Patricia Reser Centre for the Arts (The Reser) Beaverton Oregon 2022

A dandelion puff floats above the lobby. Delicate yet robust the sculpture is made of metal and mirrors, each shaped like a rearview mirror. On the floor below is stained the shadows of two drifting dandelion seeds.

The dandelion puff - so transitory - suggests the innocence, freedom and memories of a child dreaming in the summer sun, and the poignancy of time passing. This form also refers to a mirrorball - to dance, extravagance, the excitement of opening night - and to you becoming part of the show. The mirrors are a subtle reference to a quote by Marshall McLuhan, “We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror”.

Puff casts shadows and flashes of reflections, and captures fragmented images of the surrounding world, giving the sculpture an ever-changing, ephemeral quality. Puff (rearviewmirrorball) is rooted in ideas of nature, culture and artifice.

We developed an art framework plan for the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts. This plan conflated ideas of performance and imagery of the natural world. Especially influential was the local landscape, one shaped, engineered, manufactured by extensive beaver dams; and the idea of the stage set, a constructed landscape of the imagination. From this idea of the manufactured landscape came four artworks, one of which is puff (rearviewmirrorball).

Fabrication and installation by Gizmo Art Production, Inc.

Seattle-Tacoma International Airport 2019
Commissioned by Port of Seattle

We were thinking about the Pacific Northwest, about the landscape and mythology of the temperate rain forest, about the delicacy, density, and majestic scale. The artwork refers to ideas of land and landscape, the ways we interpret nature, and to our deeply Pacific Northwest connection (on a number of levels) to the natural world.

Noted as one of the airport’s five favourites:
www.portseattle.org/blog/five-favorites-sea-tac-public-art-collection

National competition finalists.
Veterans Affairs Canada, Department of Canadian Heritage, National Capital Commission

Jacqueline and Nancy are honoured to be the artists on Team Hapa Collaborative:
Joseph Fry, Team Lead & Principal
Benjamin Herwig, Veteran
Jordan McAuley, Veteran
Lucas Holy, Emily McKenna & Shaheed Karim, Hapa Collaborative

Our team envisioned a monument embedded in the landscape, a sheltering place that honours the commitment and sacrifice of Canadians in helping to rebuild Afghanistan, provides a space for personal and communal remembrance and renewal, and encourages visitors to learn more about Canada’s Mission. The monument is informed by enduring metaphors of the garden and the labyrinth that are rooted across time and place and culture: historically, walled gardens embodied ideas of sanctuary, paradise, community, security; the labyrinth is a metaphor for the inner journey.

This emotionally compelling, visually striking, and timeless monument interweaves ceremonial and informal ways of use, the heroic and the reflective, the private and the shared. It is a place for people to gather, to take pleasure at being in a contemplative and communal space - and to reflect on how this kind of experience was really the point of Canada’s mission to Afghanistan: to help bring peace to a war-torn country. Our veterans talked about how they believed that “where there is conflict there’s potential for connection“ - we hope this Monument becomes a place of understanding, for the individuals involved, their families, and Canadian society as a whole.

River Green, Richmond  2013
Commissioned by ASPAC Developments Ltd.

A graphic and dynamic artwork through which you move. This artwork is informed by the local landscape, by mythologies of landscape, by how culture interprets the land and how the land shapes culture. In the end, the work is about landscape and culture, stillness and motion.

herons at rest, nesting amidst the trees
On one side is a monumental, translucent image that extends the length of the bridge: life-size images of herons nesting in a rookery - an intimate, almost domestic, view.

flight - motion
At night, you see a heron slowly moving, beating the air, fluttering in a continuous loop. A bright, moving, presence - powerful yet gentle.

8X on the Park, Vancouver 2021
Commissioned by Brenhill Developments Ltd.

