EXHIBITION
News Articles
Woodlands' lost found again in Dead and Buried
The Georgia Straight
Robin Laurence - Thursday, March 19, 2009
At the Amelia Douglas Gallery until April 4
Michael de Courcy’s Dead and Buried is a sombre conceptual project by a dedicated artist and community activist. Subtitled The Cemetery at Woodlands, the work is about loss and reclamation. It’s about a former age’s disregard for a group of disadvantaged people and the attempts, by a few contemporary individuals and organizations, to achieve redress. Composed of text panels and copies of newspaper articles, government documents, and letters, along with maps, photographs, and a troubling sculpture, Dead and Buried represents a powerful effort of research and remapping.
There’s as much reading as looking in this installation. Didactic panels recount the history of the Woodlands site in New Westminster, the community in which de Courcy lives with his family. Woodlands began its institutional life as the Provincial Asylum for the Insane in 1878, went through a series of incarnations as renamed and expanded mental-health facilities, and ended as the Woodlands School for children and young adults with developmental disabilities. By 2002, when de Courcy became interested in the site, Woodlands was permanently closed and its buildings were being demolished. It has since been redeveloped into what the artist describes as “upscale townhouses and condominiums”.
Seven years ago, de Courcy created and exhibited a mixed-media project documenting Woodlands’ history and highlighting some of its former residents. Now, his focus is on all that remains of the institution: a 2.2-acre cemetery where 3,065 residents who died in the asylum, many of them wards of the province, were buried between 1920 and 1958. A couple of decades after its closure, the cemetery was converted into a public park. Its grave markers were “unceremoniously removed and disposed of”, de Courcy tells us. Marginalized in life, the Woodlands patients were then erased in death.
Some of the grave markers—cast concrete slabs, each giving the name and year of death of the individual—ended up in building projects in the late 1970s. Newspaper clippings from 1986 recount the discovery that a number of them had been flipped over and used to pave a walk near a Coquitlam fourplex. Additionally, de Courcy reports, a barbecue patio for Woodlands staff was built out of gravestones in the 1970s. To satirize this callousness and disrespect, the artist produced “Memorial Barbecue” as part of his installation. Here, a large, black, institutional-looking barbecue stands on a small rectangle of reproduction grave markers.
A happier aspect of the exhibition consists of de Courcy’s determined recovery of information concerning the forgotten cemetery. Through his archival research, he met Lisa Donaldson, the great-great-granddaughter and biographer of Alfred McNeil, an important historic figure who died at the asylum in 1921. A large colour photograph records McNeil’s present-day family gathered at his (temporarily restored) gravesite.
Using archival information, a couple of grave markers that have remained on the site, and computerized positioning technologies, de Courcy “remapped” the Woodlands cemetery, naming all the dead and identifying where each is buried. This information is accessible in the exhibition through a detailed map, and at the cemetery site for those equipped with handheld GPS devices. By producing “virtual” headstones, the artist has restored the identities and re-memorialized the final resting places of a forgotten population.
http://www.straight.com/article-206539/woodlands-lost-found-again