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”.

Featured

Janet Smith

Janet Smith is founding partner and editorial director of Stir. She is an award-winning arts journalist who has spent more than two decades immersed in Vancouver’s dance, screen, design, theatre, music, opera, and gallery scenes. She sits on the Vancouver Film Critics’ Circle.

Articles

Eastside Arts Festival unveils new workshops and full schedule for event running July 17 to 26

New art-making opportunities and expanded art walks are part of the programming just announced

Queer Arts Festival kicks off with exhibitions “On the Edge”, June 5 to 27

Community Art Show captures a cross-section of experience, while Varied Editions plays with multiple prints of the same image

West of Main Art Walk spans collage, woodblock prints, oils, and more, May 30 and 31

Spreading as far west as Tolmie Street, Artists in Our Midst’s annual open-studio event features 79 talents in all

B.C. visual artist Samuel Roy-Bois named finalist for national Sobey Art Award

UBC Okanagan associate professor has a celebrated multidisciplinary practice that works across sculpture, installation, photography, and the built environment

At the Museum of Anthropology, Jut-ke-Nay–Hazel Wilson weaves Haida history into robes

New exhibition I Use My Haida Eyes features 51 of the artist’s intricate works, which hold layers of cultural knowledge

Stir Cheat Sheet: 4 artists to check out at Art Vancouver 2026

These are just a few of the highlights at the 10th annual edition of the showcase of Canadian and international artists

With mysterious Magic Show, artist Rosamunde Bordo blurs line between real and fictional worlds

Multilayered exhibition of video and handcrafted works at Western Front blends detective tales and esoteric rituals to create an ongoing, genre-defying form of storytelling

Stir Cheat Sheet: Two artists worth checking out at Emily Carr University’s The Show

Here’s a snapshot of just two form-pushing talents out of the more than 400 on view at the giant exhibition, May 13 to 27

Museum of Anthropology displays a visionary artist’s collection in I Use My Haida Eyes: The History Robes of Jut-ke-Nay–Hazel Wilson, opening May 14

Wilson’s 50 painted and appliquéd robes document specific episodes of Haida history, representing an expansion of traditional Indigenous form

Here’s what to expect at the 2026 edition of West Coast Modern Week, July 7 to 12

A home tour of five West Vancouver residences, a film screening of E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea, and much more on offer for architecture buffs