In Before Demolition, Emily Neufeld paid tribute to the single detached dwelling and its shifting status. Her focus on the home drew from her experience growing up with a father who worked as a building contractor, and is grounded in her awareness of Vancouver’s housing crisis marking a divide between the haves and the have-nots.
She explained “most people can no longer afford detached homes, and because of that many houses are being sold and demolished to make room for further densification. Rising housing costs are displacing people, and those who are able to stay suffer under large mortgages and crippling property taxes. [...] My goal is to bring a moment of pause and reflection to the rapidly-changing housing landscape around the lower mainland”.
Scouting houses set for demolition, Neufeld obtained permission to enter these sites during the brief window between the departure of the inhabitants and the arrival of the wrecking ball. Once inside these domiciles slated to be torn down and rebuilt into townhouses, condos, or larger homes, Neufeld searched for the traces of humanity within these “empty” houses—all the subtle effects that touched her: ghostly imprints of pictures removed from the walls, worn-out areas on carpets, a view of the lawn from the window above a kitchen sink, a cranny of cobwebs. The details she found moving share parallels with Roland Barthes’ notion of a photograph’s potential “punctum,” which he outlines in Camera Lucida as “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” These punctum-like elements “disrupting” the house’s architecture led Neufeld to imagine those who had once lived there, and even to see the houses as people, each with their own special temperaments. And indeed, Neufeld describes her time spent in these houses as performing “funeral rites.”
These rites included Neufeld cutting away carpet to reveal hardwood floors, slicing into walls in order to create new sightlines between rooms, moving sections of lawn indoors. Neufeld photographed these short-lived in situ interventions. Drenched in light streaming through uncovered windows, these brief transformations suggest a fleeting optimism before their inevitable destruction.
For Before Demolition, Neufeld also created a set of sculptures from the devalued materials gleaned from these houses. A furnace duct, old curtains, discarded ferns, light fixtures, insulation, plywood, and concrete became the building blocks of free-standing structures—some awkward and fragile, while others are strong and squat—that roughly allude to the human body, evoking the equivalencies Neufeld makes between people and their homes. Mixing architecture and sculpture with an almost archeological sensibility, Before Demolition hints at the many narratives that can be found within domestic lodgings. As she writes, “Homes embody layers of history: memories, stories of lives lived in space, rooms full of light and sound, stratified like the soil they are embedded in.”
Emily Neufeld lives and works on the unceded territories of the Squamish, TsleilWaututh and Musqueam peoples in what is currently named North Vancouver. Her practice investigates place and the layers of memory and psychic history that accumulate in our material world. She is committed to examining her own Mennonite and Scottish settler colonial histories in understanding her relationship to this place as Indigenous land. Recent solo exhibitions include Prairie Invasions: A Lullaby (2020, Richmond Art Gallery, BC), Before Demolition: Tides (2019, Eyelevel Gallery, NS), Motherlands (The Pole, Den Haag, ND) and Before Demolition (2017: Burrard Arts Foundation, BC). She received her BFA from ECUAD in 2013. Neufeld has created and participates in community sharing gardens, and sees land as fundamental to her research process.
To learn more about Neufeld’s Work, visit her website.