This past spring I worked with four friends from my 1984 art-school grad class ripping apart the innards of a decommissioned high school in North Vancouver and then reassembling the bits into something new. It was for an art installation called Vancouver School. The experience opened up some old wounds and healed a few. The five of us were given an entire school that was decommissioned in June 2005. There was still homework in the desks, and lockets and retainers in the lost and found bucket. It was like old New England, where entire villages vanished, their meals still on the dinner table.
The first two weeks in the abandoned school were Steven Kingy, but once the creepiness left it was like working inside my dreams at night, except it was real and I had control. I could literally, legally, artistically bash the crap out of anything that displeased me. At will I could mangle and trash lockers or AV equipment or uninspired textbooks. It was like being handed a superpower: the power to reconfigure the way I existed with my memories. Within a month, I was no longer having recurring dreams of trying to remember my locker combination or being late for a test in a class I didn't even know I was enrolled in. Gone. Thank you, art.
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