Stir Cheat Sheet: 5 things you should know about the VAG’s Offsite: Sanaz Mazinani installation

Imagine Vancouver in 2080. Think melting glaciers and rising oceans

Offsite: Sanaz Mazinani at Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite toFebruary 21, 2021, Photo by Ian Lefebvre, Vancouver Art Gallery — *Offsite: Sanaz Mazinani* at Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite toFebruary 21, 2021, Photo by Ian Lefebvre, Vancouver Art Gallery

IF YOU’VE WONDERED what Toronto artist Sanaz Mazinani’s All that Melts: notes from the future-past installation at the Vancouver Offsite spot at 1100 West Georgia is all about, here’s what you need to know.

The work imagines Vancouver in 2080, after climate change causes melting glaciers and rising oceans.

Look close at the live greenery: the hanging and surface gardens hold native plants that might be threatened by the warmer, drier temperatures 60 years from now.

The folded, fanlike structures are actually water catchments that gather rainfall to sustain the plants.

If the glaciers floating in the reflecting pool look artificial it’s because they are the closest our future society can come to reproducing them--by using 3-D technology.

Mazinani calls it “part elegy, part warning”, drawing on ideas of myth—a “memorial to an era gone by”.

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Janet Smith

Janet Smith is founding partner and editorial director of Stir. She is a Webster Award–winning arts journalist who has spent more than three decades immersed in Vancouver’s performing arts, film, and gallery scenes. She sits on the Vancouver Film Critics’ Circle.

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