"Memory Block started as a response to Stan Douglas’s high-fidelity, panoramic Every Building on 100 West Hastings, a Vancouver street in which real estate speculation and public policy have contributed to the impoverishment and endangerment of Downtown Eastside residents. In order to consider Commercial Drive, another East Vancouver street where gentrification is underway, I instead used low-fidelity, long exposure photography to represent erasure of community and history. But local memory is resilient (in spite of or perhaps because of its instability), so I invited local writers, artists and activists to share stories of their community, creating a composite text to represent multiple histories of my neighbourhood. Produced as a companion to my installation exhibited at Presentation House Gallery in 2017, the book form draws from Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip, to which Douglas’s work paid homage." -- T. Poirier