At around 11pm on 14 August, Saghi Ehteshamzadeh's phone rang with news no gallery director wants to hear: there had been an emergency at Access Gallery, and first responders had already broken in.
A passerby walking along East Georgia Street in downtown Vancouver had spotted what looked like a person's feet sticking out from behind a counter inside the gallery. Convinced someone was in medical distress, they called it in. Police could not raise anyone at the locked gallery, so firefighters forced the door and rushed inside, ready for a rescue.
What they found instead was Untitled [The Preparator], a 2024 sculpture by the artist Allysa Pierre, part of the group exhibition Pending, on view until 1 October. The work shows an art handler kneeling over a crate, upper body vanished inside it, legs and feet very much in view. It is, by any measure, a triumph of verisimilitude: convincing enough to summon Vancouver's police and fire departments in the middle of the night.
Ehteshamzadeh's first reaction, she told City News, was confusion: she had locked the door herself and set the alarm. Her second, once she learned a sculpture was the culprit, was more practical: would the city reimburse her for the broken lock?
That answer is still pending. She has been told she can file a claim, with no guarantee of payment. In the meantime, the gallery paid a locksmith named Cameo C$1,000 (about $720) to fit a new one, a bill that might have been avoided entirely: a friend of Pierre's who lives across the street reportedly told responders on the scene that it was artwork, not a person, and that it was even pictured on the gallery's website.
Access Gallery, marking its 35th anniversary this year, is now fundraising and inviting the curious to see the sculpture that fooled a city's emergency services. Pierre's art handler will still be there, kneeling into that crate. But after dark, gallery staff now cover it up, a small concession to realism's occasional cost.
As reported by Hadani Ditmars for The Art Newspaper, the incident leaves behind a droll little footnote in the history of trompe l'oeil: a sculpture so persuasive it required its own rescue mission, and a reimbursement claim still working its way through Vancouver's bureaucracy.
