 Hello everyone and good evening. My name is Taryn Earhart and I'm the Arts and Special Events Programmer here at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. On behalf of the library and the West Vancouver Art Museum, I would like to welcome everyone to tonight's art talk, Douglas Copeland in conversation with Hillary Leckwin. While I recognize that we are all in different places this evening, I would like to acknowledge that the West Vancouver Library and Art Museum reside within the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Squamish Nation, Slavictooth Nation, and Musqueam Nation. We recognize and respect them as nations in this territory, as well as their historic connection to the lands and waters around us since time immemorial. I am personally grateful to call the Pacific Northwest my home, and I'm thankful to the Coast Salish communities that continue to protect the natural beauty and animal diversity that surround me every day. It has been my great pleasure to work with Hillary and her guest tonight to bring this event to our community. And now I would like to pass things over to Hillary, who is waiting for us over at the museum. Have a great night. Thank you very much, Karen. We are so delighted to be presenting our artist talk with Douglas Copeland this evening here at the West Vancouver Art Museum. We are sitting in our exhibition, Radit Lane, which is a project that we've been working on for the last two years. And the exhibition, of course, is on here at the West Vancouver Art Museum until May 28th. So, Doug, welcome. Oh, thanks, Hillary. Nice to be here. It's so nice to be able to get together and to reflect on this project that we've been building for the last little while. So, let's talk a little bit about how the project came about, and then we'll shift gears and speak a little bit about the book. So, we started working together because I sent you an email and said, we'd like to work with you here at the West Vancouver Art Museum. And you very kindly got together with me and started to talk about what a project here would look like. So, in our initial conversations, we spoke a lot about how West Vancouver, the place, influences your writing and influences your art. So, what about Grofer and Nakoma appealed to you for this particular project? Oh, boy, I think it has to do a lot with the relationship we have with both time and with history. And at what point does something that is old become history? What do we choose to forget and what includes history? And what happens to us, or accidents, slips through the cracks and actually does become history. And the book, the show's based on Grofer and Nakoma, was written in 97. And it's set in this little neighborhood of the British properties in the very eastern wastage, Rabbit Lane. And by sort of a geographical accident, it's very up against Kaplano Canyon on one end and this big empty golf course on the other. And I used the expression, it says, though time stood still back in 1966, they just put a bell jar on top of it, and it never changed. And I've met so many people since and said, oh my god, you noticed that about that place too. And so in the book, you have characters who graduate from high school in 78. And then one of them, Karen, goes into a coma for two decades, and then she emerges. And that's where the discussion about time and history begins. She remembered what shocking was not shocking. And then through a sort of a metaphysical catastrophe, time itself ends. And then so what happens when you're living outside of time? And what happens in it, which is essentially a world of consequences really. And so maybe you've actually been inhabiting real time as if there's no consequences as well. You know, shape up and maybe you have to renegotiate your relationship with being alive in a world. I think that's ultimately the story of the book and the show in turn. So we set about to stage these scenes from the book, or from the coma. And you have a brilliant idea of crowdsourcing our cast members and our cars and our homes that we use. You've done a bit of crowdsourcing before for Gumphead, for example, and some of your other projects. What about this particular project did you think would appeal to all of the very generous people who got involved in the project? I think that if you look at the images in the show, you'll see that we have the characters who inhabit the photographs, but the photographs themselves have been inside and outside of this form of architecture that most of us here grew up in. Which I guess technically comes up with five and ten dollar blueprints supplied by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation back in the 50s and 60s. You know, they don't do house tours of CNHC homes in West Vancouver. They're just very homely and drab. But the people who responded to the call for volunteers almost to a one grew up inside these houses, they instinctively understood what I was talking about in terms of the sense of time standing still, compressing, shrinking in and around these places. And I think they wanted to help commemorate that part of history. Because I don't think it's ever actually been, I've looked at museums across the country and I've never seen this sort of house celebrated or acknowledged even. So I would say that pretty much everyone that volunteered is from and of the environments that we were working in. And certainly of the people that I spoke to over the course of the photo shoots, the idea of there being a sort of worldwide plague or