Thinking of New York and all its been through recently? The Tobias Wong exhibition, at the Museum of Vancouver, is well worth a rainy afternoon visit! My favourite piece, the iconic Florent matchbooks re-imagined as the NYC skyline (still with the twin towers, inspired by the perverse optimism of Tibor Kalman). A great show.
Immersed in a swarm of suspended origami jellyfish at the Vancouver Aquarium.
Can you tell the difference between the crocheted wool coral (Cooper Hewitt Design Museum) and the coral coral (Vancouver Aquarium)? Okay, perhaps the fish give it away.
Interestingly, this huge sparrow is sculpted from polystyrene (a material usually used for disposable cutlery and foam drink cups). Touché.
Why are these sculptures so compelling, much more so than the usual bronze (although the pasture of bronze cows in downtown Toronto is pretty great). Paper, wool and polystyrene are so unexpected, yet turn out to be perfect, making the juxtapositions between animal and material memorable. You can’t ask for more from a medium than that.
Museums are places to look and think and when the objects they offer span the lifetime of the planet, there is much to appreciate and also to think about. How does one visualize time?
At the Beaty Museum you can literally stand on top of dinosaur bones, helpfully protected by a glass floor, while marvelling at the reconstructed skeleton of a Blue Whale that washed up on a beach in PEI 30 years ago, spectacularly hanging from the ceiling.
It’s wrapping your head around the millions of years between the bones above and the bones below that takes some time.
(Source: beatymuseum.ubc.ca)
