by Rob Howatson

courtesy Dan Fairchild

The sculptures and images of Vancouver’s streetscape blitz are the product of several arts initiatives that are intersecting as Vancouver heads into Olympics mode. Many of the bizarre and beautiful creations popping up around Vancouver and Richmond, for example, are part of the Vancouver Biennale, an arts exhibition that, as its name would suggest, is supposed to take place every two years – but in this case is spanning 2009 to 2011.

The Biennale features 39 installations collectively worth more than $10 million: pieces that range from the Gao brothers’ Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin’s Head, which is drawing cheers and jeers at Elmbridge and Alderbridge Way, to Jaume Plensa’s WE — a human form, woven from letters, that haunts Sunset Beach at night when the sculpture glows white. A map showing the locations of the different Biennale sites is available here.

courtesy Dan Fairchild

The City of Vancouver has also launched The Olympic and Paralympic Public Art Program, which includes more than 20 new permanent and temporary public artworks commissioned for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. This explains why Vancouver’s City Hall is trimmed with LED lights that produce a cascading effect for a few seconds at the top of each evening hour. (See the YouTube video here.) Thanks, German artist Gunda Förster. The program also explains why Vancouver artist Vanessa Kwan will tow a skewed kiosk around the city February 21 to March 21 and hand out postcards to passerby. The postcards have die-cut holes in them enabling recipients to frame the real vista and take their own photos of the landscape within the dreamscape. The images can then be posted to Flickr so that suddenly the viewer is the artist.

courtesy Dan Fairchild

Also be sure to check out Ken Lum’s Monument for East Vancouver at 6th Ave and Clarke Drive, Stan Douglas’s Abbott and Cordova, which is located in the atrium of the new Woodward’s complex near Abbott and Cordova and Michael Lin’s enormous hand-painted mural that covers the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Georgia Street façade.

>>Which artworks, if any, do you find uplifting?

>>Which ones should be chased out of town, as was the case with Dennis Oppenheim’s Device for Rooting Out Evil, the six-metre-tall, upside-down church that once graced the lawn at Coal Harbour’s Harbour Green Park?

Photos courtesy Dan Fairchild