The Vancouver Art Gallery is taking art to the streets with its public outdoor exhibition space Offsite. These striking site-specific installations rotate every few months to boldly disrupt the bustle of daily life to offer moments of refection and amusement. Vancouver-based artist and writer Marina Roy created the site’s thirteenth installation Your Kingdom to Command, located outside the Shangri-La Hotel.
Roy’s complex and clever web of richly layered historical, biological and musical references is comprised of a wide range of unusual materials including bitumen, shellac and salvaged tree stumps from Vancouver’s summer 2015 windstorm.
The artist’s use of evocative materials and colourful forms is a nod to the processes of refining the remains of dead organisms into fossil fuels to produce gasoline and plastics for human use; one of the many kinds of human activity that has a profound impact on the environment.
Your Kingdom to Command reflects on the global and local consequences of climate change—but also nature’s restorative phenomena (note the log’s water works nursing its fellow log friend).
Curious about the origin of the title Your Kingdom to Command? Hint: have a listen to the song Shangri-La by British rock band The Kinks! —Laura Busby
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