SWARM08 – Check it.
SWARM is as it sounds – two frenzied nights of visual and mental stimuli from Vancouver’s visual arts community, it is mixed with food, sound, and drink and spread across out fair city – from Mount Pleasant to Gastown. It’s always a lot of fun, and chalk full of great local artists and their work.
On Thursday, I’ll be checking out the Green collection at Click Clack Empire, “We Declare”: Spaces of Housing at Gallery Gache, and Styrofoam Huffer looks especially interesting:
Styrofoam Huffer will consist of a large scale sculpture that will operate as an object that could have potential communal use. Taking his inspiration from the film Darwin’s Nightmare, which depicts children in Africa melting the toxic styrofoam substance for the purpose of numbing their bodies and minds in order to function in unbearable social and political circumstances, he draws upon this particular instance to describe our own collective numbness to the social issues that surround our everyday experience. This project’s intention lies not in a place of judgement or blame-placing, instead it asks us all to question where it is that we fit into the fabric of society, what happens when we all choose to participate in seemingly insignificant actions, and how certain objects or materials can have a function after their usefulness appears to have been taken away.
