92 CANADIAN A RT • SPRING 2016 canadianart.ca 93
warehouse spaces along Powell and Railway
Streets. Another thriving warehouse scene
was on Cook Street, at the south end of False
Creek, under what became Olympic Village
(later re-branded the Village on False Creek).
“I spent a lot of time on Cook Street
when I was 16,” says Irwin, who attended
Langara’s studio program before graduating
from the University of British Columbia
with an art-history degree in 1990. “It was
great. Art, music, performance and theatre
were inseparable; people participated in
every way.”
What Irwin experienced at Cook Street
is part of a continuum that began in the
earlier 1960 s with collaborative, interdisci-
plinary enclaves like Sound Gallery, Motion
Studio and Intermedia, followed in the 1970 s
by Video Inn, the Western Front and Pumps
Centre for the Arts. Whether the institutional
looseness that was once associated with
interdisciplinary practice continues today is
debatable given that the city’s state-sanctioned
artist-run centres behave closer to public
galleries than as sites of artist-driven experi-
mentation. Another mitigating factor could
be the emergence of a private gallery culture
that has younger artists making work less for
each other, as was often the case in the 1980 s,
than for the market. Still another could be
Vancouver’s transition from a resource port
built on union labour to a transnational
resort in service of IT entrepreneurs. It is here
that we return to Rancho Rasdoul.
My first look at Rancho Rasdoul came in
early summer, during a visit with 40-some-
thing artists Kevin Schmidt and Holly Ward
at their 100 -year-old farmhouse home, located
a couple of kilometres south of the ranch
proper. The two erstwhile Vancouverites
had just returned from a three-year stint in
Berlin (where Schmidt was a 2011–12 resident at the Künstlerhaus Beth-
anien) and, as was evident from the roadside, were busy with projects new,
old and ongoing.
The first of these projects is the farmhouse itself, which, though in
constant need of repair, provided the set for Schmidt’s EDM House ( 2013 ),
a 17-minute video and sculptural work that has the building’s exterior
festooned with Christmas lights that pulse to the beat of a soundtrack theartist had composed in its bedroom. The second is Schmidt and Ward’s
future home, The Pavilion, Phase 2 ( 2011 –), an architectural hybrid of
rancher-style house and the 22-foot-diameter geodesic dome Ward con-
structed as part of her residency at Langara College in 2009–10. The third
is Screen in the Landscape (2015 –), a project that consists of a movie screen
placed in a raked bowl carved into a sloping pasture. Screen in the Landscape,
the farmhouse and The Pavilion are on land owned by Hill and Irwin.Okanagan_ sp16_16TSLR.indd 93 02/04/16 12:03 PM