Spectacular Meltdowns and Exploded Views: Superdimensional Art and Architecture at Expo 86 – 2026.11.24

November 24, 2026 from 5:00–7:00pm

Reception + Talk
Presented by the West Coast Modern League
Hosted by INFORM | 50 Water St | Vancouver BC

Join the League with INFORM for a returning talk by curator and writer Jordan Strom celebrating the 40th anniversary of Vancouver’s Expo 86 world’s fair.

A time of shifting political winds (the rise of right-wing governments), large-scale industrial catastrophe (Space Shuttle Challenger and Chernobyl), and ecological destruction (acid rain to clear-cut logging) the mid-1980s also ushered in a new aesthetic paradigm. Seemingly disparate forms of art, including new media installation, kinetic sculpture and architecture, large-scale 70mm cinema, and collaborative publicly engaged art rose up across Canadian cities, museums and galleries. A key convergent point for these ascending forms of image and space making was Vancouver’s 1986 world’s fair. This talk will focus on four exhibitions at Expo 86: Michael Snow’s holographic installation The Spectral Image, SITE’s Highway 86, Peter Cardew’s CN Pavilion and the Canada Pavilion’s Great Hall. In certain respects, these exhibitions foreshadowed immersive art forms that grew in number in the early decades of the new century; yet they also stand apart as distinct superdimensional spaces, that reconceptualized viewers as active participants grounded in physical reality. Taking its cue from the concept of the ‘exploded view’—a form of drawing or diagram with components of an object or device that has been slightly separated at a distance in three dimensions—this presentation will share some of the ideas and design evolutions that informed these experimental exhibits; examine some of the resonances between them; and situate these new media spaces within a broader set of artistic and architectural conversations in the 1980s and the current moment.

Free event with registration (Opens Nov. 17th)
Reception 5:00pm | Talk 6:00pm

SAVE THE DATE

Meet the Speaker

Jordan Strom is a curator and writer working on the unceded ancestral territories of the Coast Salish people. Over the past 25 years his curating, writing, and publishing have often examined the intersection points between ideas, art, urbanism, media and technology studies, intercultural practices, and interdisciplinary aesthetics. As Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at Surrey Art Gallery he has organized many solo and group exhibitions including In the Shadow of the Pavilions: Expo 86 and Contemporary Art this past spring. The exhibition grew out of his research as a PhD candidate in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University where, under the supervision of Dr. Laura Marks, he is writing on expanded media art in the time of North America’s last world’s fair.

HIGHWAY ’86, EXPO ’86 Canadian World Exposition. Exhibition roadway with various transportation vehicles emerging from the harbor, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 1986. Project by SITE.