What does the millennial have to smile about? Trevor Discoe’s exhibition You Are Here at Dynamo Arts Association suggests that you have “arrived.” But where, exactly? That which is presented as a gestalt for success, taste, and relevance – your new condo! Discoe has taken urban real estate marketing tropes – images with a projected sense of mastery over one’s wealth and life management – and reduced them to empty signifiers in three new and untitled works. We know he isn’t trying to sell us a lifestyle, so we can rest easy looking at a small monitor playing a compilation of immaculate show homes. I watched with a sense of remorse for the artist who found and edited footage the together. The camera work is meant to give you a sense of the layout – granite countertops, designer furniture, and splashes of colourful throw cushions against a monochromatic living room set – but there are no sign of life. 
Trevor Discoe, You Are Here
A sculpture representing a generic architectural model is sequestered in a recessed room in the gallery and can only be viewed through two large windowpanes. Discoe’s treatment of the sculpture feels like that of an alien object in quarantine or some kind of incubating seed. Either way, the creepy sci-fi narratives resonate.
The most prominent work is a projection that looms over the gallery like a small billboard. Individuals smile for the camera against a white background. Appearing in succession, the slow smile of the millennial evokes a conflicted reaction. Some gush at the sight of a familiar face (many can be identified as members from the artist-run community), yet the expressions articulate something deeply cynical. The demographic in this video is hardly on a trajectory towards homeownership, but these fresh faces are often cast into the metropolitan complex of various condo marketing schemes: walking down the street with a small dog in one hand, a cluster of shopping bags in the other, laughing into cellphone or eating a salad.
The simplicity of the smile can be overlooked as banal or saccharine (as the paranoid intellectual looks on) and the human element drawn from the local participants might only circulate amongst a small community of emerging cultural workers. Discoe’s footage was produced during a barbeque at a building where several artist studios reside. He asked his friends and acquaintances to smile without being told why. They did so without skepticism or complaint. Almost accidentally, in an attempt to merely mock marketing creatives, Discoe captures a kind of richness that exists before the threat of capitulation under the weight of our own images used against us.
Dynamo Arts Association: http://www.dynamoarts.ca/
Trevor Discoe: You Are Here continues until June 17.
Steffanie Ling's essays, criticism, and art writing have been published alongside exhibitions, in print, and online in Canada and the United States. She is the editor of Bartleby Review, an occasional pamphlet of criticism and writing in Vancouver, and a curator at CSA Space. She is Akimblog’s Vancouver correspondent and can be followed on Twitter and Instagram @steffbao.
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Trevor Discoe at the Dynamo Arts Association
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