NEWSLETTER

© city of vancouver

With work in major museum collections around the world, Vancouver artist Rodney Graham is a key figure on the Canadian and international art scene. Well-known for his conceptual and often humorous sculptures, his piece for the Georgia St. entrance to Stanley Park plays with the theme of flight, a nod to the location's nearby seaplanes as well as the toy model planes seen with children and adults on the park's grounds.

The work takes its title from a series of photographs I shot in Vancouver in 1977…which documented a series of ‘incorrectly’ assembled toy glider kits…I put the models together not with a view to having them fly correctly, but with an eye to their aesthetic value as purely abstract sculptural forms… Part of the challenge inherent in making these works was the very limited instrumental set from which I had to draw.

When I was asked to create a sculptural proposal for the entrance to Stanley Park, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to return to this work…and try to realize a large-scale version of one of these sculptures: to use the same very limited instrumental set with which anyone who has put together a toy glider would be familiar. The theme of flight seemed appropriate given the location too, for seaplanes are common sights at the entrance to the park.

And the park, of course, is a place where children and adults may very well play with gliders... Plus it would be something that would be interesting when glimpsed only briefly by passengers in vehicles moving at relatively high speed along West Georgia.

The title of the work ("Aerodynamic Forms in Space") is meant to evoke, in a slightly humorous way…that of a classical modernist public monument of a bygone period, elements of which the sculpture plays with. (Rodney Graham)