The Vancouver Biennale is inviting people of all ages to participate in the creation of a public artwork outside Simons at Park Royal South.
A "pigmenting party" is set for Saturday, Oct. 24 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. during which volunteers will turn the trunks and branches of 260 trees a brilliant blue colour. To mark Simons' 175th anniversary, the first 175 people to register for the pigmenting party will receive a three-to five-foot potted red maple sapling (pigmented blue) and a T-shirt.
The Blue Trees initiative was originally launched at the second Vancouver Biennale outdoor art exhibit in 2009-2011 by Australian artist Konstantin Dimopoulos. The art project has since been recreated in 14 cities around the world. Dimopoulos, who will be in attendance at Park Royal next Saturday, uses an environmentally safe, water-based, natural blue pigment to alter the colour of smooth-barked trees. The colour slowly degrades over time and can be manually removed with water.
According to a written statement by the artist, the colourful installation carries an environmentally conscious message.
"The Blue Trees takes an urban landscape with which you are familiar and changes it for a brief period of time so that it becomes surreal, unfamiliar, even uncomfortable," Dimopoulos states. "We are creatures who like certainty and we become disconcerted when our environment changes.
Yet we have altered and destroyed much of the global environment."
Dimopoulos is hopeful that his art generates discussion and highlights ecological issues.
"I have always known that art is and has always has been an extended part of nature and that art can effect social change. For that to happen one has to move out of the art institutions and galleries and move outside among nature and people in their living spaces," he states.
The West Vancouver pigmenting party will take place rain or shine. Register online at vancouverbiennalebluetrees.eventbrite.com.
