The Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency is a mobile artist residency located in Vancouver British Columbia on Canada’s Pacific Coast. Currently located on a floating platform at Imperial Landing in Steveston Village, the residency gives the artist a unique perspective on the city from the water. The deckhouse is an off the grid home with modern appliances and comforts and a 360-degree view of the harbour, while the historic cabin acts as a studio for the artist’s activities. Located on the foreshore in close proximity to shopping and amenities, the Blue Cabin provides a home base in this waterfront community within the City of Richmond. The six to eight week time frame allows the artist time for solo production as well as opportunities for engagement within the community.

The Blue Cabin was built in 1927 as a float home by a Norwegian carpenter and shipbuilder and in 1932 was towed to a small cove by Cates Park where it was lifted on pilings above the intertidal zone where it sat for the next 83 years. During those years, the cabin had various occupants most notably artist, musician, and writer, Al Neil and artist Carole Itter. Neil moved into the cabin in 1966 and was joined in the 1970s by Itter. In 2014, three Vancouver arts organizations– Creative Cultural Collaborations (C3), grunt gallery and Other Sights for Artists’ Projects – came together as The Blue Cabin Committee to organize storage, remediation and develop programming for the cabin including the artist residency.

The Blue Cabin committee is dedicated to ensuring the cabin’s legacy continues, benefitting both artists and broader publics alike. The artist residency provides a unique space for regional, national, and international contemporary artists to research and make work, engage with the local arts community, create dialogue with artists outside the Vancouver region, and expand audiences for contemporary art. More than a residency, the cabin also acts as a conduit for Vancouver’s lost histories, offering programming that educates the public about the region’s foreshore history and the communities connected to it. The mix of heritage and contemporary culture in this project creates a rare interface, one that presents opportunities to examine and celebrate where these concepts meet, and how they interact.

Vision

The Blue Cabin Floating Residency is a mobile artist residency that inspires curiosity, engagement and exchange by providing artists with the time, space and support to reflect, research and make work in dialogue with the Blue Cabin’s history and the natural setting of the Vancouver waterways, while providing the public with a distinct and diverse perspective of our heritage.

Mission

• To provide a unique residency experience for professional artists from multiple disciplines, generations and locations.
• To create a hub for research, engagement and production that reflects the Blue Cabin’s links to artistic practice and the various visible and invisible histories of the foreshore, and providing access, through public programming, to these histories.
• To strengthen the contemporary art community by facilitating and opening conversations and cross-cultural exchanges on the environment, foreshore histories, present-day issues, and the crisis of space in the urban metropolis.
• To build partnerships that connect education, preservation and creative thinking with diverse communities and publics in a manner that encourages and supports alternative ideas.

Founding Partner Organizations

Creative Cultural Collaborations (C3)

C3 is a project based visual art society dedicated to stimulating, developing, and executing unique art projects and activities including: building networks, promoting understanding and enhancing cooperation between local, national and international artists and arts organizations by facilitating exchanges of artists, developing and brokering creative collaborative projects, and promoting awareness of the role of the organization. C3 has initiated several large-scale collaborative murals that can be seen in Vancouver. Projects include artistic coordination of the six-storey mural, Through the Eye of the Raven (2010); and the Radius Mural located in the courtyard of the Firehall Arts Centre.  C3 has produced several Big Print Projects, including Big Print Chinatown held at the Chinese Cultural Centre. In 2014, C3 Society launched the Black Strathcona Project, a locative media project situated in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood. The project features 10 video stories about members of Vancouver’s black community. C3 is currently developing a public artwork titled “HERE”.

grunt gallery

grunt gallery is an artist-run centre founded in 1984 in Vancouver, BC, with a vision to be an internationally renowned artist-run centre furthering contemporary art practice. Their mandate is to inspire public dialogue by creating an environment conducive to the emergence of innovative, collaborative, and provocative Canadian contemporary art. Over the past 32 years, grunt has produced hundreds of ongoing programs in exhibitions, performance, publications, media art, archives, web-based works, and other special (community) projects.

Other Sights for Artists’ Projects (Other Sights)

Other Sights develops new and unexpected exhibition platforms outside of the gallery context and provides support to artists, writers and curators interested in creating temporary, critically rigorous work for highly visible locations in public space. They collaborate and share resources with organizations and individuals in order to present projects that consider the aesthetic, economic, and regulatory conditions of public places and public life. Other Sights’ production team offers expertise in curation, project management, presentation, delivery, and promotion of temporary art projects in public spaces. They are dedicated to challenging perceptions, encouraging discourse, and promoting individual perspectives about shared social spaces.