pandemic that leads to everybody's death, except of course for this group of friends. I think people found the idea of a pandemic because we were in a pandemic when we were doing this project. I think they perhaps found that quite appealing as well. The project began shortly before COVID. The film production company that owns the rights to Ropeta Nicola. They contacted my agent and said, we're pleading for a special order. We can't make this movie because real life is a clip stick. And we could never make it. And I think maybe that's just them being cheap bastards and whatever. But it was this sort of, you know, the book when we began seemed fantastical. And then as real history in real time and on it became not really fantastical at all. And the things that were really bizarre two and a half years ago were quotidianized to an almost amazing and amazing level. So we flipped out on that slide at that stage. And it was remarkable how excited people were to be involved in the project. It was wonderful. So everything, the photos has been borrowed and loaned, including the cars and the costumes and the houses themselves. That to me is certainly a remarkable part of the project. People would ask, what do I wear, of course? And we'll just sort of, you know, you're going to the same one. It's 1998. And people brought like five or six alternatives. Some people brought 10. And then we had these informal polls of, okay, what looks most 98. And that was so democratic. And I've been on a lot of union shoots. And they were just saying they were going to go over time so they could back up the dough. And everyone here was just dawdling, just trying to extend the happiness of the experience. And then a few of the characters, Maya and Gemma and Scott, were in a lot of the photos. And they became sort of like we're all superstars throughout the shoot. And the opening was really lovely to see them and it felt like a family reunion. It has been really fun to see the cast members come in and see the photos. Because of course they saw a very rough version of each photograph on the day of the shoot. We showed them the sort of the very rough version. And then as they come in to see the photos, a lot of them and taking photos of themselves in front of the photos. And it's a really neat aspect of the project. It used to be just a very good time to point out that the photos themselves, although printed seemingly largely here, we were filmed using six high-definition cameras by a cameraman and photographer Blaine Campbell. We did a superb job of knitting them all together. The images are ultra high-definition and a lot of the people comes from that. But I think the structure of the photographs owes a lot to, I would say, classical painting. People in the shots, they would say, how do I pose what do I do? And I think we've all watched so many movies and cartoons and TV shows where there's a wind machine going and there's someone saying, you know, make love to the camera. And instead we were saying, well, you know, the last supper, you know, everyone's sort of in relationship to everyone else, try and actually go for that kind of look. And it translated seamlessly. I don't think there's one person who didn't understand what we were saying. And so it was nice, you know, we're talking about time and history that, you know, suddenly you're being the 16th century in the equation. And then in the moment you said painting, or we said painting, people suddenly realized that they were a part of something, a time stream outside of just the here and now that would actually make you wrong. That was kind of, that was magical. That was a really cool feature of the, of the posing. And of course, all of the models had to hold that pose for 30 to 50 seconds, right? Which is quite a long time trying to stay in one place. I was watching this set of Barlow comedy, A Million Ways to Die in the West a week ago. And a running joke in a movie is like, you heard this, there's this guy in Texas who actually smiled for 30 seconds. And it became sort of like the selfie of 1856 or something like that. And very few of our models were able to hold that smile for that period of time. We had a few, but most people found it a challenge to hold that particular smile. It's really hard. I couldn't do this. So they, not only were our models generous with their time, but they were also extremely patient while we captured the images. And that was, that was, yeah, the classical painting references I think were really important because as you say, they bring us into a discussion about time and these sort of character prototypes. But they also gave our models who were not actual models with one exception an idea of what we were looking for, what we were looking for. I mean, I will say that this week, maybe it's just because it's spring and everything's sort of bouncing back to life that, yeah, I'm 60 now. And the world's going to go on with or without me. And it's very, very humbling. Park Royal still going to be there in a hundred years, likely. She knows what how long we'll be there for. So like, oh, I really was just passing through here. And I think there's this sort of assumption that comes with modernist thinking that somehow you'll go on forever, but you don't. And maybe it's a weird self-executive day, but I'm feeling very emotional today, I think. And these pictures make me feel like a band-aid for that. Thank you. So let's talk a little bit about what's changed since you wrote the book because it is coming out for 25 years. And I get