Friends and fellow artists are remembering Rodney Graham, 73, for his versatility and wide-ranging disciplines as an artist and for his generosity and his genius.
A detail of Chen Wenling s bronze and steel sculpture Boy Holding A Shark (2021) due to be installed on the South False Creek Seawall in Vancouver
Residents of a Vancouver neighbourhood have organised a community petition asking the city to stop the installation of proposed sculpture for the Vancouver Biennale by the respected Chinese artist Chen Wenling, citing concerns about the work’s impact on real estate values and the ethnicity of the artist as factors. As of Monday (14 June), the deadline for submission of public input, the petition had 1,300 signatures. A final decision by the city is expected later this week.
Book Review – Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin: Architecture and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century
The installation of Rodney Graham’s Spinning Chandelier, the $3.5 million replica of a French chandelier that sits under Vancouver’s Granville Bridge, has always struck me as a bizarrely literal embodiment of the geographer Neil Smith’s concept of the revanchist city
: a city where policy and the market work in collaboration to further exclude already marginalized groups. In a city where thousands struggle to afford housing that meets their needs, the Westbank-funded public art project feels like a giant (spinning) crystal middle finger.
My minor obsession with Graham’s sculpture meant that I was particularly exhilarated by the entire chapter that Matthew Soules dedicates to Vancouver House, the ‘starchitect’ tower associated with the Spinning Chandelier, in his new book