"Expect Delays: Intervenions by Artists"
2003-04-01 until 2003-05-30
Artspeak
Vancouver, BC, CA

This spring in Vancouver, expect to change your movement through the city. Redefine the city's routes by taking a short cut. Look carefully and find a trophy that congratulates you. Stop in a public washroom. Hear someone speaking from the stall next to yours. Exit the washroom and enter a building where you listen to the sound of a heart beating. Return to the street. (Don't be surprised if someone gently touches you while passing by). Walk through a nearby park and see groups of people throwing frisbees, eating their lunches and sitting on benches in the same configuration as a nearby billboard. Stop and join a group of people in red walking across the street. Turn the corner and spot a carefully built home for a small animal in an unlikely location. This spring, expect to be delayed.

Diane Borsato (New York)
Colleen Brown (Vancouver)
Rachel Echenberg (Montreal)
Kirsten Forkert (Vancouver)
John Marriott (Toronto)
Norma (Vancouver)
Christy Thompson (Toronto)
Sarah White (Vancouver)

Expect Delays is a series of off-site projects organized by Artspeak that will take place in locations throughout the city of Vancouver in April and May of 2003. Eight artists from across Canada have been invited to create public infiltration works that use modest engagements in daily life to critically investigate the social conventions, pedestrian movement and regulation of public space. Using strategies of humour, unpredictability and gestures of generosity, these artists take on the challenge of creating work in a city characterized by its constantly shifting infrastructure and accelerated development. Rooted in the tradition of intervention/performance/infiltration-based practice, Expect Delays in intended to expand our definitions of public art as not simply the act of situating art in public spaces, but the process by which art and ideas enter public consciousness. Expect Delays is curated by Kathleen Ritter.

The artists in Expect Delays are undertaking such projects as: identifying the city's shortcuts on maps (John Marriott), placing generic trophies throughout the city with the congratulatory phrase "Good for You" (Christy Thomspon), reciting monologues from the stalls in public washrooms (Sarah White), amplifying sounds of an inner body into a larger environment of public space (Rachel Echenberg), altering daily pedestrian habits to accommodate touching as many people as possible (Diane Borsato), occupying a park in the form of an 'idealized public' (Norma), questioning what defines a collective experience by gathering a group of people to perform a 'walk' through the city (Kirsten Forkert) and building safe homes for small animals within the confines of razor wire (Colleen Brown).

Expect Delays is supported by The Canada Council for the Arts through the Inter Arts Program and the British Columbia Arts Council. Community partners for Expect Delays include the Ramada Limited Downtown Vancouver, the Fine Arts and Music Division of the Vancouver Public Library, the Roundhouse Community Centre, Blake's Bistro, Video In and Access Artist Run Centre.

For more information, project dates and locations, go to expectdelays.com

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for Canada

Other Important Exhibitions in Vancouver