I came to Vancouver in 1999 just as the story of fifty missing women was breaking. What began as a city1s collective unease eventually emerged as a serial murder story that permitted Vancouver to heave a collective sigh of relief. Here is where the existence of a psychopath blocks all possibility of public self-examination. With the primary focus of attention on the Downtown Eastside and accused serial killer, Robert Pickton's pig farm, our thoughts only travelled only in straight lines between these two places.
Police, journalists and photographers circled the two sites. The language of crime, death, sex, drugs and poverty oscillating somewhere between stereotyping, sensationalism and the obscuring ever-present experts1 dialects.
The media coverage of what is now 69 murdered and missing women reinforce a particular social map of Vancouver. I decided to critically map our collective responsibility. My impetus was to locate what I felt was truly missing in the media coverage of this story- hence, the title, Missing.
I wanted to map our convoluted, our confused, our conflicted, our hidden, our hypocritical relationship to a much broader sex economy. I was interested in revealing our complicity and in complicating the story.
Missing is a social mapping project that extends beyond the borders delineated by the deadline and the sound bite. It had to be photographs and it had to have text because it began as the counterpoint to the newspaper hitting my front door every morning.
I have come to believe that all photographs are a negotiation between the subject and the photographer. That once a photograph is made there are many places that it can become "stuck in meaning" :history, form, intention, audience, and community just to name a few. Foremost to making art in the middle of a public crisis is to anticipate where my work will get stuck in meaning.
If sex sells, we are definitely buying. Sex work is just one small aspect of our sex economy. Creating a map of this complex story started with the question: Who gets to sell sex without any stigma? I began by searching for a familiar object that could equally link and evoke both the average consumer with a street level sex worker. I wanted this familiar object to grow out of the sidewalk as a temporary memorial. I made a concrete sculptural cast of two department store legs originally used to display nylon stockings.
With worldwide profits posted at 1.5 billion in 2003, nylon stockings have successfully colonized our sexual imaginations since 19401s. Dupont, the inventor of nylons, sponsored a War Bond rally in 1942 where Betty Grable peeled off her stockings to be auctioned off for $40,000. A favourite gift of soldiers during WWII, Macy1s of New York sold out of 50,000 pairs of Dupont nylons in 6 hours at a sale marking the end of the war .
These concrete casts of department store legs symbolize the calculated manufacturing and sale of sexual identity. Extended from each foot is a piece of steel rebar, becoming a stiletto, reinforcing our connection to the sex economy. The stiletto, back in fashion today, originally appeared in the late Victorian period as a fetish tool in brothels. The first stilettos were boots designed to constrict and contort the woman1s foot by forcing her instep over her heels. The 12 inch boot heels , extending beyond the toes and impossible to walk upon, were used to hold legs open. Stockings and stilettos rank in the top three fetish items
The first in this three part guerilla installation involved researching and locating 50 sites of complicity and making night shots of the concrete legs at each of these locations. 50 is the number signifying Vancouver1s saturation point, a symbolic calculation of the visibility threshold. In 1999 there were 49 missing women and the story remains largely invisible to most Canadians; at 50 , it suddenly crystallizes into national headlines and the media frenzy ensued.
12 is the saturation point in Edmonton. What will it be for Winnipeg, Toronto or New York? In Juarez, Mexico, a city of 1.2million, located just across the border form El Paso, Texas it is a staggering 300 prostitutes, mostly in their teens, that have been murdered since 1993.
All of these activities were marked on a hand drawn map. Under each of the 50 photos was text explaining the significance of each site.
It was essential that ALL of the sites except the last were located outside
the downtown eastside which is consistently portrayed as Vancouver1s epicenter of prostitution.
I created five implicit categories to research
The first was Hidden Histories: sites that relate the forgotten and broader history of the sex economy
The second was The Privilege of Secrecy: Aristocrats have always flaunted their morality. Money and power affords access to exploitation and the ability to hide. Laptops, plane tickets, limousines, and distance always obscure the players .
The third , Areas of Confusion: Consistently sending out mixed messages- fashion, advertising, drugs, toys Areas of Confusion is a photographic term used to describe a lens imperfection. And fire inspectors trace burn patterns back to the source of arson/ignition, also called the Area of Confusion.
The fourth was Demographics: statistics [ who, what, where and when]
And fifth was Creating Borders: laws of enclosure, city bylaws, former red light districts, informal and formal policing patterns
I cast 5 more pairs of concrete legs which were left at random locations to mark the average number of murders of women working on Vancouver1s streets since the mid-801s, a statistic that remains constant even with Robert Picton's imprisonment. All 5 pairs of concrete legs went missing.
For two months, I placed ads the "lost" section of the classifieds in several Vancouver papers. Each ad ended with the words "No Questions asked. No Reward" as a reference to police inaction .
In reviewing the statistics of violence against women what emerges both nationally and internationally is a pattern in attitudes and corresponding lack of action. Add this consistent complacency to our insatiable fascination for murder stories and you get a new kind of disassociative tourism. Currently in Vancouver there are guided bus tours of the Downtown Eastside with a regular stop at Blood Alley.
What is truly missing is the universal need for a more reflexive response.
Art has an amazing potential to speak about the unspeakable. But with this comes many important questions that artists and curators need to answer. What does it mean to move that which is horrific into a gallery setting: a singular, aesthetic and decontextualized place. Missing just showed at Harcourt House Art Center in Edmonton last month. Gilbert Bouchard, an Edmonton art critic, referred to this exhibition as art activism. In an effort to recontextualize art inside a public crisis, I contact organizations that work on the issues I am critically exploring. In Edmonton, my artists talk became a public forum held at the University of Alberta to open up a dialogue about violence towards the women on our Streets and in our community. It was moderated by the former mayor, Jan Reimer, who is currently the director of Alberta Women's Shelters, and included Kate Quinn of the Prostitution Action Awareness Foundation, Dawn Hodgins, who refers to herself as "a survivor of violence and prostitution", Muriel Stanley Venn Director for the Advancement of Aboriginal Women and two officers from Edmonton's newly formed Police Task force, Project KARE. This is about as good as it gets in critical and political artmaking.