Incidental Reflections on the Urban in Taizo Yamamoto’s Carts, Hedges, Lions
/Carts, Hedges, Lions reads as an urban archival project featuring detailed illustrations by Taizo Yamamoto that render moments and decades of Vancouver’s landscapes. Complimenting his drawings, Aaron Peck, Kevin Chong, and Jackie Wong bookend each collection of illustrations with an essay, rooted in their own relationships with the titular images. Yamamoto, an architect by trade and Principal of Yamamoto Architecture, has his works interspersed throughout the landscape of the Lower Mainland, representing perhaps, what may be ambivalently considered “modern builds.” Knowing that Yamamoto plays a role in the construction of Vancouver’s future urban landscape, these drawings in reverence to the Foo Dog, hedges, and shopping carts evoke a particular nostalgic effect. In an email exchange, Yamamoto speculates that this nostalgia is activated because these drawings “[record] moments that are already passed and lost.” I am one to agree.
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