Surrey, BC
Public Art Concept Proposal - not funded
Agricultural urbanism as a concept has a rich and powerful set of associations that it carries with it — almost utopian in scope. It also holds a set of important practical present/future goals including how we work and live in healthy concert with our expanding urban contexts. And, along with this, such values of how we recognize, appreciate and sustain food production and our natural environment. For me as a practicing artist these values can be best exemplified through the use of imaginative, experiential, perceptual qualities of an artwork which can further stimulate in the viewer a sense of wonder and deeper thought on this topic. In City Cut Greens symbolic representation, colour and light are my chosen tools of expression.
Time, Begins, Here, 2020
Proposal for Griffin Art Projects, North Vancouver, BC
When making an artwork, my central concern is for establishing a firm condition for the primacy of intensive experiential looking and believing in how this viewing experience has the power to positively change who we are as individuals.
Time, Begins, Here
A sense of place shapes our contextual understanding of the built and informational systems of a city, including vernacular architecture, commercial signage, roadways, historical/cultural demarcation, etc. This artwork and its proposed design would serve as a beacon for the geographical North Shore of Vancouver, a region of great importance, with long histories (TIME). Art can enchant us - causing a temporary partition from the noise of the everyday (BEGINS). Griffin Projects regularly brings together cultural opportunities including curated exhibition collections, discursive public forums and studio residencies (HERE).
Our moon and your daily biosphere: Five sites towards an integrated experience
Public Art Concept Proposal - not funded
The proposal was to make a complete work of art by integrating the five sites at Burrard Place under the common thread of our relationship to the moon, space, and time. This would involve a carefully considered capture of time within a dynamic environment—how the viewer both moves through and inhabits space and time in different ways over the course of a day.
Public Art Concept Proposal - PDF
Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, 2014 - 2015
Link to gallery site…
Victoria–based artist Robert Youds takes his cues from the built environment to construct an enigmatic light sculpture. For Everyone a Sunset transforms ordinary materials such as aluminum, salvaged glass and neon lighting to create cinematic plays of light that activate its surroundings.
As viewers move past the aluminum chambers filled with sheets of laminated glass and neon tubing, the individual modules become compositions of light and shadow that are further augmented by changes in natural lighting throughout the day. While the installation is associated with the subject of architecture, it avoids any particular built form. Instead, For Everyone a Sunset triggers an array of pictorial possibilities amidst the surrounding cityscape.
For Everyone a Sunset exists between architecture and design, uniformity and variety, highlighting the intersection of built and natural environments. Shifting tonality as it moves through laminate coloured glass, the light in Youds' work captures our gaze and holds it suspended, suggesting a plenitude of possibilities amidst the regularity of the urban grid. - VAG OffSite curator Diana Freundl
For Everyone a Sunset - 2014-2015
Aluminum, laminate glass, glass, neon, electricals
12’ X 10’ X 35’
Installed at RBC Centre, 155 Wellington St W, Toronto, ON, 2011
Seeing you seeing: colour wheel, utilizes the atmospheric condition of colour, light, and shadow to define space and to demarcate our incomplete partition of the everyday. As the ambient light of day rises and falls through the vestibule windows lighting the sculpture, so do the conditions by which we experience it change. We catch ourselves in this orchestration. The coloured glass of the artwork becomes both a cinematic collector and distributor as it captures reflected images moving across its surface and throws saturated patches of spectral light waves here and there into the architectural arena.
Aluminum, Plexiglas, with steel base
6' X 4'
Public Art Concept Proposal for Tridel- not funded
The light of the Canadian north is my inspiration for this project. Utilizing the seven colours of the spectrum—the colours we can see by the naked eye—I want to create a temporary autonomous zone from the city where public and private collide in a self-reflexive pictorial natural space. Within the park-like setting of the landscape architecture, I plan to have a transparent multi-coloured glass wall that would bisect one of the main garden pathways, turning both the natural and urban into a visual picture. As the passerby moves through the garden their gaze and processional movement will be registered in the reflectivity of light and shadow of the coloured sectional glass wall that traces the horizontal contours of the park terrain against its vertical plantings. The running glass wall will both frame and colour the field of vision of the viewer, presenting the garden as if the subject of a northern modern romantic painting.
My proposal, Tree and Dream Pavilion, is a staging of the atmospheric. For when the atmospheric is carefully framed through manipulations of light, shadow, and colour, it has the powerful ability to shape our individuated experience of place. Tree and Dream Pavilion is designed to demarcate the phenomenon of time, memory, place, and arguably, to trigger a notion of a larger cultural identity, all within the compression of an urban park.