Exit Strategies

SNAP is pleased to present Exit Strategies by Sylvan Hamburger, in the gallery from August 28 to October 2.

Exit Strategies features the printed impressions of ten doors salvaged from the sites of demolished homes in 2021. The doors are the debris of East Vancouver’s gentrification, its exaggerated displacement and reconstruction. In salvaging, I intended to witness my community’s transformation; in witnessing, I felt a desire to flee.

Responding to the upheaval of land, culture and community, Exit Strategies became an endeavor to visualize my fantasies of escape. I took the doors to the longstanding rehearsal studio of my father’s local theatre company, unused since the start of the pandemic. Amongst the sets and costumes, I imagined and cut passageways through the doors’ worn, flat surfaces. Later, in the months before a rent hike and subsequent eviction, I inked and hand-pressed these doors onto found bedsheets. Through the process of cutting and relief printing by hand, my intention began to shift: the impulse to flee became a renewed desire to attend. As the room filled with theatrical departures, Exit Strategies became an exploration of colourful transformation—revealing new thresholds within architecture slated for destruction.

ARTIST TALK: Thursday, September 23 at 7 – 8:30pm | Online

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Sylvan Hamburger is visual artist working in printmaking, installation, and public art. He uses salvaged architecture to consider the historic and social implications of changing built environments. A graduate of Mount Allison University, Sylvan completed the Printmaking Studio Practicum program at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in 2018-2019. He lives in East Vancouver on the unceded homelands of the Xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Selílwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.