J.Pac Production's recent "Lower Swedish Cabin" video was featured at the Vancouver Art Gallery in a new exhibition called “Cabin Fever” which ran from June 9th thru September 30th, 2018!
The Vancouver Art Gallery's "Cabin Fever" exhibition offers a historical and cultural survey of cabins in North America. The title of the exhibition draws from the idiomatic term for an anxious state of mind resulting from a prolonged stay in a remote or confined place.
Historical Cabin's are as much a cultural construct as it is an enduring architectural form, as much a symbol of a certain way of life as it is a marker of the human relationship to place. Such complex connotations and meanings have, at times, rendered the cabin indefinable and elusive. But at its essence, the cabin conjures ideas of a simpler, more primal existence.
It stands apart from ordinary life. It provides basic shelter. It allows for communion with nature. Forever associated with Henry David Thoreau and his iconic (and often misunderstood) retreat on Walden Pond, as well as countless other thinkers and writers from Martin Heidegger to Michael Pollan, the cabin has allowed for considerable philosophical inquisition. It is also an object of consumption and a compelling part of our visual culture, popularized by coffee table books—Rock the Shack, Hide and Seek, Retreat—and websites such as Cabin Porn. No longer is a cabin simply a cabin. Having been appropriated for politics, bastardized in the name of design, and romanticized by the mainstream and counterculture alike, the cabin, as we understand it in a contemporary context, is rife with contradiction.
Perhaps this is because in Canada and the United States the tradition of the cabin has long been associated with the frontier, and as the idea of the frontier changed—both geographically and psychologically—so too did motivations for inhabiting this type of architecture. The old associations endure, but we've ascribed new meaning to the cabin. Whereas initially it provided a pragmatic solution for shelter, it has come to represent an idealistic vision of an unattainable past. So potent and seductive is this image that increasingly we present it as a panacea to the modern condition. This is both an obvious response to our over-stimulated world and a puzzling outlet for a culture intent on being connected.
The exhibition’s layout is structured as a historical narrative in three parts and told through architectural models, drawings and plans; photography; historical documents, literature, film and ephemera. Full-scale cabins, or full-scale structural fragments, will be used in several instances to provide palpable reference to materials, scale and building technique. Installations in the high-wall galleries, and a selection of artwork spread throughout the exhibition, will reveal how ideas of the cabin have been manifest in artistic practice.
CHECK OUT OUR "Lower Swedish Cabin" VIDEO ON DISPLAY!
🎬 For more on this exhibition visit: tinyurl.com/vanart-cabinfever
Filmed/ Edited / Produced By: Joe Paciotti of J.Pac Productions
Voiceover By: Joseph Frantz
Executive Producer: Delaware County Historical Society
Official Website of the Lower Swedish Cabin: https://swedishcabin.info
Official Website of J.Pac Productions: www.JPacProductions.com
Official Website of The Vancouver Art Gallery: www.vanartgallery.bc.ca
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