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     Overflow develops in two consecutive stages. The second is a flexible, changing installation responding to the architecture, socio-geographic location and history of Centre A's space, built using glass drink bottles obtained during the first stage, in which the gallery participates in one of the more visible unofficial economies of the neighbourhood - the recuperation and redemption of bottles from across the city.
     Centre A is located in Vancouver's Downtown East Side, an area marked by poverty and mental illness, substance abuse and drug traffic, increasing redevelopment and gentrification, tourism and entertainment consumption, and socio-political frictions arising from the economic disparity and divergent interests of the various local users and stakeholders - including poor residents, the transient population, homeowners, business people, real-estate developers, consumers, tourists, cultural groups, and social-service organizations - and those in the underground economies, such as drug dealers and users. One of the most visible trades in this neighbourhood is the considerable number of poor citizens making a living by gathering and returning bottles for refunds, an aspect of the ad hoc local economy that has over the years become regularized, as well as recognized and widely supported by the city population.
     The gallery occupies a historic building that architecturally retains evidence of its former use as a streetcar terminus. It is positioned to become one of an increasing number of cultural, heritage and social organizations whose below-market-cost locations are a result of concessions granted to developers by the City of Vancouver in exchange for housing such groups - a process widely understood to be the soft edge of gentrification, even though the process is not controlled by the groups in question.
     One of the gallery's neighbours is United We Can, the largest bottle depot in the Downtown East Side. UWC is a successful private enterprise that regularly operates over-capacity, and whose principals have developed a proposal for a full-scale recycling centre to be located underneath a nearby highway overpass on the edge of the neighbourhood.
     In the months preceding the installation, through the 2006 holiday season, Centre A will buy bottles from several local collectors and collaborate with United We Can by relieving them of incoming bottles that cannot be recycled by breweries. The re-use of materials that would otherwise be a liability for UWC - pure excess - supports the argument that a considered plan for local processing of all kinds of reusable waste is not only crucial but also right - a proper response to locally-generated consumer glut.
     The installation itself will be a flexible mass of glass bottles arranged on the concrete floor and around the brick pillars and office furnishings of the vast space, lit primarily by the natural light from the wall of windows overlooking Hastings Street. With their labels removed, the bottles appear both as abstract tokens for human presence and as a sparkling, seemingly liquid volume. In keeping with the moveable nature of the materials, the arrangement will likely change over the course of the exhibition, perhaps ranging from an unordered mass spreading across the space like an encroaching tide, to an obstructive yet contemplative presence, to more orderly patterns that might recall the sorting of railcars or the movement of goods through the nearby port.
     In any configuration, however, there will be tension between the now-pristine bottles and the fact that they represent not only a humble yet economically valuable raw material that is a precious local resource and a subject of street-level expertise, but also alcoholism - one of the neighbourhood's scourges. It is possible that the attractiveness and apparent value of the materials, displayed in all their uselessness in the somewhat refined gallery space, could draw out some of the neighbourhood's underlying interests, economic incongruities and incommensurate social facts, including the gallery's uneasy position as a possible contributor to the gentrification of the neighbourhood.

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Produced in collaboration with United We Can. Special thanks to Ken Lyotier and Hank Bull for furthering the development of the project.