In Everyday Moments of Crisis, Intimacy and Care

Many of us remember what we were doing when the 4.7 magnitude earthquake hit southwestern British Columbia last month. Or you might remember where you were when you received a phone call that changed your life.

And you probably remember how time melted and bent afterwards, imbuing the everyday with a fuzzy, electric quality — even as it appears just as it was. This fact can be as cruelly dissonant as it can be comforting.

The familiar sounds of the laundromat or the smell of chlorine at the community centre pool remind us that even after all that can happen, we are still here.

We are still sweeping the floor, brushing our hair, trying to find the right clothes to wear, the right words to say.

Jackie Dives is a Vancouver-based multidisciplinary artist who has been working for years in the spaces between the extraordinary and the everyday. Of Course This Hurts, her latest exhibition, is a unique, affecting meditation on living through the loss, fear and societal stigma wrought by the unregulated toxic drug supply crisis in B.C.

Dives’ documentary-style photographs depict ordinary moments in the lives of people who use drugs and the people in their communities. This radical mundanity invites people to see the toxic drug crisis differently.

“I think the broader public doesn’t understand the nuances of what this public health emergency looks like. And I think the media has contributed to that misunderstanding,” she says.

“What I see on a day-to-day basis is — it makes me emotional to talk about. I see deep care and love. And struggle. And I see people persisting against all odds to survive and to take care of each other. And I see immense and unfathomable grief.”

This can get lost in sensationalistic media portrayals of the toxic drug crisis that replicate limiting and harmful stereotypes.

“What it actually looks like is people bandaging each other’s wounds,” Dives says, of the day-to-day realities of people living through a public health emergency that has been killing their peers and loved ones.

“And people trying to keep up their self-care routines — forcing themselves to go to the gym, to shave, to get a haircut. These things are still happening, these very mundane life things.”

Dives’ work is inspired by that of photographers like Gordon Parks, the first Black photographer to be featured in Life magazine in 1948 for his never-before-seen, humanizing coverage of the gang wars in Harlem.

She also draws inspiration from the work of late AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz and documentary photographer Nan Goldin.

During the AIDS crisis, the activism and civil disobedience of those most affected was instrumental in driving social change.

And the work of photographers like Wojnarowicz and Goldin serves as a visual record of these movements. To Dives, those photographers “are the reason we have compassionate, nuanced documentation of what happened.”

Last year, 2,253 people died from the effects of unregulated drugs in B.C. — eight years after the provincial government declared rising deaths from the unregulated toxic drug supply a public health emergency in 2016.

There have been over 49,105 opioid-related deaths across Canada since 2016.

‘Jackie Dives: Of Course This Hurts’ runs March 16 to 26 at Gallery 881 (881 E. Hastings St., Vancouver). The opening reception takes place March 16 from 2 to 5 p.m.; an artist talk takes place March 22 from 2 to 3 p.m.