ABSTRACT
We’re waiting for the bus that travels south on Granville Street in Vancouver, British Columbia. For weeks we’ve been staring down the street from the bus stop at a storefront window that appears to function as a type of shelter for the public – sometimes seemingly random people stop and step inside only to emerge again and continue on their journey. It dawns on us one morning, when the coffee is extra strong and frothy, that what we’ve been witnessing is in fact a recent exhibition by the Canadian artist Germaine Koh at the Katriona Jeffries Gallery. Shell is one of Koh’s recent explorations into the behaviours and situations that define and construct public and private space. Fashioned from aluminum, plexiglass, and plywood, Koh has modified the glass-fronted private space of the gallery. An enclosure is built on the inside of the space, attached to the existing glass front of the gallery, but with a pane of glass removed in order to create free access to the structure from the street. In contrast to the gallery, the public has access to this space 24 hours a day. Resembling a bus shelter, and conjuring up metaphors of crustacean shells (Szewczyk, 2005) this inbetween space which is both and neither private or public, exposes the vulnerability of private space, the fragility of safety, seclusion, and property (Koh, 2005). As Monica Szewczyk (2005) writes in the exhibition text, Koh’s space accentuates both the contemplation of time, and the wasting or killing of time. Koh’s architectural intervention is a transitory space, waiting to be filled and acted upon, inviting participation in the in-between. It is this openness, uncertainty, and exposure of meaning that situates this work and others like it, as potential acts that allow us to inquire into and create new models for thinking and conducting research. Just as Koh’s art presents a vulnerable space between private and public, how might we begin to think of research methodologies as relational situations that provoke meaning through contemplation, complication, and as alternative models of space and time?
