Earthbound Mnemonic

Krista Belle Stewart is a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Sylix/Okanagan Nation and a Vancouver-based artist. Stewart works with video, land, performance, photography, textiles, and sound, drawing out personal and political narratives inherent in archival materials while questioning their articulation in institutional histories. For Earthbound Mnemonic (2019), Stewart used as source material a photograph of tiles she made out of earth from her home in Spaxomin, which she then digitally manipulated and coloured in red and copper to create a visually and contextually multilayered work

Click to download Tania Willard’s essay “Orthogonal Heart Line: Intersecting the Colonial Grid” (PDF) on Stewart’s work.

Completed in 1954, the BC Hydro’s Dal Grauer Substation was designed by the young architect Ned Pratt and artist B. C. Binning. The building was commissioned by the B.C. Electric Company, under the helm of then-president Edward Albert “Dal” Grauer, to bridge functional design and public art. The substation would go on to serve as a three-dimensional “canvas” that was said to resemble a Piet Mondrian or De Stijl painting.

The modernist philosophy with which the building was designed emphasizes the link between art, architecture, and everyday life. With this in mind, Capture Photography Festival has commissioned artists annually to create new site-specific works to be installed on the Dal Grauer Substation’s facade. Drawing on the building itself, these projects temporarily emphasize the substation in the streetscape and reassert it as an architectural icon.

Presented in partnership with
Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association