As you walk along the street you see something intriguing that suggests the wild landscape beyond, and within reach - the iconic Lions on the North Shore. The dramatic, faceted forms of twinned mountains sit within the upper pool. The forms are identical but ‘mirrored’ to one another, a play of artifice.

peak (Ode to Lions) is made of mirror-finish stainless steel – a refined medium, yet also playful and interactive. The mirrored surfaces capture and refract light, pattern, colour, abstracting the city around us, always shifting as the light changes, as people pass by. As a metaphor, the mountains are about constancy, eternity, stillness – the internal journey. As objects, they are elegant, captivating and socially engaging.

Peak (ode to Lions) is an unexpected jewel-like object - an unchanging form always shifting with the light; like the landscape itself, still yet ever-changing.

Place Rodolphe-Rousseau, Arrondissement de Saint-Laurent, Ville de Montreal 2020
Commissioned by City of Lethbridge

An abstract form evokes the coulees of southern Alberta, a place shaped by the natural landscape and a mythology of the wild. This form also plays with the idea of ‘plinth’ and the formality of historic public sculpture. Twinned coyotes are partly mythical, partly familiar - wild, yet at home here, moving between the windswept landscape of Alberta and the urban spaces of Saint-Laurent. There is an implied, undefined narrative between the coyotes, reflections of the other.

Like many who come to White Rock, we were entranced by the serene expanse of water and tidal flats and the presence of so many birds, especially the great blue herons - graceful, endearing, and an iconic part of the waterfront. The Great Blue is a monumental steel silhouette of a heron strolling through the neighbourhood on the way to the beach. Her eye gazes out at you and her broad stride forms a playful gateway. She is at home here, interwoven with our daily lives, a connection to the natural world.

An egg-shaped opening is a symbol for potential, the unknown future. There is an undefined narrative rooted in the surrounding natural landscape of the area; The Great Blue evokes a timeless landscape – partly mythical, yet also familiar, the imagery abstracted by scale and the artifice of placement, silhouette, and narrative.

Clifton Park, Edmonton 2023
Commissioned by ONE Properties & Revera Inc.

This sweet and dignified packhorse, a little tired from walking up the hill, reminds us that the horse has been part of our communities, part of the land, year after year, century after century. Running along his back and up onto his head is a line of purple martins – these social birds have come alight here, gathered companionably together on their generous host. These birds, like any family or community, are a cluster of personalities; some are nestled together, some preening individually, flitting or observing. These familiar inhabitants of our backyards are part of the land immemorial, migrating across continents annually, reminding us that we are bound together.

Untitled (wind and stars and birds and life) subverts the tradition of grand equestrian statuary set on high plinths. Our packhorse is with us on the ground, bearing songbirds rather than a heroized rider. Together, the horse and purple martins link Glenora Park to the far reaches of the world, representing migration to new homes, building community wherever they go. This artwork, situated at the entry to Clifton Park, is rooted in familiar parts of our lives – the sound of birds in our backyards, rural life, children and animals, families and friends connected.

There is a domesticity to the artwork, yet, at the same time, the horse and the birds allude to the natural world...moving within the vast expanse of land and sky, part of the eternal and ephemeral natural world.

Mahon Park, North Vancouver, 2009
Commissioned by City of North Vancouver

Out/look refers to the history and landscape of North Vancouver - surveyed and settled within the last century, the wild, forested landscape still present. A bronze figure, standing high atop a cedar trunk, marks the presence of Wagg Creek and Mahon Park above. As the viewer approaches the site, and moves around it, the figure is silhouetted against the sky. The figure is somewhat mythical, contemplative - she is looking far into the distance; a raven her companion. This playful, evocative installation is both representational, and abstracted by whimsy, suggestions of childhood stories, memories of nature, and a sense of myth. The artwork is layered with readings, yet accessible to all.

New Westminster Parkade  2017  
Commissioned by City of New Westminster

We were thinking about the surrounding urban landscape and waterfront and the heritage homes and gardens. The artwork is a playful counterpoint to the industrial facade of the parkade and the working waterfront. The monumental fragments of birds on branches introduce something light-hearted, gentle, almost domestic. These birds recall the birds of the nearby forest and neighborhood gardens – a reminder of the heritage homes nearby, homes of waterfront workers. The imagery also reminds us of textiles or china patterns of the 1800s – woven into the ‘fabric’ of the chainlink facade.

