Inside the homegrown fabrication shop that’s grown beyond its theatre company roots

The Great Northern Way Scene Shop is a huge space, full of machines, lifts, and tools. It’s also bustling with activity, with people working on various projects spread out across different rooms. 

It’s just a taste of everything that CEO and project director Elia Kirby has on the go. Kirby has 35-40 builders working in the shop doing custom fabrication for various non-profit, commercial, and government clients.

“We’re basically professional prototypers… facilitating someone else’s ideas,” Kirby explained.

Founded in 2003, the scene shop was affiliated with UBC’s theatre department, growing and expanding based on a need for smaller theatre productions and the non-profit arts community to have somewhere to fabricate their sets and installations.

“I find the stuff that is most interesting is the community-based work,” like East Van Panto at the Cultch, Kirby said. “That's the stuff that makes me feel really proud,” he added.

In 2012, the scene shop left its original location near what is now the Emily Carr campus in False Creek Flats. They eventually moved across the train tracks to the current location at 281 Industrial Avenue – a former warehouse that’s owned by the city.

Sharing the warehouse alongside the scene shop, Kirby and co-founder Marietta Kozak created the Arts Factory Society, where Kirby, adding to his full plate, is the general manager.

The Arts Factory is a mixed-use arts facility with workshops, studios, and common spaces for emerging and established artists. Vancity Lookout got to visit the Arts Factory portion of the building last November as part of our coverage of the Eastside Culture Crawl.   

Industrial space in Vancouver, whether it’s used by artists, fabricators, or start-ups, is scarce, and also reduces access to industrial services for people in the city. For Kirby, that means there’s a general need to preserve these spaces, often old industrial buildings, where “you can get paint on the walls, you can be dusty, you can do something that’s different.” 

“I think the city does have a responsibility to maintain those spaces and encourage that type of activity,” Kirby said. Just last month, city council unanimously passed a motion for staff to look at allowing mixed-use zoning, including housing, at some “exceptional” industrial sites, including the entire Mount Pleasant industrial area, which sits a few blocks away from the Arts Factory.

Eastside Arts Society executive director Esther Rausenberg told Vancity Lookout late last year that Vancouver has lost about 550,000 square feet of studio space since 2009.

Rausenberg also noticed that the remaining studios have continually gotten smaller. “What's really important for artists is to have that freedom to be able to think and create on a large scale. We're seeing less and less of that and I think that's to the detriment of the art form and the various mediums that visual artists are working in,” she explained. 

“Some people want to make things… we’re not all going to be nurses, lawyers, and doctors,” Kirby said. 

Big clients pay the bills

The client base for Kirby’s scene shop has now expanded far beyond the non-profit community. These days, they work with major cultural institutions in the city like Bard on the Beach, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Arts Umbrella, Ballet BC, and Vancouver Civic Theatres. 

They also work with huge brands like Lululemon, Herschel, and Aritzia, and with developers incorporating public art into their projects. It’s contracts with these commercial clients that pay the bills, allowing Kirby to offer discounted rates to non-profit artists and clients. 

The other piece of the business model for the scene shop and artist space is that the city rents the building to them at below market rates. 

Kirby gave credit to the city for recognizing the work they’re doing, and the need to provide space for arts production and fabrication when the scene shop’s original location was threatened in the early 2010s. 

However, they are still paying “a shit ton of money,” Kirby said, and are currently negotiating a new 10-year lease with the city. The city’s real estate department — which is mandated to create revenue for the city — wanted to raise rent by as much as 110 per cent Kirby said. However, they settled on a much more reasonable 30 per cent increase, in line with what other tenants in city-owned buildings are paying. 

That increase will still factor into their ability to support the not-for-profit arts spaces and clients, Kirby said. 

“We have to start thinking about other forms of capital, and how are we valuing that? There's social capital, there's cultural capital, there's community capital. But at the end of the day, we're letting financial capital determine so many of the values that we are placing on things in our daily lives,” Kirby said of the way the city approaches managing its assets. 

Trans Am controversy signals shift to less challenging public art 

The scene shop also works closely with the city’s cultural services department, installing and maintaining many public art pieces. Kirby’s team was preparing to install the Trans Am Rapture sculpture at the south end of the Granville Bridge, until the project was unexpectedly cancelled by the City Manager’s Office. 

The move came during a time of transition in the department, a week after former city manager Paul Mochrie “mutually agreed” with Mayor Ken Sim to leave the role. 

A local resident had been opposing the installation by way of a petition and media interviews, calling the piece “edgy and really not friendly”. In the days before it was cancelled, the city told CBC that there isn’t usually public consultation about individual public art installations. 

A new petition supporting the choice of the Granville site, launched just after the announcement, gained about 800 signatures while the original petition in opposition had around 250 signees. 

Reflecting on the reversal, Kirby feels that the decision sets a bad precedent for residents to disagree with future decisions around public art in the city. 

“It’s not part of the process because you're not going to get everybody agreeing. [If you did] you're just gonna end up with beige art,” Kirby said. The decision to cancel the Trans Am installation “means that we're going to have less and less art that’s challenging,” Kirby added, because city staff will be less likely to propose a project that could get pushback. 

“[Staff] are then going to choose an innocuous piece of art versus something that is maybe more challenging,” Kirby explained, based on his experience working with staff in the city’s cultural department.

“Art is not a democratic process. It's an individual expressing themselves, and we all have the right to not like something and to disapprove of it, but that's not what art is there for. Art is not there to please us,” Kirby said. 

Kirby’s team has installed other public art pieces that have elicited controversy and strong feelings — like the Golden Tree at Cambie and Southwest Marine Drive and the Spinning Chandelier under the north side of the Granville Street Bridge. 

“They didn't remove just because people disagreed… the conversation around it, I think, was brilliant,” Kirby said of the chandelier.