What was spawned was a hybrid culture in which various spores grew voraciously while others disappeared, European merged with Asian
and with a sort of North American culture which was itself a hybrid.  In general, older first generation immigrants tend to cling to their own
culture and values, younger first generation and second generation tend to modify their own traditions with what they perceive to be mainstream
values, and many second and most third generation accept the mainstream indigenous hybrid culture as their own.

The same is true of artists. In their effort to think globally and act locally, most artists deal with the same global concerns and issues but they
express their deliberations in the local idiom that they are most familiar with. Surrealism is a term that was first used to designate the work of a
 number of diverse European visual artists and poets who, between World War I and II, stressed a positive and subjective approach tothe arts in opposition to the cynical anti-art stance of Dadaism. It claimed as its pregenitors, artists as different as Hieronymous Bosch, Breugel, Goya, Olidon Redon,
Georgio De Chirico and Marc Chagall. It emphasized methodical personal research and experimentation to open the door to the subconscious and
to imbue the everyday world of phenomenological experience with the phantasmagorical creations of dream and fantasy.

 On the other hand, the minutely defined and realistically depicted irrational and paradoxical worlds of Magritte, Dali and Delvaux evoke a sense of the inexplicable, yet immediately apprehensible, interweaving of the conscious and subconscious. Some of the surrealists invented specific techniques, particularly Ernst and Man Ray, to unlock psychic revelations and most of the surrealists were interested in the psychic arts, such as palmistry, hypnotism, and alchemy as doors to the subconscious.

 With its emphasis on content, psychic investigation, the relationship between the spiritual and the subconscious, freedom of expression, gesture,
and the primacy of the imagination, surrealism set the agenda for most of the visual art of the twentieth century and introduced an incredibly rich vein
 of ideas and sources which are still being profitably mined by contemporary'artists.

 It seems a bit strange that as a culture we honour musicians who play the work of composers with fidelity but we expect our visual artists to produce
work that is so new and innovative that it hides its debts to the past. A visual artist whose work acknowledges its relationship to past masters or
influences is somehow suspect, visual artists, it seems, are supposed to spring fully formed out of the void.

Our cultural obsession with the new seems to be the most powerful force driving the visual arts. Often this obsession takes the form of honouring
an artist's use of new technology and materials, and a refusal to comment on the emotional or psychic content of the work as if "newness" itself
was sufficient. Large backlit transparencies, digital slide projections, computer controlled video, computer and chemically manipulated photos and
film, and piles of industrial waste all somehow qualify as art because they have never before been used as art, not because of the significance of
their content.

All of these are funded and exhibited by our public institutions as if they were the greatest thing since diced tomatoes. Often the actual content
of these new media is totally banal and innocuous, perhaps reflecting the banality of our culture, and the compositional elements, if any, are
surreptitiously drawn from a casual perusal of art history.  At the same time, artists who use more traditional media such as painting, drawing,
sculpture, etc. and who place more emphasis on content and definition, are marginalized by these same public institutions. It is as if we want to
eat up and spit out our past before we have had time to digest it.

 Surrealism provides a specific case in point. Surrealism draws on one of the most pervasive constants in all art-imagination. It uses dreams, disassociated psychological states( the precursors were Rimbaud and Jarry), and exploration of both the individual and the cultural (Ernst, Picasso, Lam and Paalen) subconscious to jump start the imagination and follow it down the crooked road of self discovery.

Surrealism runs through all of art history-and there are surreal aspects in almost every artist's work-if the viewer is able to read the road signs.
Surrealism coalesced into an "ism" in the nineteen twenties and its legacy can be seen in the work of artists as diverse as Normal Rockwell,
Walt Disney, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Rauschenberg.  In Vancouver, a number of artists have been intersted in the surrealist legacy for the
past thirty years. They have met together, talked about their work, explored their diverse influences, developed mastery of their technical processes,
and showed their work together. They have learned how to open the doors to their imaginations so that the creatures and events inside were able to
spill out and people the visible universe.

In many cases, the influences of these artists and their relationships are illustrated within their work, which has evolved from a dialogue with their
own cultural and artistic history and out of their own individual psychic being. The past is necessarily an important part of the road that got them to the present. (The famed critic and writer Harold Rosenberg once stated: Dead art movements are the normal life of art; all that can be expected
of them is good painting. In regard to creation there is nothing to indicate that a new art movement has any advantage over
an obsolete one; the contrary may well be the case).

Some of these artists came from other countries, mainly in Europe and the ideas and approaches that they accumulated in their toolbox as they
travelled, have stayed with them and provided part of their psychic continuum. Others in this group were born in Vancouver, or, elsewhere in North America, and have lived here for all or most of their lives but they too, in this global milieu with access to the whole depth of history and breadth
 of culture, have collected ideas and influences and working methods picked up from elsewhere and elsewhen.

 In some sense the movement of ideas and people over the surface of the earth has paralled the movement of the surface of the earth itself, the
continental plates separating themselves from the primordial landmass and drifting across vast oceans, picking up pieces of a geosyncline here,
an ancient seabed there, and grinding out a hybrid identity as a continent or archpeligo.

 In Vancouver, we stand on the cutting edge where the North American plate meets the Pacific plate, where incredible but hidden stresses have
 forced up mountains, where fissure spew out gouts of molten rock from beneath the crust, and where morphed and transformed detritus picked
up on the journey has created a surface environment totally a result of the hidden influences which underlie it.