Douglas Watt: Mayor of the Village
Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC - To Sept 13
Vancouver’s Douglas Watt works in a variety of two- and three-dimensional media forms, whose material bases range from traditional art supplies to found and repurposed objects, to explore an interest in social spaces like bars, bookstores, clinics and changing rooms. For Mayor of the Village, Watt has gone meta. Inspired by Vancouver’s Davie Village, a historic centre of queer life in the city, the artist has configured his meticulous models and related accoutrements in an exhibition design that, in approximating a café, stands in for a neighbourhood.
The primary staging motif for Watt’s café is the booth, represented through backrests cut from patterned and novelty fabrics. Additional signifiers include a chalkboard menu decorated with paillettes, pendant lights glowing softly at the gallery entrance and illuminated rainbow swirls reflecting off the floor. Taken together, these elements recall an international café style reminiscent of the 1990s and 2000s, a time that registers less as a dismissive yawn than a comforting hug for those who remember what life was like before the floods, the fires, the social media platforms and the political vitriol.
A highlight of Mayor of the Village is a show-within-a-show that features a selection of Watt’s better-known model works. Among the earliest is Bath/SRO (2018), based on a bathhouse located above a Davie Street party-supply store—the slashed title refers to the bathhouse’s unofficial status as a site for low-cost, short-term housing. Watt has spoken before of how difficult it is to make art that speaks to/of queer life without succumbing to representational clichés, and how model works like Bath/SRO, Pumpjack (2019), Numbers (2022) and Little Sister’s (2023) provide a space for working through that.
