Vanessa Kwan’s Vancouver Vancouver Vancouver was a mobile sculptural kiosk that could be found at various sites during the 2010 Winter Games. Specially uniformed kiosk attendants distributed what looked like conventional tourist postcards that actually had a die-cut hole in the centre, allowing visitors to frame their vistas in individual ways. The kiosk was both sculptural and practical and acted as a place from which to engage with people and the landscape in an otherwise frenetic environment. Visitors will have a chance to share their custom postcards by posting them to the Flickr group Vancouver Vancouver Vancouver and vancouvervancouvervancouver.com until the end of 2010. “The postcards are designed as do-it-yourself framing devices, and through them, one might view infinite vistas and recombinant versions of Vancouver, both here and elsewhere. Viewers can document their “image within an image” and then post these on the website.” -- Vanessa Kwan

In the Fall of 2008, the City of Vancouver called for proposals for artistinitiated projects to be created during the 2010 Olympic Games. I ended up pitching this work, a three-part, temporary work called Vancouver Vancouver Vancouver. They liked it. The work is based on the postcard idea from my previous project, Your Private Sky-- postcards that could be used as hand-held frames-- but more specific to the Vancouver vista. The piece consists of 3 custom-made postcards, a roaming kiosk-sculpture that inhabited various sites during the Olympics, and a website where people could post images of the landscapes they had created. Loosely the work invites people to imagine the landscape as their own, as a changing, subjective experience that counteracts the enormity of a mass marketed event like the Olympics. The work was on view at 2 different sites during the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver.