Something Pleasant

Back on September 7th, I hung a 50 ft display of UTRAsomething photography in a rather cavernous event room at “The Pleasant” on Main Street in Vancouver Canada. As you might intuit by its name, “The Pleasant” is not a photo gallery, but a restaurant — which perhaps makes it an odd destination for a series of murky black & white photos culled from ULTRAsomething’s eight existing Exorcisms.

The room actually sports 100 ft of wall space, so the other 50 ft is shared by my friends Nicole and Meghan. It was Nicole who suggested we exhibit there, and who made all the arrangements. Galleries, she surmised, often attract a rather insular collection of other artists and photographers, but a show such as this would introduce our work to people who wouldn’t normally see it — people like, say, those who are too busy attending retirement parties, birthday bashes, or book readings to drop into a gallery show.

Granted, if I were any good at marketing, I’d have made this announcement last month, rather than publishing an article about my quibbles with checkout kiosks. But you know — I gotta be me. Besides, I’m not really selling anything other than myself. And if you’re reading this, odds are you already know who I am. Also, web stats suggest that the majority of my readers are in Europe, Australia, and the Eastern USA, so I just don’t foresee a lot of folks traveling to western Canada for baby showers or poetry slams.

That said, should you inexplicably find yourself in Vancouver during the next several weeks, the show will be hanging until sometime in November. The longer you wait, the more likely it’ll be that the photos are inadvertently destroyed by a group of deliriously intoxicated and rambunctious bachelorettes. So feel free to drop in, have a snack, check out the photos (plus Nicole & Meghan’s artwork), and maybe (if you’re lucky) crash a going-away party or corporate event.

©2025 grEGORy simpson

ABOUT THE PHOTOS : It became immediately clear that populating some perfunctory text with a couple of perfunctory photos of the actual exhibit would yield quite the perfunctory post. So, just to spice things up a bit, I tossed in a couple other recent photos of “pleasant” things…

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