Image: Museum of Vancouver
Vancouver gets credit in international rankings for being an urban space that’s culturally attuned to and integrated with nature. We’re green and getting greener. We have tons of green space, most especially the well-known 1,001-acre Stanley Park, and an easily accessible seawall. Despite this, our city has dramatically transformed the natural environment to fit our needs.
Rewilding Vancouver, the new exhibit at Museum of Vancouver in Kitsilano’s Vanier Park, takes a look at the city’s nature as it was, is, and could be.
Excerpts from the press release:
Using taxidermy specimens, 3D models, soundscapes, videos and photo interventions, Rewilding Vancouver challenges our perception of what is natural to Vancouver. Visitors will discover a changing-of-the-guard when it comes to the region’s wildlife, with ravens, wolves and elk fading as crows, coyotes and black-tailed deer settled in. Rewilding Vancouver also challenges us to envision new streetscapes that feature unearthed fish-bearing streams long hidden below city streets. A life-sized creation of the now extinct Steller’s Sea Cow is one of many highlights of this exhibition.
Rewilding Vancouver’s core exhibition team includes MOV curator Viviane Gosselin, designer Kevin McAllister and guest curator J.B. MacKinnon who is co-author of 100-Mile Diet and author of the recently released The Once and Future World, which served as inspiration for the exhibition.
“Almost everyone has experienced the loss of some treasured natural space — whether an entire forest or a simple vacant lot,” says MacKinnon. “This exhibition is a way to connect with that feeling, and also explore the unlimited possibilities of melding the urban and wild.”
In 2010, Vancouverites were mesmerized when a grey whale came for a swim in False Creek, and in 2013 we were equally awe-struck by a beaver investigating the Olympic Village as a new potential home. Rewilding Vancouver seeks to encourage people to discover what nature was like in Vancouver’s past, reconnect with nature as meaningful to their lives, and engage with efforts to make the city a wilder place.
“Rewilding Vancouver is an exhibition of remembering,” explains J.B. MacKinnon. “It allows the public to reconnect with a forgotten history in order to look at the present and the possible future with new eyes.”
The exhibit is at MOV until September 1, 2014. Go forth and remember, reconnect and rewild.
Last modified: March 25, 2014
