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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.)

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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).

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