RUNWAY FLOODED WITH FABULOUS ANGUS DESIGNS
Unique showcase features motifs and patterns created by Indigenous artists
DOWN AND AT ’EM: An otherwise-benign 2015 spinal tumour disabled fashion designer-manufacturer Chloe Angus. Not her career, though. By spring, 2017, her business had reportedly doubled. “I should try to tone it down,” Angus said then. That idea soon fizzled. Her recent runway show in Granville Island’s Performance Works featured 60 new designs, most of them womenswear. Many garment motifs were by Angus’s longtime Haida colleague, Clarence Mills, and Heiltsuk artist KC Hall. Coast Salish, Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka’wakw) and Ojibway themes were featured, too. Seemingly back to “working eight days a week,” the only things Angus may tone down — or wear down — are her wheelchair’s tires.
QUARTER CENTURIONS: In the 24th year of their 25-year practice, architects Russell Acton and Mark Ostry undertook a $51.5-million, 18-floor tower named Tallwood House. Apart from its concrete core and foundation, the UBC campus residence for 404 students was built of glue-laminated mass-wood columns and beams. A photo at Acton Ostry’s 25th anniversary reception shows it, along with projects from their first-year Haida Gwaii primary school to a present-day Vancouver rental tower named The Duke. The firm’s own building could be called Shortwood House. It’s a single-floor-and-basement 1930s structure of 10-by-10 wood columns, 10-by-18 beams, two-by-six joists and shiplap roofing built for Broadway Printers. Acton Ostry paid $3 million for it in 2008. If a 26th-year photo goes up there, it will be of the firm’s Vancouver College project, now half completed.
FOR ART’S SAKE: Auctioneergallerists David and Robert Heffel customarily solicit seven-figure bids for Canadian artworks. Not so at the Burrard Arts Foundation recently, where Robert and online auctions director Lauren Kratzer handled 26 modestly priced works by 24 BAF-familiar contributors. The event also marked the foundation’s move to First-off-Lorne premises that include a gallery, office, two studios and room for residency programs. Directed by Kate Bellringer, BAF was launched by property developer Christian Chan, whose philanthropic family donated $10 million to the UBC campus’s $25-million Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. Chan relishes the Heffels’ involvement in making collecting “the gateway people have to the arts … at an accessible price.”
FIGHT FOR IT: At the South Asian community’s recent 100 Year Journey gala, IT specialist Steven Purewal promoted his imminent book, Duty, Honour, Izzat (a Hindi-Urdu word for honour). He said it’s about 1915’s Second Battle of Ypres where Punjabi brigades supported Canadian troops, whose 1917 victory at Vimy Ridge contributed to our nation’s independence.
GOOD BOY: Mothers are usually proud of their children’s accomplishments. None more so than Claudia Shaw, whose Deep Cove-raised, Berlin-resident son Jeremy’s 111-minute Quantification Trilogy screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Set in the future, the films entail such elements as human atavism syndrome, a man’s dance-immersed life, and a group augmenting its members’ brains with machine DNA to access the forgotten faith that has evolved as a survival necessity. The trilogy also screened at London’s Tate Modern recently, and in New York and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts this week. Shaw’s local gallerist, Sarah Macaulay, sounded proud, too.
CURTAIN CALL: The imminent closure of the Entertainment District’s Doolin’s Irish Pub and Belmont Bar will end decades of sometimes rip-roaring hospitality. Some recall the Granville-atNelson hotel’s era as the Belmont and later Nelson Place when its pub, then called a beer parlour, welcomed Indigenous patrons who might have been discouraged elsewhere. The clearest echo, though, is of then-teenage singer Michael Buble and the Smoking Section band playing the hotel’s old BaBalu Lounge and all but blowing out its doors and windows. A more decorous Buble will be photographed alongside guests at the B.C. Women’s Hospital + Health Centre Foundation’s Glow gala Oct. 13.
SHOW TIME: High-end fashion stores’ runway-show season has begun. Nicole Yang ’s large Leone emporium recently staged one. So did Rachel Kapsalis’s Vetrina boutique. Tracey Pincott, the doyen of fashion-show producers, reflected the latter’s 20th anniversary by putting female models in platinum wigs. That, and the challenge of having guests see them negotiate a doglegged staircase in high heels, might have cued Kapsalis’ daughter Ariana Nigro to sing Platinum Blonde’s 1985 hit, Crying Over You. Instead, she went with Chris Isaak’s 1990 Wicked Game.
SUNDAY WALK: The Friends of the Vancouver City Archives organization will greet guests at the Dunlevy-and-Union intersection at 10 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 14. John Atkin will then conduct them on a $15 walk called The Roads to Nowhere (roadstonowhere. eventbrite.com). It refers to the demolition-pending Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts that were to be part of an urban-freeway scheme. In 1972, mayor-premierand-cannabis-executive-to-be Mike Harcourt and future city councillor Darlene Marzari joined Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Assoc. evaluation director (and future UBC board of governors chair) Shirley Chan to help kill the project. One wonders if they’ll join the walk on Sunday.
DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Franco Felice’s Cafe Il Nido has now spent 30 years in Robson-at-Thurlow’s 110-year-old Manhattan Building.