The Mill Project

I am exploring bricolage as the primary artistic gesture in the work that supports this thesis, focusing on the history of a single site in West Vancouver, where lies a remark­able subcultural artifact: the Inglewood ‘Mill’ Skatepark - the first skateboard park constructed in Canada in 1977, and subsequently buried in 1984. The skateboard subculture is layered with three other histories: the Shields Shingle Mill (1916-1926), West Vancouver Secondary School (1927-present), and my own lived experience as a suburban skateboarder. The approach of the project has been that of a pseudo-archae­ological ‘excavation’, digging through the layers of the site's historiography, engaging with questions around authorship and authenticity, historical accuracy and objectivity. Through the detournement of archival images (photomontage), an assemblage of site-related constructions, and a series of interventions, surveys, and excavations of the site, histories are subverted and conflated. its material and intellectual capacity - to recompose dominant histories, ideologies, and mythologies. Bricolage is discussed in relation to appropriation, myth, and subcultures (specifically in the way bricolage is manifested in skateboard culture). My investigation is supported, primarily, by the following writers and their theories: on the topic of bricolage, Claude Levi-Strauss and Dick Hebdige; on the topic of subcul­tures, Dick Hebdige and Iain Borden; on the topic of myth, Roland Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss; and on the topic of appropriation, a whole host of writers and their dis­cussions around postmodernism in the late seventies and eighties. Further examinations of these topics are found in the collage works of Martha Rosler, the pseudo-archaeo­logical site interventions of Mark Dion, the ad-hoc constructions of collaborators Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser, and in the bricolage-installation, Vancouver School, by the collective Futura Bold.