the sense that there are some things that have changed since we wrote it. I'm remembering back to the 298. And I've always tried to set my books in what I call the extreme present when I began writing, which is going back 30, 30-something years ago and all. I was like, oh, your books will just be dated. And I know what's happened now is each of those just become a really hermetically sealed time capsule of the era that they're from. In the 1909, it was no existence. Back then, you had a very nascent internet that had yet to become a magnet. You had no smartphone technology. You were actually still, we were living inside of Francis the Viano's and the state liberal democracy, Fantasia. And it was sort of, you know, 9-11, and you've been on the roller coaster ever since. There was a kind of purity and innocence about the 90s that I think is remembered when we come back. I call it the last good decade. And I was at the opening of the Mall of America in Minnesota, Bloomington, Minnesota, I think it was. And it was the opening day. And it might as well have been the 19th century. I was up on this podium at the local WKBC radio station. The 4-H Club was like awarding prizes to check-ins. And there was this roller coaster that was coming every 62 seconds and we were like within like three feet of our ears. And there's all these people walking around and eating ice cream. And the guy from the radio station looked at me and sort of misjudged me and thought, well, Mr. Smarty Pat, you must think this is all pretty silly. And I said, not Moody's Bit, not Moody's Bit. I think that in 100 years we're going to look back on an event like today is some sort of charm to the magical period that can never ever come back at the time of almost ultimate peace and prosperity and friendliness. And his reaction was like, oh. That's his speechless. I mean, I think that's awesome to know. You had these characters that were, I think, inhabiting a political vacuum, certainly an ideological vacuum, a moral vacuum. Again, coming back with the bell jar and the nothingness of it. I think actually, and just looking back on the book, reading, I've already read the whole thing. It's quite hard to reread something like that. In the book, the characters, they have older cycles and they get around quite easily from here and there. But I realized that what we've learned, trees stop all down very easily and they block roads instantly. And once the tree's down over a road, certainly these characters are too lazy to go up and they get chains off. So I realized in retrospect, they probably would have been confined much more in two-point neighborhood. They wouldn't have had the agency to go around and see the world. But I do recognize that, I suppose. Absolutely. So let's talk about the scenes that we staged in the photographs because there was certainly some logic to the scenes that were selected. But there are some surprises as well. So the scenes generally are moments of drama in the narrative. But we also had some considerations around the expense and feasibility of certain shots. We definitely wanted to avoid gore. At least I wanted to avoid gore. And we could have gone as we could. I know, I know. Okay. Because there certainly are moments in the books that the leavers, for example, the bodies of people who died, which are all over the place in the last part of the book. So we avoided those over-signs of blood and guts and gore and really went to scenes where he could insert that sense of doom, that sense of commonessness and certainly some of the photos of that. So maybe you can talk a little bit about what your criteria were for picking the scenes that you did. I think I was looking for charged moments throughout the book or taking moments that had some charge in amplifying that sense of drama. Some of the photographs don't map on to exactly that scene inside the book, but they're suggested by certainly. I think that, for example, you have the character Pam who is in the photo with the baked beans on the floor. She's wearing a macrame jumpsuit. Highly stems directly from Anne Margaret in the movie Tommy. In the 70s, they're, and I'm just old enough to remember a certain kind of decadence that really no longer exists. And a way, I think, what is decadence? It's an abuse of responsibility. And I think that these characters certainly embody that. And I think that when she's in the baked beans ready to be able to do something decadent in the photographs here right, there's a sale that's going on which happens in the book. But there are like three large sized boxes of fruit loops on the floor. And I think in one sense with the photograph, I would really like everyone who's not seen the book just come in these photographs and say, what the hell's going on here? I need to know what is happening. I think, I mean, there's this world that we all live in called the real world, the Yale real world. And there is this other world that is hidden inside all of us. I was thinking of the real kind that was certainly my favorite poet. Each of us has a letter inside of us that lies in wait to be opened. And I think that the photographs here, they all inhabit some moment in time when the letters are being opened and you're actually seeing something that lies inside of all of us. The thing I don't understand, Hillary, is why is it so hard to know yourself? I mean, you're inside your body, I'm inside my body. Why can't I access what's really going on in here? Maybe people do therapy. It's really, really expensive. It's like going