Jeremy Shaw’s Expo 86 Posters

Jeremy Shaw first gained notoriety for dosing his friends with the powerful hallucinogen DMT. He recorded the results for an eight-screen installation that was shown in galleries around the world. His most recent work is a poster campaign in Vancouver that started last March. Since then, 25 different designs have decorated the city’s lamp posts with iconic and infamous imagery from Expo 86. In the artist’s own words, “It was a project I decided to do in response to the upcoming Olympic Games—I saw a lot of parallels with the branding of the city and the creation of new architecture and monuments and wanted to comment/incite conversation around these issues. I also thought it would be a nice way to get a sort of recuperative glimpse of a city that has changed so drastically in 23 years.” Organized by The Presentation House Gallery, this poster campaign “was initially funded by VANOC’s Cultural Olympiad, although it’s now mysteriously missing from their listings online.” When asked point blank if he felt the Olympics were a good thing or a bad thing, he responds, “In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think I can really answer fairly, but as far as Vancouver is concerned, I think they’re very problematic. “