“Christos Dikeakos’ artistic practice has played an important role in the development of conceptual photography in Vancouver since the late 1960s. His photographic series, Sites and Place Names, created in the 1980s and 1990s, was shot in Vancouver, Saskatoon, Athens, Thessaloniki, and Berlin, and considers the palimpsestic nature of memories, histories, and nomenclature within contemporary urban habitations.

Sites and Place Names Vancouver, 1990—2015 comprises a series of 43 large-format chromogenic prints, each picturing an abandoned, overlooked, or seemingly innocuous urban and/or industrial landscape from in and around the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. Each photograph is overlaid with floating texts stating the locations’ place names and important flora and fauna in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh sníchim, and English, which the artist gathered over the course of extensive conversations with Indigenous colleagues, friends, and Elders.

With the seeming disjunction between the image and text, Dikeakos surfaces the violent erasures enacted upon these unceded Indigenous territories. The artist challenges the colonial viewpoint that these modern urban locations are non-Indigenous, emphasizing rich and intricate ecosystems, histories, and land use concealed within seemingly ordinary places. In so doing, the artist also critiques the presumed veracity of the photograph.” — Simon Fraser University Galleries

“Is There a Picture tells the remarkable—and improbable—story of a unique group of artists who used photography to launch a far-flung city into the fine-art stratosphere. An outgrowth of an earlier production (Picture Start), this feature-length documentary tracks the rise of Marian Penner Bancroft, Christos Dikeakos, Rodney Graham, Jeff Wall, and Ian Wallace from the rich countercultural milieu of 1960s Vancouver to their place of global prominence today. Drawing back the curtain on this extraordinary set of artists, Is There a Picture offers rare insight into their work, their relationships with one another, and how it is that they emerged in a city until recently known more for its surrounding forests than its art.” — The Cinematheque