CASA, Lethbridge, Alberta, 2013
Commissioned by CASA, Allied Arts Council of Lethbridge

Mirrored Earth is an artwork activated by the movement of passers-by - the community becoming part of the artwork. Mirrors form a pixellated landscape, capturing and refracting light, pattern, colour, shifting as the light changes, as people pass by, as you yourself move past the artwork. Scattered mirrors react and move to the movement of passers-by, evoking the glimmer of sun on water, a flutter of rising birds, the way sunflowers follow the sun’s passage through the sky.

Milano, Burnaby 2018
Commissioned by Solterra Development Corp.

One of the threads running through our body of work is a meditation on landscape and culture and on positioning ourselves within the world. The work is intended to “change the focus of the eye” (Joseph Campbell, On Being Human) and references the iconic paintings of mountains by Lawren Harris (a long time resident of Vancouver), the connection between landscape and identity.

Set in the pool, resting on concrete plinth, is an over-scaled totemic figure, coyote, at eye level. Coyotes are familiar urban residents, yet evoke a sense of the wild, the unknown. The eye of coyote is caught by something lustrous overhead.

As your eye follows coyote’s gaze, you are drawn to an abstract, intricate form suspended above the entry – the inverted topography of a mountain peak

lightness of being links us to the larger landscape, a timeless one beyond urban confines. There is an implied, undefined, narrative between coyote and mountain, the two connected by a focused gaze. The artwork forms an imaginary landscape – connecting past and present, urban and wild – with you as the figure in the landscape.

Parkside at Waterfront, Calgary 2018
Commissioned by Anthem Properties

Two inter-related components draw the viewer along a path. coyote is a totemic figure, wild, and at the same time, urban. His head is turned to look back towards Sien Lok Park – drawing our awareness towards the park which is framed through a richly coloured gateway - a play on the traditional moongate of chinese gardens. The deep yellow is auspicious and bright. moongate’s inner edge is shaped like a dragon – as you pass through you meet him eye to eye. Approaching from the park the gateway is a mirror reflecting the sky, the park, and you.

moongate is a threshold and a frame for the borrowed view, and a symbol of wholeness and the eternal cycle.

There is an implied, undefined, narrative between coyote and moongate, the two connected by a focused gaze. The artwork forms an imaginary landscape – connecting past and present, urban and wild, mythical and real, one place and another – with you as the figure in the landscape.

Ashland, Oregon, 2017
Commissioned by Southern Oregon University

A slightly dis-ordered pile of books spirals upwards high above the passerby. The opening of the books is mirror finished – reflecting and fragmenting the world around us. Etched onto this mirrored face is a silhouette of a Madrone – a native Oregon tree. This ‘strand of DNA’ books has references to intellectual knowledge and storage, the image referring to the tree of knowledge.

Calgary Police Officers’ and Firefighters’ Plaza, City Hall, Calgary, 2005

Commissioned by Calgary Police Officers’ and Firefighters’ Tribute Plaza, c/o Parks Foundation Calgary, Alberta

Set in this vast plaza is an intimate space and a tower of light. Stone-clad walls embrace a space of remembrance, and a light, glowing, translucent lantern marks the plaza as a place of memory, celebration and hope.

the walls of memory
The paired walls are a metaphor for the strength and commitment of the police and firefighters. They create a public focus for an educational experience, and shelter a space for personal remembrance. Their exterior and more public faces are engraved with historical narratives, one wall for each service. The interior surfaces commemorate the individuals killed in service; small projections provide places to leave remembrances.

the lantern of light
The space within the two walls is entered from beneath a delicate open ‘tower’ of metal and coloured glass. The space beneath the lantern is defined by a series of paired metal columns - a quiet reference to the two services and the support they provide society. Wrapped around this refined, ordered structure is a simple, pure sheath of luminous coloured glass, gradually becoming more open towards the sky. Sunshine makes the lantern glow with an intense warmth and cast dappled light; at night it becomes a beacon of light.

