Swelled heads

Too weird for my words, you can read about it HERE, but really, has Doug Coupland gone too far with this? A giant self-portrait upon which the public is invited to stick chewing gum…Gumhead will be installed outside the Vancouver Art Gallery for the summer.

Source: Twitter @DougCoupland

The official description from the gallery’s website is that the installation

is a seven-foot tall self-portrait that the artist has described as “a gum-based, crowd-sourced, publically [sic] interactive, social-sculpture self-portrait.” Viewers and passersby are encouraged to apply their own chewed gum to the sculpture so that over the summer months it is transformed, eventually obscuring the artist’s face. 

Reminds me of Seward Johnson’s Marilyn Monroe monstrosity, voted one of the worst pieces of public art ever…

© THE DESERT SUN, JAY CALDERON / AP

Please don’t anyone bring it to Canada…we have our own gigantism….

Beaverlodge, Alberta

Public engagement using video

Canada’s National Film Board changed the way documentary films were made and presented when, in the mid-1960’s, they created the Challenge for Change program, which put the then-new lightweight (by those standards) video cameras and recorders into the hands of community activists, recording meetings, protests and interviews on local subjects for local audiences. It was a great success and ran until 1975 when the government of the day cut funding (no doubt due to the program’s “challenge” to top-down decision-making). Challenge for Change films may still be seen on the NFB’s website, and are available in libraries across North America.

Here in Vancouver, filmmaker David Vaisbord, after completing several successful, relatively big-budget documentaries, found that funding had dried up, and decided instead to find films he could make within a six-block radius of his home. What he found was Little Mountain, a low-income housing project that was being demolished, its families evicted, by a government intent on making a quick buck selling the park-like property to a commercial developer to build yet more low and medium rise condominiums in a city that had gone condo-crazy. Six years later, David continues to film the band of former residents who fought various levels of government and who have lost and won battles to retain social housing in this new development. Two of the most determined not to be forced out, pictured above, are Sammie and Joan, a blind couple. Neither of them will be moving into the new social housing they fought so long and hard for: Joan passed away this year, followed a few months later by Sam.

Making a long-form, multi-year documentary is not for the faint of heart, as the filmmaker explains…

David Vaisbord in conversation with Michael Cox

Listen to Interview

 

urban space advocacy

Some ideas about the use of space in cities:

Five finalists have been announced for this year’s Urban Land Institute (ULI) Urban Open Space Award, an annual competition that recognizes outstanding examples of successful large- and small-scale public spaces that have socially enriched and revitalized the economy of their surrounding communities: http://t.co/OWsb0waxCh

One of the finalists is Santa Fe’s Railyard Park. An imaginative repurposing of industrial land, designed by Frederic Schwartz Architects (design and history here), it is a popular meeting place which the city has dubbed “Santa Fe’s Central Park.” It is cared for by the Railyard Stewards, a non-profit organization of volunteers.

Animating urban spaces by fictionalizing them is happening in Vancouver, where neighbourhood residents of the Riley Park area are collecting and creating short geo-centric narratives. This is a new project so there’s not much to go on yet, but an interesting way to involve people in the history of their community.

Putting the priority on liveable and useable public spaces, the Project for Public Spaces recently launched the PLACEMAKING MOVEMENT:

Over the past year, Placemakers from PPS have been invited to speak in hundreds of cities, where people are eager for new opportunities to create great places in their communities, from average citizens up to more and more enlightened city officials and private sector partners. We are currently leading some of the most boundary-pushing projects on every continent (Well, except for Antarctica; but it’s only a matter of time!). From the Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper re-imagining of Detroit, to the academy-shaking success of the Harvard Common Spaces program, to our work with JUCCCE [Facebook] to shape the new China Dream around Placemaking principles, to the widespread adoption of Place Governance principles inAdelaide, Australia, Placemaking is turning things upside-down on every corner of the globe.

Closer to home, the Vancouver Public Space Network is a model of how citizens can organize to advocate for the creative, democratic and cooperative uses of public space, which includes, of course, the installation of temporary and permanent public art [i.e. Vancouver Biennale]:

As an advocacy organization, the VPSN works to champion the importance of public space to the overall liveability of the city. Our efforts are wide-reaching and our organization is structured around eight key portfolios and project areas. Our work attempts to provide a blend of focused research and design work, creative community engagement and, a celebratory, solutions-based approach.

installation, Heather and Ivan Morison, Vancouver Art Gallery OffSite 2010

 

 

Norway’s memorial

22 July 2011, Oslo

 

The same day, Utoya Island, Norway

27 February, 2014, Oslo.

Three years ago 69 people, many of them young, were murdered in Oslo and on Utoya, an island in Norway.

