Vancouver’s unsung post-Olympic public art
On this hot August morning, five months after the 2010 Winter Games have left town, Olympic Plaza is a lively place. At one end of the public square, located at the corner of Manitoba Street and Athletes Way, bicyclists in racing stripes psych up for a hard ride. At the other end, in front of the Creekside Community Recreation Centre, a TV crew shifts equipment as the coffee wagon arrives. In between, tourists amble around the plaza, all of them—truly, all of them—stopping to pose for photos in front of Myfanwy MacLeod’s outrageous public artwork, The Birds.
Each of its two sculptures, naturalistically proportioned but ominously enlarged depictions of male and female English sparrows, stands 5.5 metres high, about the size of a perching pterodactyl—a really cute pterodactyl. Constructed out of painted polystyrene over steel frames, the sculptures startle, amuse, then confound. The effect of their scale, ultimately, is to make us think about the huge consequences of introducing a foreign species into a delicately balanced ecosystem. Launched in late May, the work was commissioned as part of the City of Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic Public Art Program, and speaks to the sustainability theme of the Olympic Village development.
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