Display-Displace, 2013

Reece Terris - Vancouver, Canada

Site-Specific Installation

The boulevards that define the financial district are lined with numerous corporate lobbies. The grand scale of the architecture seems to be at odds with the human scale of the furniture and interior design elements but if you pay attention there is a consistency to the style of furnishings and a method to their meticulous arrangement. One communicates the persistent drive of globalized finance and capital, while the other attempts to humanize it, to make it more welcoming and accessible.

Public art is often used as a means to mediate between architecture and the people that make use of a space. This suggests an artistic opportunity: to treat the furniture in the lobby as modular elements that can be combined and reconfigured to produce abstract sculptural assemblages. Like the modernist works of art that have come to be identified with corporate lobbies and plazas, these new compositions shift the function of the furniture towards the conventions of public art. The stacking and verticality of the accumulated elements temporarily disrupts the comfortable seating accommodations of the lobby to suggest an idiosyncratic individual subjectivity. The provisional new configuration parallels the upwardly mobile aspirations of globalism.

Reece Terris is a Vancouver-based artist whose work alters the expected experiential qualities of a place or object through an amplification or shift in the primary function of an original design.

Past projects include a six-storey apartment building temporarily installed in the rotunda of the Vancouver Art Gallery and a wooden pedestrian bridge connecting two residential homes. He works in a variety of media, including sculpture, performance, installation and photography. 

Learn More

reeceterris.com

19

Richmond-Adelaide Centre, 130 Adelaide Street West

This project is indoors.