A couple days ago, I tweeted a link to a blog post written by Frances Bula, the ever-productive urban affairs/Vancouver City Hall writer. Followed for her forward-thinking and pragmatic reporting, Bula proposed three ideas the city should adopt to keep the Olympic vibe alive. Specifically: adding an aboriginal museum downtown; removing red tape around street food and sidewalk cafes, and; coming up with incentives to keep people using public transit like they did these past couple weeks (i.e. free transit attached to event tickets, temporary U-passes, etc). The complete post and the 47 other suggestions it’s spawned to date are linked here.
Getting the city we want
Art of Craft: Two upcoming family programs + Handmade Nation
The Olympic Games may be over, but the Cultural Olympiad continues—now without the complications of capacity crowds (fun as they were!). Starting next weekend, we resume public programs with a series of events relating to Art of Craft, one of the exhibits we’re hosting as part of the Olympiad.
On March 13, there’s a MOV Kids & Family collage workshop hosted by local textile artist Bettina Matzkuhn, whose work is featured in Art of Craft. Participants bring scraps and materials from home; we’ll have sewing supplies. The workshop is free with regular admission and recommended for a range of ages, though parental involvement is required. Further details are found on our Engagement Calendar.
Q&A: Jan Halvarson, co-founder of Poppytalk
In March 2005, Vancouver-based graphic designer Jan Halvarson launched Poppytalk, an influential design blog followed internationally by design enthusiasts and shelter-magazine editors alike.
A prolific curator of all things “handmade, decayed, and beautiful,” Halvarson has been at the forefront of contemporary arts and crafts trends, spotting new talent here and abroad. In conversation with MOV, she shares her thoughts on the revival of craft, how the Vancouver scene is evolving, and the local artists she’s following now.
Ravishing Beasts draws to a close this weekend; final thoughts
Who knew an exhibit on taxidermy would be such a hit?
As much as we loved the ideas explored in Ravishing Beasts, and the opportunity to reveal all the animals and species we’d been hoarding in our basement for decades, we were surprised by the crowds and media interest it sustained these past few months (some of the press coverage is linked here). Credit guest curator Rachel Poliquin for seeing beyond the stale narratives of taxidermy—hunting, conquest, decay—and telling a contemporary, even surprising, story. In so many ways, she’s given this strange, disparate collection an afterlife.
Ed Pien: Pushing drawing beyond sentimentality
Internationally acclaimed artist Ed Pien arrived in Vancouver a few weeks ago carrying his work Tracing Night in two suitcases. Created in 2004, it’s now part of his personal collection and, he says, representative of 20 years of pushing the act of drawing into three dimensions.
The idea to create art you have to walk—sometimes crawl—into to fully explore first occurred to him at a showing of his paintings in 1985. Looking back at the canvases as they hung on the gallery wall, he saw only the depth of the stretchers. “They [the paintings] seemed dead to me,” he told an audience at a recent MOV talk. “I wanted to come up with a way to engage viewers more thoroughly, and keep them engaged for longer periods. That was really the beginning of my three-dimensional installation work.”
2050 is the new 2010
We’re not even halfway through the Olympics, but in some circles the conversation is already shifting to a post-Games analysis—that is, aside from the bad press, particularly from cities that have hosted the Games (see a story from Utah’s Daily Herald newspaper here) or are set to (coverage from London here). What’s that about?
There are several local events and fora in the offing to examine the impact the event had on the city, their legacy (get used to hearing that word), and where we’re headed more generally without a massive deadline or international audience to steer our efforts. Vancouverites who lived through Expo 86 must experiencing profound sense of deja vu.
A few of our favourite things from the Games
This is less a piece of writing than a working list of our favourite things to come out of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. A caveat: many of these things aren’t directly linked to the Olympics, but may have been accelerated by them.
Favourite transit project: So many column inches have been written about streetcars in Vancouver—why we took them off city streets so many years ago, why we don’t add one down the old Arbutus rail corridor, why we didn’t build a grid of streetcars instead of a subway line. Vancouverites—or maybe it’s just reporters?—are obsessed with the things. So when the (also) much-written about streetcar line between Granville Island and the Olympic Village Canada Line station was reopened for the Games as part of a demonstration project years in the planning—and with free fares to boot—it was something of a miracle. The length of the line is akin to Seattle’s monorail system (read: short) but it’s a needed connection to an under-served area, and fun to ride. More details on the project linked here.
Welcome world! Fascinated by what you’re writing about us
So much going on it’s hard to keep up! There’s too much to write; we’ll post more over the coming days.
It’s too early to get into the Games, but so far we’ve been fascinated by—among many, many other things—all the reporting and essays coming out about Vancouver and Canada. Three must-reads so far.
Vectorial Elevation goes live tonight
Quick post—and an invitation: Tonight, the Vectorial Elevation light show goes live over English Bay. There’s been a bit of buzz about this Cultural Olympiad installation (hosted as part of CODE, their digital program).
In a nutshell, Vectorial Elevation is an audience-generated laser-light show (the rendering pictured at left doesn’t really do it justice). A series of 10,000-watt “robotic searchlights” have been set up along Vanier Park and Sunset Beach. Once Vectorialvancouver.net goes live at noon today, users from here and around the world can design their own light patterns, creating a spectacular, evolving, massive interactive display that will be visible as far as Richmond and the peaks of Grouse and Cypress. There are some parameters in the program to keep the lights aiming skyward, so nix any plans to align the beams into a single condo unit.)
The intimate, evocative work of Ed Pien
Tonight marks the opening Tracing Night, the second exhibit MOV is hosting as part of the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, and on view until April 11. The launch party starts at 7 p.m.; tickets available here or at the door.
Tracing Night defies easy classification: it’s an installation piece that serves as a stand-alone exhibit; it’s art layered with history, mythology, and psychology; it’s an elaborate drawing that needs to be entered into to be understood, and one heightened by video projection and a humming, eerie sound scape. In many respects, it’s an unusual choice for a city museum, but its location is somehow fitting, occupying a cavernous 1,000-square-foot gallery wedged between our permanent history galleries and Art of Craft, a binational survey of pieces from Canada and Korea (and our second Cultural Olympiad show).
