Imagine it is night; you are moving alone through the city you know by day, pausing before store windows, standing in a leaf-strewn parking lot, or on the half-lit edge of a suburban corner. Imagine the chill of the west coast autumn rain, and reflections of neon that burn on the soaked pavement, or are mirrored in the glassy ink of the night harbour. Now, scratch at the patina of ordinariness that you associate with such places, and consider our proximity to the sex economy through the blind eye we turn toward power.
Inspired by our collective unease with stories about missing and murdered women, Femke Van Delft aims her photographic stare at the largely urban landscape of Vancouver. Originally titled Topographic Reminders, Missing offers up 50 photographs, concrete sculpture, text, and map-making to inscribe a difficult-to-ignore cartography of spaces, times and events. Van delft explores our socio-historical relationship to the commercialisation of sex through her primary trope -- a life-sized pair of women’s legs, cast in concrete.
She photographed these iconic, high-heeled sculptures at the airport, and at a fitness club, outside of stores that sell toys and candies, cars, music, and style; at a church, and a bank, and a library they eerily take on the quality of the surrounding light in each location. Illuminated by the flood of BC Place, they stand as white as the walls that surround them. In other images they appear as spectres, glowing softly blue at the forest edge of Stanley Park, or flesh-like beneath the sparkling ball of Science World. Across the street from Waterfront Terminal, they emerge from the darkness looking scarred; and in front of a Bridal Boutique, they are barely visible in silhouette. Van Delft’s placement of the legs evokes a haunting vulnerability that simultaneously conjures a sense of nakedness, exposure and isolation. It is difficult not to associate the legs with the highly visible women who work in the sex trade, and while the realities of some women have inspired the installation, Missing invites viewers to move beyond sensationalized representations -- an act eased by the knowledge that they are casts of department store props used to display nylons. This work questions our complacency with what surrounds us in our daily lives, urging us to put away our reassuring platitudes about whom it is that goes missing, in what ways, and from where.
Van Delft hauls the ordinary into the realm of the disturbing through selected passages of information drawn from official history, from scholarly studies, advertisements, popular media and from her own observations. Her plucking at the past and present touches down on urban planning, public spending, legal decisions, political scandals, and the shifting terrains of technology, transportation, media and advertising. Few industries of culture-production escape Van Delft’s gaze. We read quips about the origin of the stiletto, about GHB - the date-rape drug, and the corporate rivalry between Viagra™ and Levitra™. Historical and contemporary reports of the abuse of public power appear near information on the marketing of fishnet stockings to children “ages 3 and up.” Juxtaposed with statistics on the sex trade are those that speak to the successful sales of videogames combining sex and violence. Here and there, we catch a glimpse of difficult negotiations over public space; times when people living with sexually-contracted illnesses were segregated, or when a “clean sweep” meant the removal of undesirables from large-scale civic celebrations. The past folds into the present as we are textually cued to consider more current manifestations of NIMBY: people throwing pennies at women who are sex trade workers, or large neighbourhood meetings in opposition to locating drug treatment or recovery facilities in healthy neighbourhoods. The larger picture includes the enormous budgets for sporting events and enforcement activities alongside figures of cuts in government funding to services for marginalized people. Missing is an invitation to contemplate a complex field of power surrounding so-called “social problems,” and we are presented with no easy answers.
On a plinth at one end of the gallery, Van Delft places a map of the city of Vancouver drawn accurately street by street, and then applied through photo-transfer to fifteen 11 x 14 inch stretched canvases. Small red dots mark the exact locations where her photographs were taken - sites we deem out of harm's way - places where we buy, or where we wait for a bus; where we take visitors to admire scenery or where we are educated; places from which we are governed, places of industry and pleasure, power and ordinariness. The spiralling lines that comprise Van Delft’s rendering of city blocks evoke riddled relationships and histories that map out exclusion, abuses of power and exploitation in Vancouver, but there is a largely unmarked zone on this map. In the Downtown Eastside – a neighbourhood made notorious through news stories and TV dramas with gritty street scenarios - there is but one address. The final photograph depicts the humble street front of Amnesty International, an organization that recently issued a report titled: Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to Discrimination and Violence against Indigenous Women in Canada. Having moved from one image to the next, from one unsettling narrative to another - we arrive at a destination where we confront systemic disregard for the safety and well-being of people whose lives are more often than not, branded by racism, sexism and poverty.
One woman who came to the opening of Van Delft’s exhibition remarked: “At first the legs are disembodied, then they become witnesses, and then they are people.” Like the concrete legs, Missing stands as witness to the hidden privilege of power that permeates our consumer desires and forms a back-drop to our awkward waltz around gendered identities, violence and sexual exploitation.

Leslie Robertson
7 January 2005