Local artist Jay White wants Bowen Islanders to join people from across the Sea to Sky region in Horseshoe Bay next weekend to voice their concerns about various resource extraction and shipping projects proposed for Howe Sound.
This includes the proposed McNab Creek Gravel Mine and the proposed Woodfibre LNG Plant. He also wants to teach these people how to make pin-hole cameras, and to pick a spot near one of these proposed industrial sites to set these cameras up in late February.
“The images that come from the pinhole cameras can be beautiful, and they have very long exposures – between six and eight weeks – so they aren’t really about photographing something with clarity,” says White. “For me, this is more about getting people physically into places where they are discouraged from going. It’s a sort of playful act of counter surveillance.”
White, who is working on this project with fellow artist Gen Robertson, has carried out the project once before along the route of the proposed Kinder Morgan Pipeline expansion in Burnaby.
“The pipeline route takes about a day to walk, and you are technically trespassing in a lot of the places along the way,” says White. “But the point is that we should be allowed to see where these projects might happen. Participants come back from these places with lived experiences and stories, and I feel in the telling of those stories we can make a larger, lasting impact.”
White and Robertson are hosting their workshop, called “Pinhole Cameras and Pipelines,” at St. Monica’s Church in Horseshoe Bay at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 28.
Workshop participants aren’t required to set up the cameras in February.
