Checking in with your hotspots
extended to October 17

Summary
This group exhibition presents artwork that challenges our expectation of both street art and performance art. In each work, artists perform in and around automobile traffic. The resulting artwork considers the relationship between the human body and motorized vehicle, the commuter perception of the freeway landscape, and the parallels between driving and dream. The artists are Michel de Broin, Jenipher Hur, Ken Lum, and Michael Markowsky.

Expanded description
When artists become roadside attractions it’s street art for the commuter.

The volume of vehicles is building, the roadways are expanding, and the artists are there, stuck in traffic, performing in this redefined landscape. In the language of traffic radio, “hotspots” are street locations where abnormal occurrences temporarily slow vehicular traffic. These are generally thought of as locations of traffic accidents, construction zones, and traffic light malfunction—in other words, locations to be avoided.

The “hotspots” of this exhibition are instead flashpoints where artists Michel de Broin, Jenipher Hur, Ken Lum, and Michael Markowsky perform and engage with the landscapes of the roadway and the vehicles that pass along them.

Evoking earlier days of stagecoach travel between BC’s Interior and the Coast, Michael Markowsky’s mural/video installation Painting on a Truck on the Grand Trunk Road, Surrey BC depicts the landscape-in-motion while the artist paints from a moving flatbed pickup. Ken Lum’s Entertainment for Surrey shows the artist performing for passing traffic on the edge of the Trans-Canada Highway during morning rush hour. In You Are Included Jenipher Hur presents animated traces of her epic walking journeys throughout a city’s dense network of expressways, underpasses and side streets. Michel de Broin’s Shared Propulsion Car depicts an altered pedal-powered 1986 Buick Regal as it weaves its way through metropolitan traffic.

The artworks of Checking in with your hotspots reconsider the role of the citizen-commuter and the spaces of transport that are always under construction in the 21st century megalopolis.