Charles Rea

MAINSTREETERS: Taking Advantage, 1972-1982 surveys the history of a gang of Vancouver artists who lived and worked together in drama, excess, friendship and grief. From 1972 until roughly 1982, they lived along Main Street, the traditional dividing line between the city's working-class immigrant eastside and its more affluent westside. Core members––Kenneth Fletcher, Deborah Fong, Carol Hackett, Marlene MacGregor, Annastacia McDonald, Charles Rea, Jeanette Reinhardt and Paul Wong––engaged in ambitious collaborative media and performance work that charts the rapidly shifting social terrain of the city.

Running In A Maze features an abstracted video of young women and men playfully chasing one another in a maze created by artist Charles Rea. The layering of architectural forms and spaces in conjunction with abstracted text creates a visual labyrinth in which multiple mirrored surfaces collide. Wong’s video documents Rea’s Mirror Maze, an installation consisting of symbols and patterns painted onto large convex security mirrors. The mirrored planes and cryptic text used to decipher information reference modern information systems and other myriad forms of technology. Splicing and fusing of architectural forms and transparent walls in this maze simulate an environment of reflected and reflecting surfaces that parallel Wong’s interest in discovering his own identity.