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Passenger and Tour Guides

15 October 2002

Passenger & Tour Guides Exhibition catalogue, Kevin Rodgers, Derek Sullivan, published by ArtSpeak Gallery, Vancouver.

As the intro says best, “Rodgers and Sullivan explore the construct if the West Coast as it is seen from the outside, with its attendant romanticization and associations with the ‘frontier'”. The package overtook the content, consisting of a beautiful card envelope printed with wild flowers which opens up to photographs of the exhibition of the same name. Other standard tourist images are printed on the envelope sleeves, in such a way that they could be used as postcards if one so wished. The envelope contains sheets of folded paper; most are cream, one is white. The cream sheets, evocative of elegant stationary, contains random handwritten fragments from something like a journal or personal letters. The white sheet unfolds to gorgeous hand drawn map of an imaginary coastal city. This one gets a grade of Z because A+ seems low. (Timothy Comeau)