Big green chalkboards hang high on the walls in North Vancouver's Artists for Kids Gallery. The patched-together wooden floor doesn't end at the wall but curves upwards against it, extending part way to the ceiling and directing visitors' eyes toward those green boards with their puzzling text. "What do you like best about electricity?" one chalk-written line enquires. "I feel I am not an unlikable person," intones another.

Beneath the signage, in the midst of frantic installation work-electric saws shriek, drills whir, a vacuum cleaner sucks up construction dust-Vancouver artists Angela Grossmann, Derek Root, Douglas Coupland, and Attila Richard Lukacs talk about the show. Playfully titled Vancouver School, it runs to May 13. (In addition to hosting school tours, Vancouver School will also be open to the public. For info, call 604-903-3798.) Four months ago, the artists recount, they and their long-time pal Graham Gillmore were invited by AFK director Bill MacDonald to create a collaborative installation in the gallery that usually displays works from the AFK collection. (An art-education trust, the AFK benefits North Vancouver students from grades one to 12. Recently it has extended its scope to include a wider community.)

"We walked into this room, looked at it, then looked up at the ceiling," Grossmann says of the facility, located in a former elementary school. "Then we realized it was an old school gym and thought, 'The first thing we will do is make it back into a gym.'" Coupland talks about the charged nature of the space. "The guys thought that gyms are about competition and endless comparison and status and ranking," he says. "Whereas Angela thought the gym was all about becoming socialized and forming tribes and groups."

Still, the installation is not simply about the nature of school gymnasiums but about school generally, about classrooms, hallways, libraries, washrooms?-physical spaces that trigger a crowd of memories and observations, both personal and universal. "I look at my own high school, in my head, as if I'm in a helicopter," Coupland says, "and it's all one unit."

The temporary walls, track lighting, art storage, and all the other fine-art furniture and accoutrements of the AFK Gallery have been replaced with a twisted playground of altered objects and materials. These include desks, photos, trophies, sports equipment, and plumbing fixtures, all recently salvaged from a decommissioned North Vancouver high school. "The materials are all found, they're all part of school vernacular," Grossmann explains. "They said we could use everything... Well, I was going to say that isn't nailed down, but we used everything including what was nailed down. We took the entire stage and the entire principal's office."

The installation's components were chosen because they all resonated in some powerful way. "We worked with the idea of reconfiguring objects to evoke a new connotation, or to alter the meaning," Root says. Two "Death Stars", one composed of sports trophies, the other of audio-video equipment, hang by heavy chains from the ceiling. Student desks, spotted with chewing gum, are stacked in jungle-gym-like towers at one end of the gallery. At the other, Lukacs works intently on a send-up of a teen-magazine cover, which he is drawing directly onto a displaced washroom stall. Drinking fountains and urinals are bolted at odd heights and angles to a wall nearby. Gym equipment, bracketed together, has been hoisted toward the ceiling. These surreal conglomerations trigger memories and reshape experiences. "We've been trying to determine for ourselves what school meant," says Grossmann.

Acclaimed artists all, they formed a close-knit group while attending the Emily Carr College of Art and Design 25 years ago. With the exception of Coupland, then the sole sculptor and nascent novelist among the band of neo-expressionist painters, they launched their careers together in Vancouver in the mid-1980s. Despite wide travels and extended absences from the city, they've maintained a tight connection.

Root explains that at the outset of their Vancouver School project, the artists decided they would leave their "signature styles and motifs at the door". They would work in the true spirit of collaboration, he says, by consensus, without exercising their individual habits of painting, drawing, or sculpting. "We're five people with really big egos," adds Coupland, "so it wasn't easy." Still, with the exception of Lukacs's washroom-stall drawing of a lovely young man, they've mostly succeeded in erasing their unique and idiosyncratic selves from the installation. Kind of like school.

Unlike school, Grossmann says, converting the AFK Gallery into a massive installation was an opportunity to experiment, outside the mainstream, without the usual art-world pressures and scrutiny. Interrupting his work, Lukacs comments, "This isn't about a product that has to be sold." Then he adds, "We said it would be a fun project because we're working with friends....We can laugh at each other." Coupland concurs. "Drama and all, we really do enjoy working together."