DINA GONZALEZ MASCARO

Rubble

“In Argentina, I remember going to watch when buildings were being demolished (I am fascinated with architecture and its destruction …) When it was over I would take a piece of rubble to my house and paint it white” (Dina Gonzalez Mascaro, April 2007).

Dina Gonzalez Mascaro has always been interested in the destroyed as part of a whole. Her exhibit, Rubble, at grunt gallery is her most recent in a series of projects set off by the past five years of architectural change in Vancouver. It is an eclectic mix of drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures made about or from the rubble of the continual construction, demolition, and re-construction of the city.

Gonzalez Mascaro works with material that could be seen as artefacts, as public, maybe even as historic, but the materials themselves are inherently devoid of any sense of the local. Building materials—rebar, cement, nails, brick, wood and plaster—are some of the constituents of her lexicon for the presence of what is no longer here. Not here. As in the hospital that used to be on 10th and Heather, or the parking lot that used to be on the corner of Seymour and Smithe.

This rubble is nothing like what she collected as a young woman in Argentina. There, to take home a piece of the Palacio Municipal, for example, would be to collect a fragment of historic architecture that could be 150 to 350 years old. Having a piece of the building, a freize, column, plinth, a scroll, even the foundation or wall, would reflect a sense of its value as a precious part of a venerated history. Here in Vancouver, Gonzalez Mascaro has created an exhibition of unpretentious rubble, a process that resonates with some of the ideas in El Hombre, Todo Los Hombres (“the man, all the men”), a book that she referred to in her artist’s talk; the text’s meaning translates in her exhibit as a single piece of rubble that can stand in for all of the rubble, or vice versa: each of the works and its components, a synecdoche for the city, all of the city, including the parts that have disappeared…
Marcia Crosby 2007.