Home Dream Home

Opening Reception Friday, November 28, 2014, 7:00 pm

In Home Dream Home, Catherine Pulkinghorn integrates her reflections on becoming a first-time home buyer in Vancouver’s thriving pre-sale condominium market. With information gathered from industry professionals who responded to her invitation to collaboratively form an on-site, post-occupancy evaluation of her apartment, she interrogates the gap between rhetoric and reality in the home-buying experience and explores how even idealized projects promoted as providing an opportunity for affordability can be much more marketing than truth. Pulkinghorn’s ultimate aim is to distribute a set of research and findings to Vancouver citizens engaged in the (onerous) search for affordable housing. As meetings with participating designers, planners, developers, financiers, architects, and experts in construction, insurance, and governance take place in her living room, Pulkinghorn’s process recalls "kitchen parties” or grassroots activism which begins in the home.

Catherine Pulkinghorn has worked in site-specific, embodied and experiential practices for two decades. In recent projects she has extended her focus to include socially based work, moving away from exclusively researching and producing independently, to working collaboratively, engaging community members as key contributors to resolving the queries of her work. In her explorations over the past several years, Pulkinghorn has worked with small children, newcomers to Canada, youth, adults, seniors, and families, as well as colleagues and sector experts to investigate actual history and societal transformations in Vancouver.