Walk In/Here You Are
by Christian Kliegel & Cate Rimmer

Vancouver Central Library—North Plaza
350 West Georgia Street

Vancouver artist Christian Kliegel’s architecturally inspired structure on the Vancouver Central Library’s north plaza serves as an open-air theatre for Here You Are, an outdoor exhibition of video, still and performance works by local artists. Curated by Cate Rimmer, curator for the Charles H. Scott Gallery at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, the installation will feature six different exhibition programs over the year.

Walk In/Here You Are explores ideas of presentation and location. It invites visitors to interact with the installation’s physical components and to use it as an outdoor social space while viewing works by both established and emerging Vancouver artists.

“Walk In/Here You Are is a large-scale installation on the Central Library plaza that serves as a venue for visitors to engage with a curated program of projected videos and live performances… A form of a drive-in theatre has been created to encourage viewers to temporarily interact with clusters of street furniture found within the jurisdiction of the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation.

The furniture is imbedded into a large wooden deck. As the library plaza slopes down towards the entrance of the library (the location of the screen), the furniture increasingly disappears into the deck. The relationship between what is foreground or background is eventually inverted. This change in interface constrains the use of the seating while simultaneously opening up new possibilities of interaction.”

Christian Kliegel, 2009

Part One of the exhibition explores themes that indirectly relate to the Olympic and Paralympic Games: spectacle, promotion, endurance, camaraderie and physicality. Artists include Stan Douglas, Jamie Hilder, Shannon Oksanen, Håvard Pedersen, Laura Piasta and David Catherall, Kevin Romaniuk, Jeremy Shaw and the performance group, Weekend Leisure (Erich Gerl, Curtis Grahauer, Christy Nyiri, Pietro Sammarco).

Artists' Biography

Most recently seen as part of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s exhibition How Soon Is Now?, Vancouver artist Christian Kliegel received his BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2004 and is currently a graduate student of architecture at the University of British Columbia. His work explores the frameworks of architecture that determine how people function in space, resulting in projects that often re-contextualize materials and forms.

Kliegel has participated in both local and international exhibitions, including Spite House at Lawrimore Projects, Seattle (2009), PPPPFFFFFHHHHHHHHHHHHGGG at the Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver (2008), and Production Postings at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2006). He also designed a new multi-use flexible space for the Vancouver artist-run centre Artspeak. Kliegel’s openair installation space for the Vancouver Central Library’s north plaza is his first public art commission.

Cate Rimmer is a curator at the Charles H. Scott Gallery at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where she has organized numerous group and solo exhibitions. The founding director/curator of Artspeak Gallery in Vancouver, she was previously the director of Truck Gallery in Calgary. She was also a curator-in-residence for the Liane and Danny Taran Gallery at Saidye Bronfman Centre in Montreal, for which she curated a series of exhibitions exploring the banal in contemporary art. Rimmer holds a Masters of Literature in Museum and Gallery Studies from the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

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Friday night karaoke event summer 2010

Christian Kliegel, Concept image, 2009

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