The Vancouver Art Gallery is pleased to present Cabin Fever, a new exhibition tracing the history of the North American cabin as an architectural form and a cultural construct, on view June 9 to September 30, 2018. Assembling renderings, artworks and commercial products as well as architectural models, plans and full-scale interventions, Cabin Fever surveys this iconic yet humble lodging?s utility, adulation and prevalence in Canada and the US.
Intended as a repeatable prototype, Mackay-Lyons Sweetapple’s Cliff House (2010) is a modest steel framed cabin perched precariously on a bedrock cliff. Photo by Greg Richardson
From rustic sanctuary of the kind Henry David Thoreau wrote about in his book Walden (1854), to minimalist homesteads popularized by coffee table books Rock the Shack, Hide and Seek, and websites such as Cabin Porn, the cabin and its connotations have evolved over centuries. Cabin Fever explores this evolution through three key themes: ?Shelter?, which introduces the cabin as a practical solution to patterns of westward expansion and emergency relief; ?Utopia?, which examines the cabin as the ideal locale to practice introspection or to escape the conventions of society; and ?Porn,? which positions the cabin as an idea fully integrated into popular culture. Spanning the second floor of the Gallery, Cabin Fever features architectural models, drawings and plans, photography, historical documents, literature, video and ephemera. As the centerpiece of this ...