art but what Canadians call Aborigine or First Nations art; with less than half
an hour before closing, we were allowed to browse part of the gallery with a
small donation. Baskets and magnificent wood carvings.
We visited the Pendulum Gallery,
which is in a bank building and so-named because of a metal pendulum swinging
back and forth overhead—a bit disconcerting after seeing the Edgar Allen
Poe-inspired film The Raven. The current display was of black and white framed
photos taken in several countries, including Nepal. One of the images was of a
pile of trash at the edge of town in Kathmandu—there were a lot of dismal,
haunting photos taken in Kathmandu. It made me want to return.
From the Pendulum Gallery: www.larrylouis.com is the photographer’s website.
One of the images was a haunting, misty photo of pigeons at what I at first
thought was Durbar Square in Bhaktapur, but according to the plaque it was the
abandoned Tripureshwar Mahadin Mandir Temple. It contains a sculpture very
similar to one in Bhaktapur, of a king sitting under a parasol and on a lotus
throne high up on a pole. But it wasn’t as high as the sculpture in Bhaktapur,
and it was shielded by a snake like the Buddha. Most of the pictures were taken
in Kathmandu, including one of a very old woman sitting on the edge of a cot at
a home—sort of an old-folks home for Nepalese people who would otherwise be
homeless. Another image was of someone working at a loom at a pashmina shawl
factory—I thought of my pashmina shawl. It seems the places where they’re woven
are getting scarce; it could become a
lost art. Another image was of people—a family or two—living under a bridge in
Kathmandu, and another was of some trees and a mound of rags. Kathmandu has
more and more people living in poverty and in slums.
Shortly before getting to the
hotel, we impulsively stopped by at the Howe Street Gallery of Fine Art, where
the curator is a white-haired white man with a British accent but originally
from Zimbabwe. When my dad mentioned that the new prime minister is a
conservative, the gallery owner actually said he’s not an extremist and he’s
OK; interestingly (because my dad talks about politics frequently, a topic
that tends to raise my ire), younger people don’t like him. The only thing
conservatives conserve is patriarchy. On that note, I did enjoy much of the art
in this gallery—stone carvings of African heads from Zimbabwe, paintings by a Chinese
American and his brilliant thirteen-year-old daughter, and paintings of
sailboats and such using a lot of orange.
We stopped by at the hotel room
at about 6 pm (that’s when I wrote the previous entry) and after relaxing for a
bit , we headed
back out to wander the streets some more. I thought the shop my dad wanted to
visit “by the waterfront” was a touristy shop in Gastown near the steam clock,
but he was referring to a touristy shop in the basement of the Waterfront
Building, which is attached to the sails
building called Canada Place. The shop was closed again, so we stopped at a
couple others before wandering the streets—we did end up in Gastown (after I
led us into a dodgy neighborhood) on Hastings because I was fascinated by a
beautiful red 1910 building with a mansard roof—it turned out to be next door
to a cannabis shop and across the street from a WWI memorial).
So after that we turned left and
headed down to Gastown, a street much further down than we had previously
visited, and we came to the Gassy Jack statue (which is a bit rusty and seems
to slant forward) and lots of beautiful old buildings I hadn’t seen before.
Gassy Jack statue
We continued walking and
eventually turned around and had carrot cake and beverages at a place called Coffeebar
that was open till 9 pm (unlike all the other coffee and tea establishments we
came across, which closed significantly earlier) and next to a camera shop
occupied not only by humans but also by a cute bulldog anxious to take a walk.
The name of an alley--it reminds me of London
While we headed back toward the
hotel, I spotted a store full of carved wooden Native American (First Nations)
art—masks and totem poles—so I persuaded my dad to cross the street and visit
the shop. It had an art gallery upstairs and a loft between that and the ground
floor—totem poles, masks, wooden carvings on every floor, stone carvings and
jewelry in glass cases on the first floor—all First Nations art. Some books
were available on the loft and downstairs, and my dad let me get a couple of
books on First Nations mythology.
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