Story by Kevin Hollett
Photo by Hiroaki Shimizu
When I was kid I use to name my bikes. They were silly names and long forgotten now, but meaningful at the time. After all, my bike was my sidekick, symbolic of my advancing adolescence, the newfound freedom to escape the confines of my yard and, best of all, speed.
I don’t name my bikes anymore but that doesn’t mean that my relationship with them has changed since I was a kid.
I ride my bike just about every day and when I do, I’m aware of just about everything to do with it—how the gears are shifting, how much pressure to put on the brakes, how tightly I can turn a particular corner. My relationship with my bike is typical to that of most Vancouverites, who have the unique ability (in this country, at least) to mount their two (or one or three) wheels year round.
It’s this relationship that the Museum of Vancouver’s current exhibit, Velo-City: Vancouver & the Bike Revolution, explores.
Curated by Toby Barratt, Pamela Goddard and Nik Rust from Propellor Design, the exhibition painstakingly details Vancouver and its citizens’ long history with the bicycle, from the early Terminal City Bike Club in 1892 to the contemporary, technologically advanced incarnations of the bike for free-riding and speed racing purposes. Along the way, museum-goers are introduced to bicycles as varying as the people who ride them: from roadies and commuters to choppers bmx'rs.
“When we started doing research for Velo-City, we decided to try to count all the different cycling sub-cultures in Vancouver,” wrote Goddard in a recent email to Megaphone. “We came up with over 40 different styles of riders.”
That diversity is on display throughout the show, which is a multimedia exhibit featuring actual bikes ridden by actual people; videos of cyclists in commute, at work or in other various states of action; maps of innumerable bike routes that dissect the city, divided by cycling sub-culture; and posters and other ephemera as evidence of the bike being an engine (ahem) for social change.
“We have an incredibly diverse and rich cycling community here in Vancouver,” Goddard wrote. “It all comes down to the people who ride and the joy they experience doing it.”
Propellor Design originally met the Museum of Vancouver curatorial staff when they were included in last year’s Movers and Shapers exhibition about emerging local designers.
“After Movers and Shapers, the Museum made it known that they were interested in ideas for upcoming exhibitions,” wrote Goddard. “We had been rolling this idea of a bike show around in our minds for some time, so it seemed like the perfect chance to make it happen. It turned out to be a perfect fit.”
The curators’ attention to detail is remarkable, from the historical timeline design that echoes both a map and racing stripes, to the re-created free-riding installation—a North Shore staple that employs a snakes-and-ladders type arrangement. When you first enter the space, you’re greeted by a familiar sound, one that is at first hard to place, before you are struck by the obviousness of the source: it is a chorus of sweetly chiming bicycle bells, interrupted only by the odd honking of one of those classic, rubber squeeze horns. This soundtrack accompanies you through the first part of the museum before switching to that other ubiquitous bike sound: chains running along gears.
The heart of the exhibition though, is the interactive “Velo-Love” installation, an entire wall of photos dedicated to the cyclist’s relationship to the city, with Vancouverites posing next to or astride their cycles. People are encouraged to upload their own images to Flickr to be included in the digital slideshow that’s part of the ever-changing installation.
Maybe I will name my bike after all.
Velo-City: Vancouver & the Bike Revolution @ the Museum of Vancouver, June 4th to
September 7th. Visit MuseumofVancouver.ca for more information.
