Reece Terris: Murphy’s Law and Crown Mouldings

To say that Vancouver artist Reece Terris has undergone a personal and professional roller-coaster ride over the past few months is something of an understatement. He’s faced monumental technical puzzles, devastating weather conditions and unexpected exhibition rescheduling—all tied to his ambitious installation, Ought Apartment, which, if the Fates finally cooperate, will debut at the Vancouver Art Gallery this May.

Terris, whose other line of work happens to be renovation, has been gathering and storing bits and pieces of residential Vancouver architecture since 2004. As he writes in his artist statement, Terris was “frustrated with the environmental negligence and wastefulness involved in the never-ending home renovation process,” so he devised a massive installation of stacked rooms—each dedicated to a decade from the 1950s to the 2000s—which was commissioned in 2008 to fill the VAG’s rotunda.

Meticulously constructed from Terris’s salvaged collection, each “stage” in the six-storey installation reworks detritus of home improvement, from refrigerators and microwave ovens to plumbing, carpets and wall panelling, as an archival study of material value and cultural taste. It’s a huge undertaking, critically and logistically, and Terris has already been forced to start over from scratch after the work-in-progress was all but destroyed after his barn-studio collapsed during Vancouver’s massive snowstorm in December. So expectations, especially, one would guess, Terris’s, for the upcoming exhibition are high.

In the meantime, be sure to catch Terris’s debut solo exhibition at Jennifer Kostuik Gallery which features a complementary suite of process photographs from Ought Apartment depicting the renovation interiors he’s collected for the installation as well as photos and a dismantled version of his earlier, critically noted sculptural work, Bridge. (1070 Homer St, Vancouver BC)