Other Colours was conceived in response to the Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s True Colours, a program that offers grants to incentivize homeowners to restore heritage homes to their ‘true’ Victorian, Edwardian and War Time era (1880–1930) colours, with paint swatches such as “Oxford Bluff” and “Edwardian Pewter”. Canada’s colonial history is a violent history that must be questioned, not ceremoniously replicated. The True Colours program has been deployed largely in support of the gentrification of inner city neighbourhoods, particularly those with a history of immigrant struggle where homes were painted colours that represented diverse cultural backgrounds and experiences of the city.
221A led the research initiative with ten contributors who were asked to provide a swatch for an “Other Colours palette” that would offer alternatives to the True Colours program based on the contributors’ lived experience, cultural traditions and artistic practices.
Each Other Colours palette selection is detailed by the contributor with an original text or artwork. This collection of short prose, poetry and social history, printed by Brick Press as an Artist’s Book, offers a more pluralistic account of the city’s built environment and identity.
Bibliodata
Published by 221A
2019, English
softcover, 24 pages
25 x 19.5 cm, 11 individual colour swatches in plastic envelope
Edition of 85, with 15 Artist Proofs
Edited by Michelle Fu, Brian McBay and Jesse McKee
Copyedited by Gina Badger
Designed by Michelle Fu and Brian McBay
Produced, Distributed and Sold by Brick Press
Colour matching
Encycolorpedia.com is a website that can be used to match the hex codes in this publication to paint swatches from common manufacturers. The website provides insights into colours – producing complementary and related palettes for any hex, RGB/RGBA, HSL/HSLA format colour along with information and conversions to several other popular colour-spaces. Paint matching is performed in the CIELab colour space for accuracy. Colour profile pages are dynamically styled from the given hex colour.
A hex triplet is a six-digit, three-byte hexadecimal number used in HTML and other computing applications to represent colors. The bytes represent the red, green and blue components of the color. One byte represents a number in the range 00 to FF (in hexadecimal notation), or 0 to 255 in decimal notation. This represents the least (0) to the most (255) intensity of each of the color components. Web colors specify colors in the 24-bit RGB color scheme. The hex triplet is formed by linking three bytes in hexadecimal notation, in the following order:
- Byte 1: red value (color type red)
- Byte 2: green value (color type green)
- Byte 3: blue value (color type blue)
Swatches
Project Support
221A acknowledges the generous support of individuals, businesses, foundations, and governments for believing in 221A and its programs by providing their generous financial assistance. Other Colours was made possible through project-based support of the British Columbia Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Other Colours
