Bend Public Art

Bend (designed with the marc boutin architectural collaborative)
This public art project was the commissioned art piece for Winnipeg’s Cool Gardens festival. The installation Bend hangs on the convergence of two visual planes – the sky and the earth. While these two separate planes never touch in actuality, our experience and frame of reference is and will always be subject to a horizon line, and thus, a meeting point. Through an aggregation of mirrors, two resulting sheets of reflection serve to create a new virtual plenum – a third and alternative visual space. While our expression of the physical ‘garden’ is contained, the installation’s inherent celebration of negative space projects an open-ended image. Bend presents the garden as an experiential field: in its concave capacity, it offers a single point of reference and therefore an interior provision; conversely, its convex boundaries serve to project its exterior surroundings, cumulatively creating a meditative space that explores the contemporary potential of the garden. Subject to the time of day, the movement of the clouds, and seasonal conditions, it was our hope that visitors would be treated to an ephemeral experience, and alternative sense of vision and garden.