Cracks and Vines is a video memorial to houses erased from the Mount Pleasant landscape. Drawing from Milton’s fifteen year history as a Mount Pleasant resident, the work focusses on the recreation of wallpaper that once patterned the walls of rental suites she was forced to leave due to demolition. Exploring a tension between stillness and motion, permanence and impermanence, visibility and invisibility, the work attempts to unearth vines of memory into a kind of funerary bouquet that recalls spaces now gone.
Utilizing hyper-camp floral blooms, untamed weeds and neon surfaces, these recalled wallpaper patterns collide the organic with the manufactured in order to create wildly femme motifs that explore gender, power and class within the domestic realm. Dandelions, ivy and morning glory are combined with the vivid gloss of construction tape, neon fencing and industrial paint and woven into a series of unfixed collages. Documented in the wind, these compositions tremor with a subtle movement somewhere between the animate and the inanimate, growth and collapse.
With all materials sourced from the perimeter of demolished homes, Cracks and Vines reflects on the rapid development of Mount Pleasant and the socio-economic complexities of a post-Olympics Vancouver through the performative act of returning, unburying and remembering. Mimicking a kind of psychoanalytic return of the repressed, weeds, growing out of cracks in concrete, are dug out and twisted into approximations.