Douglas Coupland: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything

What makes Canadians uniquely Canadian? In a world

made increasingly accessible and porous through

travel and the internet, cultural identity is a concept that is

more difficult to define than ever, but one that Coupland

has investigated for years in his work. This section of the exhibition continues Coupland’s

investigation utilizing such cultural triggers as images of Terry Fox's leg, landscape prints from the 1940s, a narwhal tusk, and paintings by Emily

Carr and the Group of Seven. By using

imagery and objects laden with symbolic meaning for

Canadians, Coupland has created a “secret handshake” not

easily understood by others.

Growing up on the west coast of North America in the

latter half of the 20th century, Coupland’s childhood

was imbued with a deep-rooted optimism, a sense that

tomorrow would be an improvement on today. The works

in this section use Lego, latent with endless creative

possibilities, to reflect on both the fantastical and dystopic

possibilities born out of this post-war perspective. 

As both a writer and visual artist, Coupland often ignores the traditional divide between these

two disciplines. Using letters, words and books as both

material and context for his art, Coupland harnesses

the power of language in the visual realm, relying on

its form as much as its content to create his work. Coupland astutely integrates language in a myriad of ways

throughout his practice, providing surprising results when

words leave the literary world and become objects in their

own right.

Coupland readily acknowledges the influence of the

Pop art movement on his practice, stating: “Andy Warhol said that

once you saw the world as Pop, you could never look at

it the same way again, and he was right.” At the core of

Coupland’s practice lies a fascination with popular culture

and, like his Pop predecessors, Coupland embraces

banal everyday objects as worthy subjects for art. Plastic

bottles, Post-it notes and QR codes—all common items

with a functional purpose—are manipulated through scale

and medium. Updating Pop classics in light of new technologies,

Coupland recreates iconic works using contemporary

signs and symbols.

The 21st century has been shaped by many things,

but—in Coupland’s view—perhaps most profoundly by the

terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the pervasive

presence of new technologies. The works in this section reference world events including the FLQ crisis, the 9/11 terrorist

attacks and the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, grappling

with the more difficult aspects of contemporary life. Other works here appear initially as abstract compositions,

but when viewed through the lens of a smartphone the

pictures come into a different focus. 

The final work in the exhibition is The Brain, an assemblage of objects that Coupland accumulated over a period of two decades, using a collecting scheme that was deliberately casual and unintellectualized. For him, these objects represent his subconscious leaking out over time. His final goal was what you see here, an attempt to make sense of what became, in the end, over 5,000 objects culled from retail stores, eBay, Craigslist, dumpsters, thrift stores, garage sales and back alleys. Out of these objects Coupland has created a contemporary cabinet of curiosities, a seemingly encyclopedic catalogue of things elaborately connected with “neural” ties.