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Asylum Lives On in Public Art
By Robin Laurence
The Georgia Straight
October 30 - November 6, 2003

"The provincial asylum is a mere five-minute walk from here," says artist Michael de Courcy, sitting in the basement studio of his home on a quiet street in New Westminster. Surrounded by tables, fans, screens, and drying racks--one of the multidisciplinary hats he wears is master printmaker--de Courcy recalls picking up rumours of change in his neighbourhood a couple of years ago. "I heard that the Woodlands School had been closed and that B.C.B.C. [British Columbia Buildings Corp.] was going to institute a study and a public process, whereby they would decide what they would do with the 64-acre site."

Camera and tape recorder in hand, de Courcy began attending the meetings, listening to presentations from government officials, planning consultants, urban designers, and architects, and listening, too, to the concerns of local residents and social activists. Initially, he had no clear idea of what shape his public-art project would take. He was impelled only by a belief that the meetings and their subject were important to his community. "I had the sense that this was something momentous," he recalls of the discussions around the site, viewed by some as historically and socially significant and by others as a prime parcel of developable real estate. "I was there as an observer, a witness," he says.

De Courcy recites some of Woodlands's history, from its original incarnation as a provincial asylum for the "mentally unfit" in 1878 and its subsequent rethinking as a psychiatric hospital to its conversion, in the 1950s, to a school for children and young people with mental handicaps, its phase-out, beginning in the mid-1980s and ending in the late 1990s, and its eventual rezoning and sale--to a developer.

Titled ASYLUM: a long, last look at woodlands/1878 to 2003, de Courcy's project will be on view at the New Westminster Public Library until November 22. The partite work includes large, composite photographs of the interior of the oldest building on the site; life-size photographic portraits of former residents of Woodlands; silkscreen prints of newspaper clippings concerning the school; binders filled with photographic and textual records of the public meetings; and a mixed-media installation recapitulating the third reading of the rezoning application at New Westminster City Hall. All are presented in an unslick, unframed, grassroots manner, and all have been created and funded by de Courcy himself. "This is a project where the mandate was to make art out of real things and real issues," he says. Then he adds, "It's the poetry of information."

The photos of the empty interiors of the 19th-century central building are especially eloquent, documenting small bedrooms, barred windows, communal showers, kitchen, day rooms, staff rooms, and long, desolate corridors. Stripped of furniture, some areas look surprisingly clean and bright, a function, probably, of Woodlands' recent use as a set for film and television productions. Others are ankle-deep in peeling paint and asbestos insulation collapsed from the ceilings above.

"I was responding to this sense of history," de Courcy says. Only gradually did he awaken to what was missing: the former residents of Woodlands School. "The residents were the marginalized group that had no voice," he says. "I wanted to put a human face on...what had gone on in this place."

He began to network with parents and activists, and gradually met, talked with, and photographed 13 middle-aged former residents. A few, especially those with multiple physical and mental disabilities, were living in group homes. Others had become advocates and activists, struggling for restitution for abuses they believe they had suffered. Others still had fallen out of the care system and were living on the streets and under bridges, de Courcy recounts. "You're looking at where they came from and where they are now, and you're allowed to imagine what's gone on in-between."

The Woodlands project isn't "ivory tower", he insists. "This is purely blue-collar artwork, it's the frontlines--collaborating with people and working on issues those people have an interest in." His low-tech, low-budget, independent way of working, without public or corporate funding, is itself a statement, consonant with the conceptual, anti-institutional, community-oriented art he has been undertaking since the 1970s. "I'm not interested in making applications to juries of architects and planners to do a piece that's going to sit in front of a building," he says. "I'm looking for meaning in the job of making art....I just can't sustain interest in something that is mechanical or where there's no emotional content, no human connection."

Nor, however, is he interested in sentimentalizing his subjects. Flipping through one of his portfolios, de Courcy pauses at a photo of Richard, a grey-haired man wearing a white shirt, black tie, and baseball cap embroidered with the words I Survived Woodlands.

"We're all connected somehow," de Courcy says. "We're all part of it."

 

Copyright information © 2004 Michael de Courcy