There is a graphic, in a book I'm reading called Vancouver Matters, which compares the amount of space dedicated to the major urban parks in relation to surrounding urban density between Vancouver and Manhattan. While Central Park cuts a vast swath in the core of the Big Apple, Vancouver's Stanley Park is on a one to one scale with the downtown peninsula. It is this dichotomy that acts so strongly as an impetus to preserve that delicate recipe of sea/sky, city/forest, mountain/skyscraper, east/west, rich/poor. Stanley Park is the id to our ego, and our identity is one of semiotics and myth. We draw upon it to confirm that we are in fact the most beautiful city in the world;l we use it like a resevoir of beauty when our rents go through the roof; we use it to justify the high cost of living. Its like a litmus test, reflecting the zeitgeist of Vancouverism; a buffer that measures up against our Hausman-esque fascination with recreating our self-image.

It is with this in mind that the Vancouver Museum has curated The Unnatural History of Stanley Park. Visitors are immediately drawn into a dark room with angular columns, kaleidoscopic greens projected onto them, intermittent groans of old growth bending in the wind. The disorienting angles yield to glossy light box images of the famous Stanley Park Wind Storm. A good place to begin if you're exploring our influence on the park and a barometre of our ever-shifting ideology, the storm was indeed a glimpse at how carefully we influence not only the park, but also nature as a whole and how vulnerable we are to its backlash. Its origins as a military base and private link to the British Properties via the causeway and the Lion's Gate Bridge. There's the requisite natural history component with emu eggs and beaver skeletons which seemed more like they needed to clear some room in storage, but the sheer amount of 'stuff' in the exhibit made up for any coherent narrative. The overall impression, one that I've learned is the impetus of Vancouverism is that we always been hyper aware of the need to 'attract visitors'. Guidebooks, maps, souvenirs, novels, paintings, and an entire room devoted entirely to postcards, backlit and sleek. The exhibit ends with a nod to social media in the form of an interactive slideshow where visitors upload their own images to Flickr. Which in a way, embodies our investment in the ever-changing and shifting iconography of Stanley Park.