About Face (Proposal)
Statues of Captain George Vancouver and Lord Frederick Stanley preside over their namesakes, the city and the park respectively. These monuments are part of a future that will have had to have happened, that is, the performance of a future that hasn’t happened, but must.
How will these monuments be mobilized in support of the work of reconciliation being done throughout the city?
About Face follows Call to Action #47 from The Truth and Reconciliation Commission that calls on governments at every level “to repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and lands, such as the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius,...”
About Face repudiates these concepts by turning each statue 180 degrees, thereby changing both the conditions and significance of their display.
Turned to face the trees behind him, Lord Stanley raises his arms in a gesture of mute supplication and awe, retracting his presumption of naming rights over the land he stands on. Through this reversed gesture, the statue turns its back on settler colonial ideology of property and re-directs the viewer’s gaze towards the sovereignty of the land itself.
In his new orientation, Captain Vancouver points directly at City Hall – an architectural manifestation of settler sovereignty – shifting his ‘discovery’ from the landscape that led imperial power forward to the legacy of dominion that followed in his wake. The statue thus points directly at the center of what remains to be reconciled.