Sunday Morning Eye Candy — Public Art in Vancouver, Two Works

 Still on a blogging break, but thought I’d share a few photos with you as I explore Vancouver during our “Staycation.”  Although we know the city fairly well, there’s plenty more to discover. For example, I decided I need to add a few new running routes to my routine for variety, and while looping through the Coal Harbour neighbourhood, I found this brilliant installation by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Titled F Grass, the work is surprisingly lyrical for something made of iron, something depicting such an everyday, resilient, underfoot plant. Like his amazing Sunflower Seeds, which Pater and I were lucky enough to see a few years ago in London, this contribution to Vancouver’s Biennale 2014 is both beautiful and subversive — politically sly, perhaps — a work of conceptual art.

Because I’m on a blogging break,  I won’t say more about this, but I’ll refer you instead to Vancouver Biennale’s page about it. The page features information about Weiwei,  his overall ouevre, the work itself, and also offers some great photographs of it from a much better aerial vantage and including its setting in the harbour. There are a couple of videos well worth watching as well.

 Not much further along on this running route, I passed another contribution to the 2014 Vancouver Biennale, Columbian sculptor Luis Fernando Pelaez’s Home by the Sea. Again, you can read more about this work and the artist here.

I will just say that this might be the most poetic use of sheet metal I will ever come across . . .

It’s beautifully sited on an expanse of parkland near the water, with the busy downtown just behind. . . .so many intersections here, so many margins.

I’m putting my mic away now and letting the sculpture speak for itself. It does so much more eloquently on site than it does in my photographs — I wish you could see it up close yourself. . .

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There you go. . . . I hope you enjoyed.