Vancouver artist Christian Kliegel’s architecturally inspired structure on the Vancouver Central Library’s north plaza serves as an open-air theatre for Here You Are, an outdoor exhibition of video, still and performance works by local artists. Curated by Cate Rimmer, curator for the Charles H. Scott Gallery at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, the installation will feature six different exhibition programs during 2010. Walk In/Here You Are explores ideas of presentation and location. It invites visitors to interact with the installation’s physical components and to use it as an outdoor social space while viewing works by both established and emerging Vancouver artists. Part One of the exhibition explores themes that indirectly relate to the Olympic and Paralympic Games: spectacle, promotion, endurance, camaraderie and physicality. Artists include Stan Douglas, Jamie Hilder, Shannon Oksanen, Håvard Pedersen, Laura Piasta and David Catherall, Kevin Romaniuk, Jeremy Shaw and the performance group, Weekend Leisure (Erich Gerl, Curtis Grahauer, Christy Nyiri, Pietro Sammarco).

Walk In/Here You Are is a large-scale installation on the Central Library plaza that serves as a venue for visitors to engage with a curated program of projected videos and live performances. A form of a drive-in theatre has been created to encourage viewers to temporarily interact with clusters of street furniture found within the jurisdiction of the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation. The furniture is imbedded into a large wooden deck. As the library plaza slopes down towards the entrance of the library (the location of the screen), the furniture increasingly disappears into the deck. The relationship between what is foreground or background is eventually inverted. This change in interface constrains the use of the seating while simultaneously opening up new possibilities of interaction.”