25 November, 2005 – 16 January, 2006

Domicile/drift is a selection of photographs that pictures single-family homes, barricades and provisional dwelling places in Vancouver. The works are hung in paired sequences of large and small photos in order to consider the framing and picturing of the experience of the parts and whole of the city—and what lies over and underneath the urban surface.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Dikeakos began his long-term artistic project of indexing and scanning material urban reality, thereby critiquing urban expansion and its social-political effects. His new photographs continue to scan the shrinking and underdeveloped land tracts of the city, spaces rendered temporarily transient before aggressive real estate speculation and the urban renewal projects of the 2010 Winter Olympics. Dikeakos's works evoke a particular consciousness of the city that contrasts the “luxury lifestyle investment” condo homes and glass towers of the Vancouver skyline with the unauthorized, individualistic and provisional alternatives to where we live, what we observe, and how we take notice.

Since the late 1960s, Christos Dikeakos' practice has played an important role in the rise of conceptual and post-conceptual photography in Vancouver. His works are concerned with the layering of histories over time and the significance of urban spaces as sites to activate memory.


Jessie Caryl