By Kevin Hollett
Photo by Jacob Hopkins

Sitting in the window of the Interurban Gallery, Angel “Molly” Gaeta works away on yet another canvas.

Her paintings are bright and bold, unorthodox and pleasing in their subject matter: benevolent interpretations of nature, like serenely smiling suns, share space with curious interlopers to the scene, like flying saucers and one-eyed aliens.

Some 40 works in this vein will greet visitors of My Creative Place, an exhibition featuring the prolific Gaeta’s work, along with artwork by her mother, Mary Rose Jack, at Interurban from February 3 to 13. For Gaeta, who has been a fixture at the gallery since it opened in 2003, the space is the perfect place to create and be inspired.

“I love working at Interurban,” she says. “There are so many different types of art that I get exposed to, and all the art that’s there is about community.”

More specifically, it’s about her community. Gaeta is among the growing number of artists living, working and showing in the Downtown Eastside.

Art has long been an agent of social change in the neighbourhood and artists and art organizations have tapped the potential for the Downtown

Eastside to be an incubator of both grassroots and outsider art, a place where artists can create and feed off one another.

“The Downtown Eastside currently has one of the highest percentages of artists per capita in Canada,” says Dalannah Gail Bowen, creative director of the Downtown Eastside Centre for the Arts. “They come where they can afford to live. Starving artists trying to make it on their own develop their art and create scenes wherever they go.”

Cheaper rental rates in the neigh- bourhood mean more artists, galleries and artist-run centres—ranging from Centre A on Homer Street, which focuses on contemporary Asian art, to Gallery Gachet on Cordova Street, whose mandate is to cultivate and exhibit art informed by mental health issues.

Interurban is unique as a community-based gallery because it serves as an exhibition space for local artists as well as a gathering place for community arts groups. The intention is to create an accessible experience, one that allows visitors to experience art without the conditions that happen in other spaces.

“Anyone can come into Interurban,” says Gaeta. “We don’t discriminate against anyone.”

Gaeta could be talking about both visitors and artists.

Her exhibition will be followed by Christoph Runne’s Portraits. Runne uses videos that combine the style of classical portraiture with elements often associated with police mug shots. Though housed inside the gallery, it’s also part public installation: video screens placed in the gallery’s windows face outward, a commentary on how Downtown Eastside residents are often subjected to the gaze and judgement of outsiders.

It’s a departure from Gaeta’s cheer- fully whimsical, abstract paintings and is evidence of how inclusive the gallery is. It’s also another way that artists here are reclaiming art and space as their own.

“Art," says Bowen, "is a gift that every person in society deserves to experience.”