The Property in Question

The Charles H. Scott Gallery is pleased to present The Property in Question, an exhibition about real estate and everyday domestic architecture. Our relationship with residential housing is shaped by desire and economics and the four artists included in the exhibition, Jacob Gleeson, Kay Higgins, Kim Kennedy Austin and Tony Romano address these in their work which has particular currency given the increasingly fraught nature of our relationship to housing in the super heated conditions of today’s real estate market.

Kay Higgins has developed a typological image archive of Vancouver’s most iconic form of residential architecture, the much maligned “Vancouver Special”. Built with affordability and flexibility in mind, Vancouver Specials were constructed in large numbers during the 1960’s and 1970’s, changing the face of established neighborhoods while facing heavy criticism both in terms of their aesthetic and social implications. Like Higgins, Jacob Gleeson has documented an overlooked fragment of Greater Vancouver’s prosaic architecture. His series of photographs of the haphazard community of dilapidated cabins on Hollyburn Ridge are included in the exhibition. Though long neglected and all but forgotten the value of these cabins has increased substantially with the recent growth of the real estate market.

Tony Romano has worked on suburban construction sites seeing prime agricultural land appropriated in order to feed the demand for new housing projects. In Mountains, Romano documents the mounds of top soil that are displaced by the construction. These landscapes speak of the dislocation and shifts in use value as does Bankrupt, his architectural model of an unfinished house. In a hot property market where entire condo projects are sold before construction even begins, the marketing machine plays a powerful role in playing to consumer desires. A building’s name and lifestyle packaging define its allure, often masking the uniformity of design and layout shared by all of these projects. In her large-scale drawings, Kim Kennedy Austin calls attention to these marketing ploys and contradictions.