Cate Rimmer has spent three years immersing herself in the meaning and mystery of Vancouver’s waterways.
Under the umbrella project The Voyage, or Three Years at Sea, Rimmer has explored lighthouses, ill-fated voyages, underwater secrets, shipping politics, sea lore, famous passages, and now, Vancouver’s role as a port city and its relation with the maritime worker.
But Rimmer is not a professional historian, or a marine researcher, or a sailor, or an economist. She is an art gallery curator.
In her new Satellite Gallery exhibition, entitled The Port / Matthew Buckingham: Obscure Moorings, Rimmer brings together film and found objects to put the maritime worker, the port city and, by extension, the maritime worker’s place within the urban economy in context.
Rimmer says she approached Buckingham, a New York-based artist, for her six-part-series finale when she heard he had made one of his trademark films on her subject of choice: The sea.
A wordless art piece based on Herman Melville’s short story Daniel Orme, it follows a sailor’s last days in Liverpool, a once-vital seaport which, like Vancouver, is being dramatically redefined by social and global economic change.
“I was interested in what happens to sailors when they come to port,” explains Rimmer, “so [Buckingham] took that and connected to the shifting history of a historic seaport like Liverpool, where it’s no longer about shipping.
“What happens to that city?” she asks.
Conflicts between maritime workers and business interests are also explored, as are the ways in which many of the traditional functions of a port are increasingly at odds with the escalating economic value of waterfront property.
Physically, this wave of change is manifested in the exhibition as a massive curvilinear platform on which viewers sit while watching the film.
As a companion project, Rimmer has also highlighted long-forgotten social spaces in Vancouver which once catered to the moral wellbeing of maritime workers (along with “those engaged in gratifying their more venial needs”) such as the Seamen’s Institute, the Sailors’ Home (which later became a brothel), and the one-time hipster hotspot the Marine Club.
“It’s very quirky,” says Rimmer. “I’m not trying to represent a linear history. I come at it as a fine art curator, so I’m looking for interesting images that bring out little things that people might then want to research themselves.”
Exhibition: Oct. 3-Dec. 6 at the Satellite Gallery (560 Seymour, 2nd Floor). Opening reception: Oct. 2, 6-9pm. Curator’s tour: Nov. 22 at 2pm.
