Designed to ingeniously reinvigorate a particularly unglamorous “found” space, Rodney Graham’si “Spinning Chandelier” looks surprisingly at home at the northern underpass of the Granville Bridge in Vancouver.
Nestled next to the last pied-à-terre you’ll ever need – Westbank/BIG’s Vancouver House – the electrified monument to 18th century French sensibility is so audacious that it seems to come full circle and appear perfectly commonplace – like Kevin Hart going from stand-up comedy to selling vitamin supplements under his own brand, or Richard Branson going from selling music records to IPO’ing his own luxury space tourism company, or Elon Musk going from payment processing to neural implants, or even Vincent van Gogh going from preaching rather badly to painting really rather well.
But this is what happens when you cross-polinate, cross-reference, and engage in cross-disciplinary thinking : you start to make a weird kind of sense that No One Could’ve Predicted ™ that ultimately makes a noticeably positive impact on the world. This is how you end up with Pasteurisation, Brownian motion, the “theory” of evolution, and almost zero prospects for research grants.
This is also how you end up with a 14′ x 21′ faux glass chandelier that slowly rotates over the course of a day before dramatically “unwinding” back to the beginning, each and every day, all next to an abandoned gas station under an eight-lane bridge, and having the whole thing look like it was there from the start…
… much like the impossibly cinched silhouette of the V. House tower adjacent.
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- In addition to being a visual artist, Graham is also a musician, a one-two we also saw recently with Alpert @ Sunnylands. ↩