Keith Langergraber

Fire towers in downtown Vancouver a commentary on climate change.

by

If you drive down Georgia Street in the heart of downtown Vancouver, you may notice an amber glow enveloping what, at first blush, looks like a pair of cabins on stilts. But if you arrive on foot, deliberately, you will experience The Dusk Meridian, a timely and dramatic multimedia installation by Keith Langergraber that conjoins, with theatrical flourish, some of today’s pressing crises in a rustic, post-apocalyptic mise-en-scène.

Two wooden fire towers, scaled down and slightly distorted, are the key sculptural elements in Langergraber’s exhibition, on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s outdoor Offsite space until May 23. His forest outposts reimagine the remote buildings where fire watchers scan the woodlands for smoke that signals a potential conflagration. 

Every aspect of this project has been meticulously researched. Langergraber, a 2009 Sobey Art Award finalist who splits his time between Vancouver and the B.C. Interior, hiked to a dozen fire towers throughout the Pacific Northwest and pored over construction schematics for the towers. He even sourced wood from the bush to give his work a freshly hand-hewn feel. 

The towers sit in a pool of water meant to evoke an alpine lake. Burnt stumps emerge from the water. Within one, encased in resin, is a tiny model of a fire tower that appears, depending on the light, to be either trapped in amber or half emerging, like a chrysalis, in some future era beyond the time of human habitation.

Langergraber, who grew up in the Okanagan, an arid, fire-prone region in the B.C. Interior, is acutely aware of the heightened threat of forest fires due to climate change. The Dusk Meridian reads as a warning that we are on an ominous cusp. Vigilance has been abandoned and short-sightedness abounds. Humanity’s worst impulses are endangering the natural world and its unfathomably complex ecosystems. But who is on watch duty? Langergraber’s towers are empty, and access is barred.

Interestingly, the work is open to other readings on the heels of last summer’s heat dome and the fall’s unprecedented floods and landslides, which limited travel and cut Vancouver off from its usual supply routes. Although the project took shape prior to last year’s calamities, it’s impossible to view the installation without thinking of them. The pond, for instance, could easily be floodwater.

The show’s title refers to the time of day the sun cedes to darkness at an endlessly rotating point on the planet, thus evoking the anxiety-provoking spectre of endless darkness looming on the horizon. Will we come to fear the onset of each season and the weather-related catastrophes it brings? Or will we become accustomed to each season’s apocalyptic palette, like sunlight filtered by gradations of smoke?

International borders also interest Langergraber. His twin structures are largely modelled on two extant towers, one in B.C.’s E.C. Manning Provincial Park, and the other across the border in Washington. The difference in scale reflects the realities of Canada’s relationship to the United States.

It’s obvious, of course, that environmental problems transcend international borders. Howling flames don’t respect customs agents or a line on the map, and nor do surging rivers. Border zones can be unpredictable and dangerous in ways that governments on each side are helpless to control. Residents ignore this uneasy reality at their own peril.

How do these hinterland issues translate to this afterthought of an urban exhibition space amid the luxury towers at the tail end of so-called Rolex Row?

While I appreciate the effective contrast this work’s lighting throws up against the surrounding walls, I like to imagine it installed somewhere with greater foot traffic, a place passersby are more likely to feel like pausing in the presence of others. In winter, it must be said, the work needs its backstory. It would be more effective on a hot summer evening – its lighting, which evokes a now familiar smoky amber, shifts gradually, much like the transition through dusk. 

Since the actual dusk meridian is a constantly moving point, as are the impacts of climate change, perhaps this work needs to move too, with new placements at other sites. Logistically, it would be challenging. But it would be poetically satisfying if it somehow managed to follow its titular trajectory. ■

Keith Langergraber, The Dusk Meridian, at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite from Nov. 20, 2021, to May 23, 2022. 

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Vancouver Art Gallery - Offsite

1100 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, British Columbia