Description
Michelle closes her tour with a visit to the Jacobsen Apartments, a block from the grunt gallery, that features its own gallery space.
Transcript
Oh. This location, the Jacobsen. Wow. From here, I’m full of the traffic of Main and Broadway. This space 254 East Second, I guess it’s connected with synchronicity for me. I landed here after having been out of the Mount Pleasant area. I was in the country for quite some time. Five years felt like a decade. And when I came back, I was teasing my friends saying that I wanted to hear traffic. I wanted to bump into people on the sidewalk. I wanted to smell people’s smoke in barbecues, and hear their loud music. And it’s so many memories associated with this area as we started at the grunt. So when I landed in this space, it was perfect. At that time, I was a single woman and it was nice and tiny, just perfect for me. I remember coming home and I’d find friends on the porch. I chose it because it was very close to the Main Street Skytrain station. And I’ve got lots of memories going to the Seawall, cycling to Granville Island to work on a book project, just kind of getting to know the city via bike travels. Being able to walk, of course, to the Swiss Bakery. And because my formative years in the arts were linked to gallery spaces and performance, I was really drawn to this space because it had this gallery and that was key to my desire to live in this location. So I did a few shows here. One for Marta Pan, one for my partner, I did a Hapapalooza closing party and other gatherings and stuff. This gallery space was key to why I chose to live here.
I met my partner down at a gallery in Railtown at the bottom of Main, and I bought a painting from him. And when I asked him to install it in my place, he fell in love with the place too, and he never left. So we have now left this area and we’re technically in Cedar Cottage, but this space is kind of the space where the third location in Mount Pleasant where I lived. My first location was 503 East 8th. And then I was up at Main and 11th. And then I was down here and it holds a lot of memories as the exit point. The kind of end of my single life.
I shot a piece here called Becoming and it’ll really hold a lot of memories for me. And so now we’re back just one block away from the grunt gallery, where we started this memory walk together.
