Dorothy-June Fraser


"Oppenheimer Park" (2006)

Vancouver/world-reknowned artist Attila Richard Lukacs has a show at Anti-Soical skate shop (located on Main, at Broadway).
Hmmmm, the world of skateboarding and art in combo?
Yeah, it’s not new. But what is these days?
Well, actually, I’m going to go straight back and contradict myself. Not only is the fact that a “high-brow” artist exhibiting at a skate shop new, the politics involved with the work itself is new to the skate world.
Being somewhat involved with the skate scene of the Lower Mainland, I have been to many shows of the “low-brow” skate art-type. Or Skart, if you will, and you should.
But contractions aside, the world of skating and politics don’t usually interweave so tightly.
In fact, this show, based on local and world atrocities, is possibly the most political work I have seen Lukacs do since a show a few years ago when he made a connection between the Columbia shuttle crash and Palestine, in his piece "Texas, Palestine" .
The texture of Lukacs’ work this time around is somewhat more defined in the piece, Oppenheimer Park than his others. Perhaps the locality and closeness of the subject itself, our crumbling social network in Strathcona and the DTES made it something more sensual, touchable.
While his other work in the show focuses on war and destruction, human atrocities, human monsters, even, the Oppenheimer piece is the first you see in the gallery that is past the shoes, boards and clothes that populate the rather social Anti-Social.
Is there too much to deal with here? Is relating war at home with war abroad a hard subject to broach. Uhm, no.
The show itself provides the viewer with a provocative attempt at reestablishing a North American connection to the war on “terror” going on in SEVERAL locales across the globe.

"Golden Lion's gonna show me where the light's at" (2006)

There’s some TV series out now called Rome, and when I gave away something about an episode of Lost, I told my slightly-pissed friend he could give away the ending of Rome.

“That’s not fair. You know how it ended. It fell.”

Well, he’s got me there. Yes, imperialism at it’s peak is permeating all aspects of culture and the goal of many local/worldwide artists is to shed light upon said fact. The fact that really took me in here is not only that I’ve admired Lukacs' work since I became an art nerd (a while ago...), but that the venue was a skateboard shop, not an unusual venue (in fact, they have shows at AS all the time) but an unusual topic. The realm of politics is usually left to the bigger, slightly more funded galleries and is not exactly the hottest topic with most skateboarders, hoards of them proud to say they have no idea of what is going on in the world outside coping, capping and the various other skateboard terms I cannot recall this early in the morning.
Point is, go see the show. Buy a hoodie. Be local. Be global.