Culture Crawl Windows
Hipster fun in Vancouver
My younger brother has been raving about the Eastside Culture Crawl in Vancouver since he first went last year. He moved to urban Vancouver two summers ago and seems to love city life. I walk up the street outside his house and bemoan all the suffering people; he says, “It’s the tapestry of life out there!”
I came back from a week on the Beloved Island to join him and his fiancee for Culture Crawl, and remembered big cities do have some good things. The Eastside area is infested with artists, and they all display their creative warrens during Culture Crawl. After squeezing through a low-ceilinged series of rooms that seemed to be populated by ravers, we booked it for Parker Street Studios, which my brother had not shut up about all year.
Parker Street Studios is an old mattress factory. Despite a nearby window painting of Mr. Mattress (vaguely resembling a suggestive SpongeBob), no mattresses remain. Instead, the patchwork, four-story labyrinth is divvied up into a head-spinning number of artist’s studios: woodworkers, armour-makers, sculptors, photographers, weavers, jewellers, upholsterers, framers, and of course, many painters. A restless sea of hipsters in flowing pants and tiny toques surged in and out of all rooms, blocking me at one moment and sweeping me along at the next. The scent of paint, incense, and wood shavings drifted between studios. People sported their weirdest outfits. Basic, conservative Langley (my current home base) this was not.
What came to intrigue me most was how artists decorated their own space. Not with their artwork, but with other objects. Some seemed to love creative clutter, while others were extremely minimal. As the Vancouver clouds lifted to let in a bit of golden hour, I took some shots of studio windows with my crappy old iPhone. I can’t call this art, but I thought it would be fun to share.
