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Exhibition

Monique Genton

The Grass Project

September 12 - October 16, 2003

I grew up in the 1960’s in a Richmond subdivision called Richmond Gardens, a utopian enclave of cul-de-sacs and crescents. For my family and other first-generation Canadians there, the site and the era exuded an optimism about social progress and excitement about Canada as a nation. The subdivision’s continuous winding concrete curbs constrained any last vestiges of our rural pasts’ unruly landscape, and the cookie-cutter homes, for a time, erased our ethnic and economic differences. Eventually we would learn that difference, of many forms, had not, in fact, been overcome, and we would look back at the tidiness of our neighbourhood with disenchantment – but, for the time being, there was optimism. The era paralleled the explosion of modernism in Vancouver, and it seemed that to live within the subdivision’s concrete-patterned streets, treeless rectangular lawns, and box-shaped homes, was to live within abstraction itself.

There is a resurgence of earlier 60’s ideologies in the design of Richmond’s new mini-malls. The malls feature impeccably manicured islands of grass dotting a mostly concrete parking-oriented landscape. These are sites where the modernist import promises dreams – dreams teetering on the edges of the optimism we remember and the disappointment we’ve forgotten. The Grass Project hovers on this edge. The series of mixed media paintings are based on this suburban landscape, as sites of transformation between urban and rural spaces, between culture and nature, between promise and disillusion. The images not only figuratively reconstitute the soil-rich natural fields that had existed before Richmond’s development, but they also represent a modernist (and now technological) tidying up of chaotic nature.

Brochure

The Grass Project - Garden City


Authors: Rory Wallace
Purchase for $2
See all publications.

Hours

Sunday 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Monday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Tuesday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Wednesday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Thursday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Friday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Saturday 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM

Closed on statutory holidays.

Current Exhibitions

Admission

By donation

Location

Richmond Cultural Centre
7700 Minoru Gate
Richmond, BC  V6Y 1R8
Canada Line Station: Richmond-Brighouse

604-247-8363
gallery@richmond.ca

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