to Antarctica. It's incredibly expensive. And when you get there, there might not actually be anything. And so I think maybe what art does or what art tries to do is just let you open and just see inside a little bit. Maybe something that's there that's very, very hard to access. And maybe it's for the common good that we all don't know too much about ourselves. So that actually is a fantastic way to express what a lot of our visitors have been expressing when they've come in to see the photographs. And I'm thinking in particular about one image, 5.30 a.m. grad night. And in that image, we've got the two young high school students who just had their grad night in these amazing 1970s tuxes, ruffled shirts, orange and blue tuxes. They are a sight to behold. And that particular photo from the series elicits the most significant response from visitors because I think they just get walloped by this sense of nostalgia when they look at it. And it never ceases to amaze me. That's the photo that people immediately gravitate towards. More than the bees, which in my mind is even more dramatic. So let's talk about nostalgia for a minute and how, you know, certainly back to your childhood here in West Vancouver. This is a hyper-local project for you. It's a very personal project for you. Did you get a great sense of nostalgia as you were looking on this particular project? First of all, I'll say that the blue tux in that photo is identical to the one I wore. And the two teenage guys who modeled for the shot, they just looked at these bags as like, seriously. The feathered pair. And you have to understand that every single guy on Earth had that hair. And every girl on Earth had the feather or the Dorothy Hamilton one cut. And that was it. It was really the only option you had. I didn't think of it as nostalgia. I thought of it as historical accuracy and just getting it right. Even down into something like the license plates which we had to research to make sure they were not authentic. And I guess what's changed between then and now is to look at some of these interiors. They don't look that different from right now except if it was right now there would be something somewhere with a little tiny LED light blinking somewhere. Or there would be a lot more in the summer down near the floor. There's this idea that I've been thinking about. And then I've been talking about some friends of American museums and futurology and that sort of thing. And what if there is no next big thing? And what do you mean, Doug? Well, okay. We've had search forms of digital communication. We've had the way that those ideas play out with things like Uber or PayPal or what have you. We're 23 and you get used to sign or to solve murder code cases, etc. But what if there actually is no next big new technology coming down the pipe? And then I don't even think this idea has a name yet so I'm trying to find one for it. But then what does that mean? It means that the technology we have right now is possibly all that we're stuck with, all we're going to get. And this can work out a number of ways. Number one is like, but wait, we're so used to having these idiots in Palo Alto withdrawing. Something new it is, 18 months. And apparently it'll be another decade before we get another big thing thrown at us. And then it'll only come about as a result of AI. So like it or not, we're sort of trapped in this... I want to see rat nays, something like Arcusanti or something. What we have is all we're going to get in the next decade until we change things again. And so what will your living room look like in 12 years, what will mine look like? It'll probably look very different except for, you know, right now it's a blinking LED. It could be one little wire that comes down from the corner that's on the present. We, in Vancouver, a big surprising thing between now and then would be all the water and air conditioners. Two things that you'd never have seen in a house back in 78. And so things change, but they don't change. There's this one photo, it's in this kitchen, this house in North Vancouver, which never you and I were scouting out this other house and then we're like, hold the phone, what is that? And it was a really seminal ghost in me from 1958. And you called the owners by the contractor's sign and they said go on in and do what you want to do and what a score that was. So we went in and there was this kitchen and in 1958 it was the most modern kitchen in Canada. But then the original owners, they put that kitchen in and then they set it up sale as well. That's it. We're never going to change this kitchen ever again and they didn't. And then you walked in and felt like you were entering an actual time capsule of some sort. And because at that point we were still scouting it out, we felt like we were in someone else's house or we felt like we were in a sort of sacred spot. And I think that, of all the shots, that's the one we just did. We have to do something here. And so we took a picture I had of an alarm strong and put it in. And it just sort of speaks to itself really. And then of course coming in and then do it at the top, its top-up corner is this great big log in like 20 something, you know, 2019 or something else. I love that photo. And I love the sort of the happy circumstance of the way that whole photo came about. And we did do a great deal of planning for the shots and making sure that we had the right props and the right people and the right costumes and the right cars. But there were always those accidental