Public Art Private Views, 23 short films about art in public spaces
Public Art Private Views
Twenty-three short films about art in public spaces. Three hours of art and interviews. Available in a two-DVD set complete with an educator’s/viewer’s guide. This overview of public art, its conception, implementation, and challenges, is ideal for high-school and public libraries and municipal public art offices.
Moving Images Distribution website
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DVD1:
1: Kobberling and Kaltwasser build nothing to last.
German artists Folke Kobberling and Martin Kaltwasser build sculptures from found materials. Invited to make something of the detritus left over from the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, they construct a giant bulldozer on a site next to the Olympic village, a site cleared for the Games and soon to be developed with more condominium towers. The sculpture is built to decompose over time.
2: Responding to Site: Liz Magor, LightShed
How does art in a public space reflect or respond to its site, and is there a corresponding influence upon the artwork by its location? Liz Magor discusses her historically referenced ‘LightShed” which is very contemporary in construction material, yet refers to an old building.
3: Responding to Site: Ken Lum, Three Works
While Lum has employed sculpture and painting in his practice it is his photo-text works that have gained the artist international attention in recent years. Using the portrait as his working model, Lum comments on various elements of contemporary life and art by juxtaposing text, whether it be a person’s name or a fragment of a thought or dialogue, with photographs of stereotypes of people in ordinary (but staged) situations and environments. The friction that is created between the text and the image, while usually ironic, is more often unsettling and always ambiguous. In works that deal with issues such as race and class in a multicultural society and the influence of corporate power and mass media there is a critical edge that in some ways appears to make an intimate crisis or situation very exposed but this critique is less about the social type portrayed by Lum then about the inadequate social landscape that engenders such disfunction. In the end the viewer often feels some kind of kinship and sympathy for the characters in Lum’s dramas. – Vancouver Art Gallery
In 2012, Lum joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design in Philadelphia. In 2013, he was appointed a Fellow of the Penn Institute of Urban Research.
4: Responding to Site: Digital Natives by Clint Burnham & Lorna Brown
Curators Lorna Brown and Clint Burnham talk about their ephemeral project Digital Natives, involving dozens of tweets by artists and activists on a digital billboard located on aboriginal land.
5: Vancouver’s Public Art Program.
Vancouver’s manager of the civic public art program, Bryan Newson, gives its history and context within the larger framework of the idea of the ‘creative city.’ Over fifty works of public art are shown.
6-8: Communities and Public Art (in three parts).
Art originating from the local community: in “South Hill” a neighbourhood business association engages a curator to create a public art plan for a commercial street in need of revitilization. The Public Dreams Society creates performance-based public art engaging, and building, communities, with events such as their fall Parade of Lost Souls, taking place along several back alleys, and Illuminares, an annual festival of light. And in the third section, Reece Terris, an artist and builder, created a “social bridge” between his home and his neighbour, without city approval.
DVD 2 Contents: (note: the stills are not links to videos; hyperlinks are to artist website.)
9. Søren Dahlgaard: Dough Portraits
10. Sophie Ryder: Lost in a Maze
Sophie Ryder. “Minotaur and Hare” (© Dan Fairchild)
11. Hema Upadhyay: Loco Foco Motto
12. Marie Khouri: Art on the Canada Line
13. Kaarina Kaikkonen: Growing Connections
Growing Connections, at the Van Dusen Gardens, 2010. Photo by Dan Fairchild.
14. Sebastian: in the Van Dusen Gardens
Artist: Sebastian. Location: Bellingham. Photo by Ann Chaikin
15. Jim Denevan: Sand Drawings
Peter Hinson photo of Jim Denevan’s sand drawing, Spanish Banks, Vancouver 2010.
16. Michel Goulet: Echoes
Michel Goulet.
17–18. Public Art and Architecture: interviews with a developer and two architects. Ian Gillespie of Westbank Developments, and Michael Heeney and Bing Thom of Bing Thom Architects, discuss the importance of the builder being given a vote, if not final approval, to the art that goes onto their buildings.
Westbank Developments: Telus Gardens (opening 2015)
19. Jenifer Paparo, former curator of the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.
Artist: Scott Massey: Aurorae, at the Contemporary Art Gallery.
20. Scott Watson, curator Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, University of British Columbia.
Artist: Edgar Heap of Birds
21. Barrie Mowatt, founder and director of the Vancouver Biennale
Artist: Dennis Oppenheim; photo by Dan Fairchild
22. Bill Jeffries, former curator, Simon Fraser University Gallery.
Occupy Vancouver at the Vancouver Art Gallery, 2012.
The complete series, 23 films in all, is available in a two-DVD set from Moving Images Distribution.
PUBLIC ART PRIVATE VIEWS 