What Are We Now?
Lynne Marsh’s Stadium (2008) and Antonia Hirsch’s Vox Pop (2008) revolve around solitary figures within sports arenas. Grid-like formations of fixed, empty seating serve as both backdrop environments and the presence of absent crowds. Each work adopts the seamless production values and structural familiarity of contemporary advertising and televisual entertainments. Vox Pop is a silent two-channel video work one minute in duration.
Olympic Village Discards Recast As Public Art
It’s really the last place you’d look for art: Behind barbed wire, on the back corner of an abandoned industrial lot, tucked in behind a big pile of dirt and gravel sprouting scrappy clumps of grass. In the movies, this would be the place to dump a body. In Vancouver, this generic strip of halfpaved wasteland next to the Olympic Village has become a piece of interactive public art.
From Bars to Brollies, Bright Lights
When independent curator Patrik Andersson invited T&T to create a sustainability-themed exhibition for the Pendulum Gallery during the Winter Olympics, he made this request: “Think about what happens when the Olympic countdown clock goes below zero.” Tony Romano of Toronto and Tyler Brett of Bruno, Saskatchewan—who often make art together under the sobriquet T&T—responded with a cheery, postapocalyptic vision of Vancouver called False Creek. Specifically, their installation is a kind of after-the-gold-rush imagining of the area.
Finn Again Awakes every three minutes
ears ago, I went on a James Joyce tear. I started with Dubliners, worked my way through Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and then Ulysses. The last challenge was Finnegans Wake. Full of puns, verbal wordplay and made-up words, Joyce’s last book has a reputation as a notoriously difficult book to read.Undaunted, I read on. Or, at least, I tried. Again and again, after a few pages, I was completely lost, unable to figure out what I’d just read.
‘Digital Natives’
If you’re crossing Vancouver’s Burrard Bridge and glance at the electronic billboard that rises at its Kitsilano end, you may notice something different. Amidst the Guinness and Jack FM ads will flash the occasional message on a red background. Some of them will seem to be about native issues
Twitter-like messages highlight Vancouver billboard
Interspersed with ads for Air Canada, Starbucks, cars and wine on the controversial electronic billboards adjacent to the Burrard Bridge, new messages are provoking thought in a different way.
Digital Natives Controversy (Vancouver, bc)
The following post comes in the wake of a controversy related to an art installation for Vancouver’s 125th Birthday Celebration. Clint Burnham and Lorna Brown are co-curators of the project.
Two urban agriculture projects
It may not have been the nadir of my dimness, but it was certainly the most twitlike thing I did last weekend. Believing the end time was the start time, I arrived at the Grow project’s mason-bee workshop three hours late, just after the participants had left. Still, the enthusiasm of artist Holly Schmidt and landscape architecture student Chloe Bennett shone on undiminished. Standing in the middle of what’s been dubbed the “Bulkhead Urban Agriculture Lab”, a public-art project on the south shore of False Creek, just west of the Olympic Village, they generously shared their knowledge and insights.
Artists and Gardens: A Growing Concern
A cold wind blows off the grey waters of Vancouver’s False Creek. On a grassy promontory, just west of the Olympic Village and north of the former city works yard, a garden is being dismantled. Large planters, fashioned out of repurposed shipping bags and perched on second-hand wooden pallets, have yielded up their summer bounty of herbs, berries, grains, vegetables and edible flowers. Workshops have been given, walks have been conducted and seeds have been exchanged. More importantly, the garden has sown a large crop of community interest and environmental involvement.
The Situation Is This: Speaker Series Fall 2011
Kathleen Ritter, October 5, 2011 Francisco Camacho, October 11, 2011 Samuel Roy-Bois: Interlocutor, November 8, 2011 Claire Doherty in conversation with Lorna Brown (Podcast) Over the last four decades, artists have re-imagined their relationship to public space. Moving from civic squares and lofty edifices, public art has expanded beyond a relationship to physical structures to […]