moments that I think also shine through in the series. And certainly that is one of my favorite instances. I also love the Cleveland Down shot that we did, which was the very last shot that we did in the series. And if I remember correctly, we shot that in October. So we did most of the shoots in August and we read it until October to do Cleveland Down because we needed it to be dark enough and we didn't want it to be 10, 30 at night. So Cleveland Down is a place near and dear to your heart. Do you want to talk a little bit about that particular? Well, I grew up from kindergarten right through the grade 12 just right up above the Down. It was never more than a six-minute walk away. And the thing about the British Properties is that there's never been any retail allowed. I don't know why. Growing up, if you lived up there, you had to get some butter. You had to get a large American automobile with gasoline right down the sea level and go all the way back up. It is an ecological travesty, I'll say that. But it's also, until you get your driver's licenses, essentially rural, I mean, you are in the middle of nowhere. So my only experience with retail growing up was Hardy's grocery store, which you had to go down and down and across. And to this day... It's in North Bend. In North Bend, yeah. But to this day, I still can't believe you walk into this place called a store and you give them this stuff called money and they give you things. It's magic. That's astonishing. But, yeah, no, we... I know every square inch of the forest down there. That's where what my ashes scattered. You know, should I get hit by a bus tomorrow? The canyon? Oh my God. I'm so glad there's no social media back. Then, you know what? Did you get an assistant trouble there? I had a poor pair in the state. I had three brothers and my two older brothers, especially the Hell Army, all of us. You know, here's something else to remember. North Bend, Cougar and West Bend, Cougar, back in the 50s and 60s, there was this caricature of West Bend, Cougar and the British properties being martini hill. And those people had no idea that every house up there was basically some young family's first mortgage ever. When people back then had three, four or five kids, it was just like Central Ireland before the potato family. There was just like kids everywhere, crawling over and under and into things. And there was an actual sense of community. And I've been one of those people that keeps in touch with people. Albeit not by Facebook, which I don't like to approve of. But it was a nice time to grew up there. And to drive through it now, I think it's been through several different iterations since the time I grew up there. I think now if you drive up, especially through the properties, it's completely hollowed out socially. There's zero sense of community. Half the houses are empty. The large number that were there, like who knows who, they're going to get torn down. It has, weirdly, I read this in New Yorkshire, and it was the highest rate social dysfunction of kids going to school. In a lot of cases, the families just dump the kid there. And they don't even go to school. They just play video games, all the noodles in the basement, and then they can't function in the real world. So the disconnect between then and now is really something. There's all of those trees that were planted back in 1964 are now, you know, a hundred something feet tall. The tower on the summer was a barn in the cross creek or highland. They completely make a tunnel over the road. And in a weird way, one of the properties is turning into a form of rabbit lane. Rabbit lane itself seems to tick along. There's a few monster places going down there, but it still has that air of charged boredom. In one of the photos, there's the Yeti who's made out of videotape. And we just went and videotaped it, and glue got it and taped it on. We had no idea how successful it was going to be. And it was put on top of a little round UPS postal outlet, a jumpsuit. And Jay, who works here at the museum, she volunteered to put it on. And holy crap, it is terrifying. And dogs freak out. The dogs would freak out. I think it was your Helen in the costume. In my Halloween costume. But growing up, there was always the Yeti, or the Sasquatch, out in the Capilano Canyon somewhere, maybe up in the watershed, or up in the Hollywood mountain. And who was the Yeti? What was the Yeti? It must be very lonely being the Yeti. Maybe he's not evil after all, bang. I once read that they were going to... The one way to find out that there was a Loch Ness monster for sure, was they'd just electrify all the Loch Ness and then the monsters would go over and talk. And so I thought that with the Sasquatch, in a weird way, what's happened with globalization and sort of our cities and neighborhoods losing their innocence, is that somehow all the sort of Sasquatch is floating through the top. And I soon miss that innocence. So that is nostalgia. I miss what used to be there. I think this is probably a great time to wrap up our discussion. From Rilke to Futurology, you've covered a lot. And I'm very grateful to you for the chance to have worked with you on this project and to speak with you about it this evening. Well, Helen, it could never have happened with you. So thanks and no thanks to Library for doing this talk. The exhibition is open until May 28th. We are open Tuesday till Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and we are looking forward to seeing you here soon. Thank you.