This publication was co-produced in 2002 by the Contemporary Art Gallery; The Southern Alberta Art Gallery; and Kamloops Art Gallery to accompany the touring exhibition *Dream Home* by Renée Van Halm. It includes the essay "How To Colour" by The Office for Soft Architecture and an essay by Sherry McKay.

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Dream Home

Renée Van Halm

The subject of *Dream Home* is real estate, particularly how the idea of domesticity and “home” is constructed in the public imagination. On a given date last year, Renée Van Halm selected the largest and smallest properties for sale on Vancouver's West Side. She utilized their floor plans, procured from Vancouver's Multiple Listing Service, as the basis for imagining how two properties at the extreme ends of affordability might be configured. The result is two sculptural  installations in which over forty rooms of the Big House and two small rooms of The Apartment have been modeled in scale and displayed in an architecturally “exploded” format on the gallery's floor. On the left hand side of the B.C. Binning Gallery sits the upper and lower floor of the larger dwelling, to the right sits a small apartment. In the artist's words, "The range of property size reflects how we define suitable habitation. The two sites represent opposing attitudes to the project of home — the larger revivalist structure is steeped in nostalgia, isolated and bunker-like; the smaller a bottom-line, efficient machine where the living space fits like an article of clothing." Emphasizing how individuated these ideas can be, Van Halm has painted each room of the two sculptures using one of the thousands of varieties of white that can be found in any paint store, and which are usually employed in private, interior spaces.

Accompanying *Dream Home* is *Listings* — gouache paintings depicting a variety of houses whose images Van Halm also took from the real estate listing service. They are intimate depictions of ostentatious houses, and point to one of Van Halm's recurring themes: how the private home is implicated in systems of public display. Large homes are often meant to advertise bourgeois attributes of wealth, respectability and leisure, but also to indicate retreat, privacy and a removal from the social ills of the contemporary urban world. Van Halm's gouaches exhibit how these often contradictory desires are elaborated in a variety of architectural realizations.


A watercolour painting of a large house surrounded by trees and other foliage, which are painted with loose brushstrokes. The painting is made with muted tones of green, brown, grey, and black. 

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Many sculptures are installed on a gallery floor.  They are square shaped and low in height. Those cube-shaped sculptures are pale coloured; some of them are pale pink, yellow, blue, or green.  

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This is an aerial view of the sculptural installation in a gallery space. Pale coloured square sculptures are placed on the floor. They are divided into three groups. 

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In a gallery space, many pale-coloured cube sculptures are placed on the floor. They are placed to mimic a city landscape. Eight photographs are mounted on the wall near the entrance.

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This is a low-angle shot of the installation in a gallery space. Many pale-coloured cube sculptures are placed on the floor. A shape of a house front is carved on one of the  sculptures’ facade.  

Renée Van Halm

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