The Push | Keith Langergraber

Keith Langergraber’s site-specific installations focus on social, political and cultural issues surrounding the land and the effects of tourism. Using La Push Washington as a focal point, The Push examines the effects of increased growth, commercialization and economic reliance on tourism on the lives, values and histories of the local and indigenous people. La Push, Washington, is a small community at the tip of the Olympic Peninsula and is a popular surfing spot and tourist destination.

The Push incorporates a large waveform made from Nike shoes, surfing fabrics and materials, tourist t-shirts and souvenirs and a model of the Hansa Carrier along with drawings, maps and diagrams of the area and the community of La Push. In May 1990, a severe storm caused The Hansa Carrier, traveling from Korea to the US to lose part of the cargo including 60,000 Nike runners. A year later thousands of Nike shoes were found washed up on the beaches in the Olympic Peninsula. The wave sculpture represents the uneasy transition from a resource-based economy to one relying on tourism.

Keith Langergraber born in 1973 in Trail B.C, has received a BFA from the University of Victoria and an MFA from the University of British Columbia and is a Sessional Instructor at the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, B.C. Keith Langergraber has exhibited extensively throughout British Columbia and received many grants and awards for his work on the leading edge of Canadian art. His work grows from an interest in the hidden and mysterious places with social and historical proportions in the landscape of B.C.