SAFE/NOT SAFE: women’s safety in the DTES

A community art project at Gallery Gachet, 88 E. Cordova, running from Sept. 9 to Oct. 2 hopes to raise awareness about women’s safety and promote change. SAFE/NOT SAFE is a group photography exhibition featuring the work of 30 women who live and work in Vancouver’s DTES.

Women who live and work in the DTES have taken photographs as they’ve worked and roamed the streets, as they’ve found refuge and shelter there. The women describe, in their own words and through their eyes, responses to the dangers they face daily.

This community art installation gives a visceral account of these women’s often precarious existence on Vancouver’s DTES streets, says curator/project coordinator Karen LeBeau. It serves as a testament to the urban spaces and places in their lives, where women can feel safe or at risk of violence from one moment to the next.

SAFE/NOT SAFE is about awareness as an impetus for societal change, big and small. It is about lives lived in a part of Vancouver that many citizens are unwilling to consider, witness or visualize. We can all relate to safety, as it affects our daily lives; but these SAFE and NOT SAFE images of the DTES allow viewers to enter spaces and fragments of lives that we might fear, willfully ignore, or completely misunderstand. The installation is a visual catalyst for challenging assumptions about some of Vancouver’s most vulnerable citizens.

While the DTES receives considerable attention from the media, politicians and general public, little consideration is given to making changes to provide a safer existence for those who live and work there now. To date, no harm reduction measures have been initiated to improve the safety of women in the DTES, despite the fact that since 1985 approximately 100 women from this area are missing and or/dead.

SAFE/NOT SAFE is a privately funded project that relied on the expertise, talents and passion of several volunteer collaborators. The project was coordinated out of the safe haven of the Women’s Information Safe House (WISH) in the DTES. Karen LeBeau has been a Registered Nurse since 1988 and has been employed at St. Paul’s Hospital since 1996. She is currently near completion of her BScN and is also in her second year of studies at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. LeBeau worked in St. Paul’s Emergency from 1996 until 1998. She credits this experience with exposing her to the lives and hidden beauty of the many people who live in the DTES of Vancouver, and also as the inspiration for this project.

SAFE/NOT SAFE is showing in Gallery II at Gallery Gachet, in conjunction with the larger show <I>synesthesia: a concomitant sensation</I>. It runs Sept. 9 to Oct. 2, with an opening reception Sept. 9, 7-10pm (admission by donation). For more information, stop by Gallery Gachet Wed-Sun, Noon-6pm, call 604.687.2468