Inside Vancouver
One Man's Trash
By Michael Harris published May 1, 2009
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Reece Terris has created guerrilla artworks around town for years. Now he’s invading the Vancouver Art Gallery with a six-storey high-rise of castoffs
The night after Christmas, three feet of snow blanketed a barn outside Langley. Reece Terris, a contractor and sometime installation artist, had spent years dragging castoff appliances, cabinets, and rugs there, hoarding whatever caught his eye from reno clients around Vancouver. He had become a salvage artist, saving naugahyde chairs and Kermit-coloured shag rugs; with painstaking care, he was refashioning them into six decade-specific miniature apartments. The Vancouver Art Gallery had commissioned a 60-foot tower for its rotunda—six floors of architectural intervention, a core sample of home-décor history that would drill from the present down to the 1950s. Terris was about to start trucking his masterpiece (the heaviest, largest work ever installed at the VAG) into town.
But then the roof of the barn began making popping sounds. The rafters started to bend. He called his uncle, who lived next to the building, in the morning, and was assured that the barn (once a turkey farm) was still standing. By the time Terris got there, the quarter-mile-long structure had been levelled—taking a year’s worth of assembly with it.
Terris, 40, is the opposite of the precious conceptual artist Vancouver has become known for. He drives a pickup, wears a yellow baseball cap, tends modest sideburns, and uses words like “stuff” and “yeah” while discussing his few monumental works. There’s a hockey net and sticks in his new studio at 1000 Parker Street—an old parking lot where Terris and a couple of dozen friends lugged what they could save from the collapsed barn. He’s been working at 1000 Parker, Sisyphus-style, on what he calls “the bankruptcy trek.” (The VAG ponied up $200,000 for the installation, but Terris’s own mortgage is suffering to pay for it.) Ought Apartment opens (barring further catastrophe) this month at the VAG. Terris may have been calm when he saw the collapsed barn but he broke down midway into the rebuild. “I had to salvage everything twice.”
