Contemporary Art Wraps Metro Vancouver Buses

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"How far do you travel?" bus displaying Diyan Achjadi, "NonSerie (In Commute)," 2017/2018

Five contemporary artists are wrapping the exteriors of 30 articulated buses in Metro Vancouver as part of a public art project organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery and TransLink, the regional transit system.

The project, How far do you travel?,  invites the public to consider the role that images play in carrying ideas and meaning from one place to another.

The wrapped buses have interior displays that include quotations from the artists, offering both a response to the question and insights into their work.

The project features the work of Vancouver artist Diyan Achjadi, whose wrapped buses hit the streets on Jan. 4. Designs by Patrick Cruz, Rolande Souliere, Erdem Taşdelen and Anna Torma will follow.

The official launch is Jan. 17 from 5:30 p.m. to  9 p.m. and a mobile artist talk by Achjadi will be held Feb. 3 from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Other free events on the buses will follow, including performances and art-making activities for children.

Achjadi, whose artistic practice explores print media’s role in the transit of knowledge throughout the world, nods to traditional Chinoiserie wallpaper and textiles.

She wraps them in NonSerie (In Commute), 2017/2018, a reconfiguration of historical illustrations that depict an imagined Indonesia from the perspective of 17th and 18th century Dutch settlers. As an Indonesian, Achjadi’s project is a critical response to the cross-cultural influences and fantastical imaginings that resulted from colonization.

Toronto-based artist Patrick Cruz also displays work inspired by a personal history of migration.

He came from the Philippines in 2005 and, for this project, has wrapped his buses in a variation of his installation, Step Mother Tongue. The pictographic imagery partially derives from a precolonial Philippine language suppressed by the Spanish during their occupation.

Cruz’s work reflects on the imagery's travels through time and space, as well as capitalism, globalization and an imagined post-colonial future.

Rolande Souliere, an Anishinaabe artist and a member of the Michipicoten First Nation, wraps her buses in a design that evokes hazard tape, using the colour symbolism of the four directions from Indigenous culture.

Her piece, Frequent Stopping, Part III, draws from an extensive body of work that uses road metaphors to consider land claims and shifting boundaries.

Turkish-Canadian artist Erdem Taşdelen’s work reconsiders his collage Essentials of Psychological Testing, 2018. Each of the piece's drawings, diagrams and graphs were scanned from a psychology textbook borrowed from the Vancouver Public Library. All textual information has been removed.

Lacking any context, the collaged imagery resembles cryptic puzzles and questions the field of psychology, suggesting the impossible distance visual information must travel to measure what makes us who we are.

New Brunswick artist Anna Torma draws from her series Abandoned Details. She explores traditional Hungarian textiles and fibre-based arts, presenting whimsical imagery drawn from her family history, her children’s drawings, Hungarian folklore and personal memory.

Torma considers the complex nature of diasporic experience, the desire to remember the details from one’s past, and the act of translating and transporting them into the present.

Source: Contemporary Art Gallery