On the far side of the municipal plaza generous stairs and paired tribute walls mark the approach to the memorial, linking the contemplative space to the park and the city beyond.

The artwork integrates the whole plaza. The intimate place of memory is linked to the ceremonial entry at the Tribute Walls. The educational and individual memorials are separated from the ceremonial approach, while creating a dynamic between the two – this extends the visual impact, suggests a procession across the plaza, and defines the expanse of the plaza as the area of commemoration, unifying it into a single tribute space.

Walls of Memory/Lantern of Light encourages contemplation and remembrance, both for individuals and groups; it is also an active place, inviting, a focal point for school groups, graduations, celebrations, memorials. Walls of Memory/Lantern of Light creates a place that is respectful, honouring and timeless.

500 Nicola, Coal Harbour, Vancouver, 2004
Commissioned by ASPAC Developments Ltd.

This work refers to the site’s natural and industrial context: a waterfall of stacked stone, an abstraction of the coal cliffs of Coal Harbour; sawblade treegrates; a figure looking north to the wilds; text revealed through a moving film of water.

Part of a poem by Earle Birney appears beneath the running water - the poem is about the Vancouver waterfront.

United Way Building, Winnipeg, 2010
Commissioned by Winnipeg Arts Council & United Way Winnipeg

YOU YOU + YOU is an instrument played with others and informed by the idea of community participation.  On a vast wall is an illuminated and graphic image, the braille for Y O U.  It refers to the 'you' that participates in the community; the braille also includes and excludes, a reminder about acceptance.  It is an interactive piece with talking stick.

Hand prints invite you to touch talking stick, each print triggering a note of music.  A melody is created as more people join in and many notes are played.  Each hand print is also linked to a light on the fin wall - the music becoming visible.

Hamilton Lands, Richmond BC
2020
Commissioned by Oris Consulting

koyo-te is an enigmatic assemblage of elements informed by the landscape and cultural history of the site: the wildlife of the bog, centuries of food gathering and farming, a memory of the Japanese community.

Weathered “wooden” crates, for storing cranberries, become a formal plinth: set atop is a bronze coyote, a familiar figure who has just leapt up onto the plinth. The animal is at home here, in this neighbourhood, moving between the lush landscape of the bog and the river, almost invisibly interwoven with our lives. Together crates and coyote also recall formal Japanese statuary of foxes (kitsune) and are a quiet reference to the former community. Coyote and kitsune have lived with man for a long time, moving between wilderness and farmland. Both coyote and kitsune have become part of myth, shape-shifting from animal to human, and suggesting adaptability and transformation.

koyo-te refers to the archetypal and mythical landscape of memory and identity, to how we understand, interpret, re-interpret the world around us.

Lynn Valley Library & Town Square, North Vancouver, 2007
Commissioned by District of North Vancouver
Public Art Award of Excellence, 2008

The artwork refers to the tree of knowledge, the historic logging industry, and the local landscape. The image appears to be a magnificent old growth cedar, life-size, yet is an abstraction of an iconic historical photo, White Pine by Alexander Rodchenko. Culture evolves, always in reference to the past, always becoming something new: in the words of Jorge Luis Borges, “The original is unfaithful to the translation.”

Columbia Street, New Westminster, 2016
Commissioned by City of New Westminster

An enigmatic silhouette marks the entry to downtown New Westminster. The imagery seems familiar – but reinterpreted, altered, perhaps a little anthropomorphic. The artwork plays with a found image, the silhouette of a WW2 Victory ship - a reference to the local history – abstracted by mirrored repetition, a reference to the Rorschach test, the iconic test revealing the presence of the unconscious, each of us selecting and interpreting what we see. 

