Vancouver Gallery Offsite (Spring 2016 display)
Vancouver Gallery Offsite
Offsite
Offsite is the Vancouver Art Gallery’s outdoor public art space in the heart of the city. Presenting an innovative program of temporary projects, it is a site for local and international contemporary artists to exhibit works related to the surrounding urban context. Featured artists consider the site-specific potential of art within the public realm and respond to the changing social and cultural conditions of our contemporary world. New projects are installed in the spring and fall of each year.
City of Vancouver
Vancouver Art Gallery
Offsite is organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and funded by the City of Vancouver through the Public Art Program. The Gallery recognizes Ian Gillespie, President, Westbank; Ben Yeung, President, Peterson Investment Group; and Residents at Shangri–La for their support of this space.
Curator: Diana Freundi, Associate Curator, Asian Art, Vancouver Art Gallery
Artist Assistant: Ryan Peter
Fabrication and Installation: Abaton Ltd.
About the art
Your Kingdom to Command
June 2 to October 10, 2016
Vancouver artist Marina Roy examines the destructive effects an excessive use of fossil fuels has caused on the natural world. Her installation comments on human reliance on the earth’s resources to the point of endangering biodiversity.
Roy’s enormous plywood mural utilizes bitumen and tar, black molasses like substances found in sedimentary rock that is commonly extracted and refined into fuel. In addition to bitumen, she uses colourful latex paints made of synthetic resins as well as shellac, a balm secreted by the female lac bug, which is processed and dissolved in ethanol to make liquid colourant. Using both natural and processed pigments, the artist depicts an ensemble of phantom-like flora and fauna. These are the ghosts of naturally occurring asphalt: dead organisms such as zooplankton and algae that form sedimentary rock. Once extracted, the asphalt is refined into fossil fuels used to produce a large number of consumer products, from gasoline to plastics and pharmaceuticals. In Roy’s mural, the creature-like forms float as if in a landscape alongside an asphalt pyramid—the pyramid being a reference to the commonly held belief that humans are the planet’s dominating species, entitled to reign over the animal and plant kingdoms. The pyramidal form could also be read as a road receding into the horizon.
Excessive use of fossil fuels such as petroleum has negatively impacted the earth’s biosphere, damaging ecosystems and releasing pollutants such as sulphur dioxide into the air. It has also played a prominent role in global warming, causing extreme weather conditions across the planet. Roy draws upon how changing climates have affected the local environment by referencing the autumn 2015 windstorm in Vancouver that caused several power outages and tree breakages. She salvaged a stump from a tree that fell during the storm, which she displays alongside another stump collected from a research park in Maple Ridge. This stump-cum-fountain is a breeding ground for new life, as seen in the greenery on its roots. The fountain gently waters its barren companion as though nursing it back to life, so that it will, in time, give rise to new life.
[Caption: Marina Roy,
Your Kingdom to Command (artist sketch), 2016
watercolour, pencil on paper
Courtesy of the Artist]
Photo of the space as at July 2016: http://imgur.com/Ro55tHO
More information: http://projects.vanartgallery.bc.ca/offsite/
Submitted by: Jennie Eggleston (www.instagram.com/jeggle)