A contest was held this past winter for two memorials, one in each location. The judges chose Jonas Dahlberg, because his proposal “takes the emptiness and traces of the tragic events of 22 July as its starting point” and then makes a dramatic break in a landscape, a sudden cutting away of the headland, where the names of the dead are inscribed on an inaccessible rock face, separated from the viewer by water.

From the press release (27/02/2014) of KORO/Public Art Norway:

Dahlberg’s concept takes the site at Sørbråten as its point of departure. Here he proposes a wound or a cut within the landscape itself to recreate the physical experience of something being taken away, and to reflect the abrupt and permanent loss of those who died on Utøya. The cut will be a three-and-a-half-metre wide excavation running from the top of the headland at the Sørbråten site to below the waterline and extending to each side. This gap in the landscape will make it impossible to reach the end of the headland.

 

The Jury considers Dahlberg’s proposal for Sørbråten as artistically highly original and interesting. It is capable of conveying and confronting the trauma and loss that the 22 July events resulted in in a daring way. The proposal is radical and brave, and evokes the tragic events in a physical and direct manner.

The material excavated from the cut at Sørbråten will be used to build the foundation for the temporary memorial at the Government Quarter in Oslo, and will also subsequently serve as the foundation for the permanent memorial there.

Here are the other entries for the July 22 memorials: http://minnesteder.no/en/entries/

if Banksy says its good…

does it have to be stamped “Banksy approved”? No, but it doesn’t hurt that the artist has posted an image by a Vancouver artist who goes by I ♡ The Street Art, as reported in VanCity Buzz.

At the time of publication, within two hours after it was posted on Banksy’s Facebook page with #NotBanksy as its description, the photo has already been liked by more than 60,000 people and shared nearly 7,000 times.

“Nobody Likes You” (2014) by I Heart the Street Art

And he’s selling prints of this from his website. The artist writes he “froze my arse off” while making this work in Calgary in minus 20 Celsius weather:

by I Heart the Street Art

One could argue that this is a rip-0ff of the Banksy style, but that would be more like an homage to him in graffiti circles, and don’t all artists build on, use elements of, and otherwise riff on other artists?

Video profile by Chris Bentzen for Hot Art Wet City

https://vimeo.com/83263130

Kaarina Kaikkonen

Although shot a couple of years ago, this video hasn’t been available online until now. Kaarina is from Finland. She creates art from found and recycled objects, often men’s shirts, which reflect a dark moment in her childhood when she witnessed her father’s sudden death, and her guilt over not being able to save him. She has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Chile), Cuba, the U.S., England and elsewhere.

Kaarina Kaikkonen: The Blue Route, 2013. Courtesy of Fabrica Gallery, Brighton.

In Vancouver she created a temporary installation at the Van Dusen Botanical Garden for the Vancouver Biennale 2009-2011, where I caught up with her as she worked with volunteers to build her sculpture.

New waterfront installation

Janet Echelman will install a temporary artwork over the sidewalk and water at the Trade and Convention Centre in Vancouver for the 2014 TED talks this March.

Studio Echelman is currently working on designs for a monumental aerial sculpture to premiere at the TED Conference’s 30th anniversary in Vancouver, March 2014. The sculpture will suspend 700 feet between a 30-story skyscraper and the Vancouver Convention Center– challenging the artist to work on her most ambitious scale yet. –http://www.echelman.com/project/ted-2014-conference-sculpture/

The location. Trade and Convention Centre has second largest green roof in North America. Sculpture will be on far side of building.

This work will only be up for one month. I’ll video the installation and put it up here.

Her previous work in this area was for the Olympic Speed Skating Oval in Richmond BC, which is a permanent installation: Water Sky Garden.

Janet Echelman: Water Sky Garden (2010)

Water Sky Garden, photo © Christina Lazar-Schuler

Please take the time to view Janet Echelman’s TED talk: Taking Imagination Seriously, as it is truly inspiring…