Silver & Metroplace, Burnaby   2014 & 2015
Commissioned by Intracorp

Elegant and elemental forms rest on nearby plazas, as if they were shed by a mythical deer. Each form creates a space. blacktail, lies upright like an open hand, providing a place to rest. Two blocks away, shed, an inversion of blacktail, invites you into itsʼ shelter, like a child playing in a fort in the forest.

These sculptural forms imply an entire landscape, yet also convey an intimacy. Together they are a play of form and meaning; the forms identical yet seeming entirely different.

Red Brick Residential Development, Burnaby, 2015

Commissioned by Amacon

An artwork linking a semi-private residential courtyard to a public greenway – a large 18’ high “drawing” of a house set in a pool.  Two sculptural, totemic animals face each other from across the house. Overscaled, minimal- almost like chess pieces - one suggests a domestic cat, the other a fox or coyote. Domesticity and the wild, face to face, curious.

City Centre Community Centre, Richmond 2015
Commissioned by Canada Sunrise Developments

Each place is made up of various communities, intersecting in diverse ways like lines of energy; similarly, each of us is made up of varied histories, experiences, interests, the strands of one’s identity. ebb & flow is a ‘snapshot’, a moment in time, of a braided river. These rivers ebb and flow, come together, separate, change form and pattern - a metaphor for shifting, overlapping, interweaving communities, for the constant flux of society and culture.

Trico Centre for Family Wellness, Calgary, 2010
Commissioned by City of Calgary

cloud/forest: Prosaic, iconic, wooden hockey sticks form an evocative tangle above the lobby. Theatrical lights cast moving patterns of light and shadow - suggesting a walk in the forest, sun through the trees. The complexity - and simplicity - transform the space.

Fire Station 10 & Emergency Response Centre, Seattle, 2008
Selected by City of Seattle for submission to Americans for the Arts Year in Review Awards

Bamboo is an element common to the landscapes and arts of Asia and the Pacific, homelands of many of the local immigrants. bamboo, luminous is a metaphor for the strength and resilience of the immigrants to the International District and service personnel of the Centre.

Photos: Spike Mafford

North Vancouver Main Library, 2012
Commissioned by City of North Vancouver

The library's entry plaza is inset with stone pavers etched with tree branches; each is carved with a literary quotation selected by a donor – becoming the imprint of the community on the plaza.

Photos: Scott Massey

Vista Place, North Vancouver, 2009

Commissioned by Intracorp

The artwork is comprised of a collection of related images, about seeing and landscape - quick glancing moments, something at the corner of the eye, a view seen through a film of rain, or from a moving car.

Vertical element marks the entries to the tower; there are also a series of townhouse gates along the street. These images of sky, trees, water are somewhat abstracted by a play of resolutions, and by the act of composition.

Bankers Hall, Calgary, 2004
Commissioned by Brookfield Properties

Evoking the natural world through abstractions, placing an iconic figure within a mythological landscape - reflection on the reductive orders imposed on the land - and on the complex order inherent in nature. 

Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport, Manitoba, 2012
Commissioned by Winnipeg Airport Authority

The artwork refers to the landscape you have flown over and will soon pass through more intimately. Layered with geography, cartography, mythology, and personal ‘mappings’ from those who have lived or travelled in Manitoba.

Photos: Robert Tinker

Prado Residences, Richmond, 2013
Commissioned by Appia Development

Set on each of the five low landscape walls and facing the walkway is a dragon. The mythical figure is at human scale - each dragon gazes at the passerby at eye level. These dragons recall the magnificent stone and bronze sculptures of old China, yet a more direct reference is to the mass-produced ephemera of the modern era.

The artwork is about shifts in symbolic meaning. It is about continuity and change - how symbols may retain their potency yet also become decorative - to what becomes lost, or altered, on its’ way to something new.

Bishop Grandin Greenway, Winnipeg, 2009
Commissioned by Winnipeg Arts Commission

A black granite block, marked with a pattern informed by the agricultural landscape of the early Metis settlers, is counterpointed by a monumental antler directing your view to the hydro towers beyond. Tracing between the lines on the block, you trace the shape of the Red River.  land/mark reflects on the human imprint, on the marks we leave on the land - physical, conceptual, mythological. 

