The Crow Commute

Provenance:
Ian Tan Gallery (Vancouver) label verso. This piece is from Lanthier's series Human-Nature which explores the lives of wildlife in human-altered spaces. Lanthier says of The Crow Commute: Every evening in East Vancouver, one can witness a fascinating daily phenomenon: a seemingly endless stream of crows flying overhead, leaving the city eastward with the evening rush hour. In his History of Metropolitan Vancouver, Chuck Davis reported that in 1903, the city of Vancouver opened a cull on crows - for a time, citizens could lawfully shoot them. According to a 2008 TED Talk by Joshua Klein, crows are one of the few species which, like humans, are capable of learning culturally, that is to say that they can communicate knowledge to each other, and pass this knowledge to subsequent generations. Despite the cull, there are an abundance of crows in Vancouver today, and over a hundred years later, every evening, thousands of them fly to the suburbs to roost at the end of the day, interestingly just outside of Vancouver's official city limits.
Notes:
Kevin Lanthier was born in 1981 in Vancouver, British Columbia. He graduated from the Integrated Media program at the Centre for Digital Imaging and Sound, in Vancouver, in 2000, and from the Professional Photo-Imaging Program at Langara College (Vancouver) in 2007. Lanthier's work has appeared in such publications as Applied Arts Magazine, Photo Life Magazine, and the Creative Quarterly Journal of Arts and Design, and has won numerous prizes. Exhbitions have included Nouveau Gallery (Regina SK), Ian Tan Gallery (Vancouver) and The Plaskett Gallery (New Westminster BC). As an artist Lanthier builds concept-driven composite images, combining and juxtaposing photographed subjects. His recent series Human-Nature explores the lives of wildlife in human-altered spaces.