ISABELLE HAYEUR, "Fire with Fire," Vancouver, East Hasting Street
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"Fire with Fire 2"
Isabelle Hayeur, "Fire with Fire 2," 2010, 3 channel video installation. Vancouver Olympics 2010.
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"Fire with Fire 1"
Isabelle Hayeur, "Fire with Fire 1," 2010, 3 channel video installation. Vancouver Olympics 2010.
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"Fire with Fire 2"
Isabelle Hayeur, "Fire with Fire 2," 2010, 3 channel video installation. Vancouver Olympics 2010.
ISABELLE HAYEUR, Fire with Fire
Vancouver, East Hasting Street
By Michael Harris
I remember the first time I saw Isabelle Hayeur’sFire with Fire video installation. A four storey building seemingly ablaze, with projected flames filling the windows of the top three floors, best viewed from the derelict end of Vancouver’s East Hastings Street. At five p.m. each day, as dusk settled over a city overrun with Olympic boosterism, Hayeur’s work was switched on; staff waited 30 seconds between igniting the second floor projector, the third, and the fourth, to heighten the sense of inexorable consumption.
In a few minutes, the fire builds to a mute roar, filling 20-foot expanses of glass (backed by opaque paper for the projection to play on). The effect from street level was thrilling and, each evening, homeless folk paused alongside international media and wayward tourists to collectively indulge in Hayeur’s mediated shadenfreude (enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others).
It was Valentine’s Day 2010, that I first stumbled upon the “fire” (and most of us did stumble upon it—there was such a cacophony of “Cultural Olympiad” happenings that one was excused from drafting itineraries that month). Valentine’s Day; an all consuming fire; I thought of eros.
In erotic love, we desire what we cannot have. Once our ardour has consumed or conquered some thing, some body, it extinguishes itself like fire that has guzzled all its oxygen. But Hayeur’s fire enjoys a limitless rampage. The building is engorged by flames each night, over and over again. In this paralysis of desire, it holds the viewer in a state of constant expectation; we wait for the run-down structure to collapse, even as we understand this flame is no more dangerous than the “Fire Channel” on TV at Christmas.
A certain connection to that other unquenchable flame—the Olympic torch—was inevitable. Each day, tens of thousands wandered to the Convention Centre to gawk through chainlink fence at the extravagant cauldron where the eternal “spirit of the games” licked the air. I was dumbfounded to see the masses shutter-bugging and cramming together to gaze on something as commonplace as an element – like moths to a flame. What did fire mean to these people? And what did they think the fire was about to do?
Each night these same masses convened at the city’s central Robson Square for a pyrotechnic show of decidedly mediocre proportions. Yet they hooted, sang anthems, and seemed thrilled by the balls of flame that issued from makeshift towers.
Hayeur’s installation does (as the title suggests) fight these brazen blazes on its own terms. Fire with Fireemphasizes the terror of such “spirit” by drawing the viewer’s mind away from pre-fab emotion and toward a consideration of, say, the riotous and tortured history of Vancouver’s downtown eastside—where dozens of female sex workers were murdered in recent years and addicts are shuffled along each time a “spirited” condo development gentrifies another block. (Fire with Fire was installed, in fact, a stone’s throw from another reminder of civic trauma—Stan Douglas’ monumental photo-mural in the Woodwards complex, that recreates the infamous Gastown Riots of 1971).
Fire itself, like desire, is amoral. Whether it warms you or destroys you, it’s just doing what it does. What Hayeur’s fantastic installation gives us is a chance to stand before heatless flame for once, to calmly witness disaster and do nothing to avert it. We’re left—standing on a cold sidewalk—wondering how many times in our lives we’ve done this already.