Episode 6 | July 21

Marian Penner Bancroft and Patrik Andersson on Christos Dikeakos

Christos Dikeakos, x wáyxway / x' áy'xi, 1991, c-print, sandblasted glass, metal. SFU Art Collection. Gift of John and Helen O'Brian, 2015. Photo SFU Galleries.

"What we're looking at...all seems very innocent. And yet, when you think about the word X wáyxway...and sitting in what we now know as a tourist destination, you begin to adjust your ideas of what it means to be a settler in this part of the world."

Marian Penner Bancroft and Patrik Andersson consider fellow Vancouver artist Christos Dikeakos' photographic work x wáyxway / x' áy’xi (1991).Since the late 1960s Dikeakos has played an important role in discourse on conceptual photography in Vancouver, and x wáyxway / x' áy'xi  is part of a larger photographic series engaging with memories, histories, and urban typologies within contemporary urban areas. Penner Bancroft and Andersson discuss the work's depicted view from Stanley Park looking north over Burrard Inlet toward the mountains and the industrial sites along the shoreline, as well as Dikeakos’ efforts to convey how these sites were named and described by the xʷməθkwəy̓əm First Nation prior to and since European settlement.

Patrik Andersson is Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. He has curated exhibitions locally and internationally and operates Trapp Projects, an independent curatorial platform founded in 1997.

Marian Penner Bancroft is a Vancouver artist working with photography, text, video, sculpture and sound. She is a Professor Emerita at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and recipient of the City of Vancouver’s Mayor’s Visual Arts Award (2009), the Audain Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts (2012) and the Overseas Photographer Award at the Higashikawa International Photography Festival in Japan (2018).

Podcast

Transcript
 

[Image Description: A panoramic colour photograph depicts a view of a desolate waterpark in Stanley Park overlooking the Northshore mountains and industry, which lines the edge of the Burrard Inlet. A painted river bisects the centre of the image through the park, which appears to vanish as it edges towards the north. Bright yellow fountain structures are in a small grouping to the left and in the distance to the right, across the harbour, are bright yellow sulfur piles. A sheet of glass hovers over the image, fastened with metal rods, and has sandblasted text at the center which reads “x wáyxway,” and at the bottom left it reads “masks.”]