PARKED (2024)

I organized the gathering of vehicle brand names as a Call-and-Response event that took place on Saturday April 20th, 2024. I led the assembled group of 10 or 12 participants in walking up one side and down the other of Cordova St in Vancouver. We stopped to sing each vehicle name along the way, collecting these names on this street as a snapshot of the parked cars.  

I'm planning to have a choral madrigal performance of all these names at this Church in 2025. Saint James Anglican Church, located on Cordova St is the focal point for this project.  I'm interested in creating a lament about our dependence on car culture that's followed like a blind religion, despite its plethora of negative impacts.

The connection to this Church came through artist Jenny Hawkinson who had previously made sound recordings there. She invited me to be part of Feedback Loop, her thesis project, at bothkinds project space, which provided me with a platform where I listed all of the 264 gathered names as a wall-text installation.

The first version of this idea was PARKING (2011), a collection of the names of all the vehicles parked on Gottingen St where Eye Level Gallery was located in Halifax, Nova Scotia on July 8, 2011. Parking was presented there as a floor-to-ceiling list in 2012. Then in 2018, while teaching in the Visual Arts at UBC, I gathered all the names of cars in the nearby carpark to make PARKING performed at the AHVA Gallery at UBC. I invited composer and choir director, Earle Peach, to score these names into a five-part harmony madrigal, sung by a quintet. Earle Peach has also scored the madrigal for upcoming Parked 2024/2025.