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Hidden among the multi-coloured faces comprising Douglas Coupland’s latest work The National Portrait is a practical joke.
Three years in the making, the piece is made up of 1,000 3D-printed portraits, which the artist and author has arranged in a creative formation inside the Ottawa Art Gallery’s Alma Duncan Salon. Some of the head-and-shoulders busts are placed on small risers; others are stacked in towers six or more high. Still others are so stretched and distorted they look like spears of rainbow-coloured asparagus.
People in nine cities across Canada lined up at Simons stores between 2015 and 2017 to have their faces voluntarily scanned during Coupland’s cross-country tour (the Quebec-based retailer commissioned the piece).
During a stop in Ottawa, 3D printing consultant John Biehler scanned the face of a mannequin before Coupland arrived one morning. He later queried the artist to see if he remembered where the person was from.
Coupland — who says the few minutes it took to meet each person and complete the scan made it easy for him to remember most of the 1,700 who participated — was understandably stumped.
The 1,000 faces in the large-scale installation, on display in Ottawa until Aug. 19, were printed using biodegradable plastic filament. It’s a mixture of landscape, still-life, industrial and portrait photography, and science experiment, Coupland said Thursday.
“This is pretty much what it looked like in my head.”
The three-dimensional element adds a tangibility to the piece portraits lacks, he said. “I like the fact that you have to walk around it, you have to engage in the third dimension to actually participate in it.”
Coupland said his intention was to capture the nation’s spirit in the 21st Century. The overall feeling of the piece, he suggested, is not fractious. There is civility at its core. Everyone has agreed to agree and, in that way, it feels distinctly Canadian to him.
Many of the faces are looking in the same direction. Some have big hair, while others wear flat-brimmed caps, scarves or traditional Indigenous headdresses. And there’s only one quasi-famous person — former governor general Adrienne Clarkson.
One woman who waited in line after hearing about the project told Coupland, “I just wanted to be part of the future.”
“That was really lovely,” he recalled.
Coupland has written 13 novels, including the culture-defining hit, Generation X, and numerous non-fiction books, including a pictorial biography of Terry Fox.
Retrospectives of his visual art have appeared at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Royal Ontario Museum and in Europe at Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art.
The four quadrants of his professional life — fiction, non-fiction, studio and public art — each access and activate different parts of his wildly creative brain. One’s not any better than the other, he says, they’re just different.
“I like to cycle between those four quadrants because each one of them taps into a different part of your being and somehow they all feed each other,” he said.
After seeing The National Portrait, his hope is some viewers will want to buy their own 3-D printer and feel compelled to get creative. “I’d like people to come away from this and make, make, make.”
This isn’t the first time a Coupland design has been unveiled in Ottawa.
We Were There, the LeBreton Flats monument to honour firefighters killed in the line duty or from work-related illnesses, was also conceived by the Vancouver-based Coupland.
The monument’s unique design features a large bronze sculpture of a firefighter and an 18-metre fire pole. The firefighter points to a nearby granite wall where the words Never To Be Forgotten are etched into the smooth surface in both official languages. The $5-million monument was unveiled in 2012.
Another Coupland design — this one for the Stanley Cup monument on Sparks Street — was passed over in 2016 in favour of the 3.45-metre-high chalice that was ultimately chosen and unveiled last year.
mpearson@postmedia.com
twitter.com/mpearson78
查看原文...
Three years in the making, the piece is made up of 1,000 3D-printed portraits, which the artist and author has arranged in a creative formation inside the Ottawa Art Gallery’s Alma Duncan Salon. Some of the head-and-shoulders busts are placed on small risers; others are stacked in towers six or more high. Still others are so stretched and distorted they look like spears of rainbow-coloured asparagus.
People in nine cities across Canada lined up at Simons stores between 2015 and 2017 to have their faces voluntarily scanned during Coupland’s cross-country tour (the Quebec-based retailer commissioned the piece).
During a stop in Ottawa, 3D printing consultant John Biehler scanned the face of a mannequin before Coupland arrived one morning. He later queried the artist to see if he remembered where the person was from.
Coupland — who says the few minutes it took to meet each person and complete the scan made it easy for him to remember most of the 1,700 who participated — was understandably stumped.
The 1,000 faces in the large-scale installation, on display in Ottawa until Aug. 19, were printed using biodegradable plastic filament. It’s a mixture of landscape, still-life, industrial and portrait photography, and science experiment, Coupland said Thursday.
“This is pretty much what it looked like in my head.”
The three-dimensional element adds a tangibility to the piece portraits lacks, he said. “I like the fact that you have to walk around it, you have to engage in the third dimension to actually participate in it.”
Coupland said his intention was to capture the nation’s spirit in the 21st Century. The overall feeling of the piece, he suggested, is not fractious. There is civility at its core. Everyone has agreed to agree and, in that way, it feels distinctly Canadian to him.
Many of the faces are looking in the same direction. Some have big hair, while others wear flat-brimmed caps, scarves or traditional Indigenous headdresses. And there’s only one quasi-famous person — former governor general Adrienne Clarkson.
One woman who waited in line after hearing about the project told Coupland, “I just wanted to be part of the future.”
“That was really lovely,” he recalled.
Coupland has written 13 novels, including the culture-defining hit, Generation X, and numerous non-fiction books, including a pictorial biography of Terry Fox.
Retrospectives of his visual art have appeared at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Royal Ontario Museum and in Europe at Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art.
The four quadrants of his professional life — fiction, non-fiction, studio and public art — each access and activate different parts of his wildly creative brain. One’s not any better than the other, he says, they’re just different.
“I like to cycle between those four quadrants because each one of them taps into a different part of your being and somehow they all feed each other,” he said.
After seeing The National Portrait, his hope is some viewers will want to buy their own 3-D printer and feel compelled to get creative. “I’d like people to come away from this and make, make, make.”
This isn’t the first time a Coupland design has been unveiled in Ottawa.
We Were There, the LeBreton Flats monument to honour firefighters killed in the line duty or from work-related illnesses, was also conceived by the Vancouver-based Coupland.
The monument’s unique design features a large bronze sculpture of a firefighter and an 18-metre fire pole. The firefighter points to a nearby granite wall where the words Never To Be Forgotten are etched into the smooth surface in both official languages. The $5-million monument was unveiled in 2012.
Another Coupland design — this one for the Stanley Cup monument on Sparks Street — was passed over in 2016 in favour of the 3.45-metre-high chalice that was ultimately chosen and unveiled last year.
mpearson@postmedia.com
twitter.com/mpearson78
查看原文...