Dixon Recreation Center, Oregon State University, Corvalis, Oregon 2005 Commissioned by Oregon State University

Poised/motion study is sited to animate a three storey atrium of a campus recreation center. The artwork refers to the physical experience of sport; it evokes the body directly and implies movement. It is layered with images and ideas that refer to our exploration of the world physically and intellectually.

The idea of this exploration is distilled into: 
— stillness – a figure, poised infront of a marked blackboard
— movement – a scientific motion study, a shadow captured, a mythological element
— a landing place, empty, waiting – a movement implied

These components suggest a leap you make, the transformation that comes as you cross the edge between stillness and motion, between groundedness and daring.

Paulik Gardens Neighbourhood Park, Richmond, BC 2009
Commissioned by City of Richmond
https://paulikpark.wordpress.com/

This land once belonged to two of the original settler families from the area and contains lovely rambling gardens. Through a community-based approach the park is dotted with a “rambling” text installation. Text is carved onto basalt ‘cucumber slices’ which you find as you wander from place to place. These carved basalt slices bear fragments of poetry about the gardens (by local poets) and memories of the original families. 

Mountlake Terrace Freeway Transit Station, Washington State, 2011
Commissioned by SoundTransit, Washington State

Set onto the platform is a long, voluptuous bronze form, marked by natural and manmade scars. It refers to the local landscape, the history of logging, the soaring trees of the local parks and neighbourhoods - and offers passengers a place to sit, perhaps recalling memories of sitting in a clearing in the forest.

The bronze rests on concentric rings set into the concrete platform: these narrow bands of stainless steel are a sleek graphic abstraction of tree rings, or a suggestion of ‘centre’.

Porter, Vancouver, 2013
Commissioned by Cressey Developments

(peek-a-boo) pays homage to Cedar Cottage, one of the villages of early Vancouver. It is based on photographs of local children inserted into the townhouse gates.  At certain angles the images coalesce, so that the faces appear and disappear as you move by.

In the breezeway these same faces peek out at us, as we walk by elegant thin light bollards.

Fragments of a face, a glance, a playful ‘peek-a-boo’ - the artwork is a community of glances, mischievous, playful, intimate. It is about the neighbourhoods we live in and a marker of home.

vessel

Marina Skate Park, Thunder Bay, 2009
Commissioned by City of Thunder Bay

An iconic form marks the skate plaza, the industrial shipping heritage of Thunder Bay, the presence of Lake Superior, and recalls an historic ocean-going boat under construction…or in decay. Vessel also reflects on container, on the definition of object and space, shifting between solid and skeletal as you move around it.  

Public Art for Department of Environmental Quality/Oregon Public Health Laboratory, Hillsboro, 2009

Commissioned by Oregon Arts Commission

This artwork responds to ideas of laboratory and landscape. An ordinary, iconic element of the contained world of the laboratory - the microscope slide - is abstracted and transformed into representations of the outer world, the landscape around us. Abstracted images, translucent color on glass, evoke the landscape.

earth, water, sky

Several overlapping, translucent, slides are layered to form a meditative assemblage on the high wall of the lobby - a play of color, pattern, imagery, micro/macro. The images refer to the sea, sky, forest, river, contours, land - abstracted fragments of the natural landscape - transformed by scale, abstraction, overlapping references, and juxtaposition of imagery. They allude to ideas about perception, about seeing something in various ways.

Loudon Gateway Station, Silver Line, Dulles Corridor Metrorail 2020
Commissioned by Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority

The artwork reflects on flight and journey, physical and metaphysical. The title is a reference to the motto of Loudoun County, “I byde my time”.

Based on an archetypal labyrinth, the artwork appears simple, yet is complex when negotiated. The unicursal path turning towards and away from the centre unexpectedly is a visual and experiential expression of the nature of journey and destination. Surrounding the labyrinth are herons flying outwards from the centre, evoking another pattern of movement, one about flight.