Germaine Koh: Home Made Home

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Germaine Koh, "Home Made Home: Lululiving," 2018

wood-frame structure, 160 sq. ft.

Opening Reception: Saturday, June 16, 7:00 – 9:00 pm

Curator: Nan Capogna

Vancouver artist Germaine Koh contributes to the housing discourse through her exploration of small-scale dwelling as social sculpture in her solo exhibition Home Made Home. An advocate of creative space design, accessibility, sustainability and self-sufficiency, Koh’s compact structures probe the complex housing issues relevant to the Lower Mainland. Home Made Home will include several of Koh’s structures - a portable, convertible telephone booth, a service kiosk, and a prototype for essential living services. Her newest construction, Home Made Home: Lululiving, is a 160 square foot micro-dwelling built on a flatbed trailer that will be located outdoors near the Richmond Art Gallery and Cultural Centre. This structure demonstrates progressive building technologies and ecological efficiencies of small-scale living, and prompts analogies to worker’s housing, floating homes, barges, and shipping containers common to Richmond and Vancouver. While it is tempting to align Lululiving with the Tiny Home boutique industry so prevalent in contemporary media including reality TV shows and YouTube channels, for Koh, the structure is a vehicle for examining ideas of home and viable living space in the current Vancouver housing market.

Two separate displays are included in the exhibition that present a range of housing forms and contextualize Koh’s works: historical images of do-it-yourself shelters and vernacular architecture from the local communities’ history, and contemporary small home alternatives to the large conventional single-family home. A 200 square foot schematic model built for the exhibition functions as a proxy living space and houses the archival images depicting First Nations settlements, pole houses, and squatter shacks in Vancouver and Richmond. FinnSlough, a squatter’s settlement established by Finnish fishermen in the late 19th century in Richmond is the last of these communities to exist in the region.

The second display, comprised of architectural presentation boards featuring small home alternatives, profiles case studies of small, prefab and mobile housing by designers, builders and activists invited by Koh and include Tiny House Warriors, Backcountry Hut Company and Lanefab. These projects, both conceptual and realized, highlight an underlying social and political momentum toward expanding conventional notions of housing and social responsibility. All of the projects, local to the Pacific Northwest, innovatively respond to circumstances of homelessness, eviction, housing affordability and environmental threat.

Home Made Home draws attention to the systems and conventions operating within the present housing crisis, prompting questions of sustainability and civic engagement.

Curator Nan Capogna explains, “While the challenges loom large given the dominant social, political and economic realities, Koh’s smart work redirects us to the notion of human scale”.