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

By Janet Smith

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.

#1

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

#2

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.

#3

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

#4

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.

#5

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

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