Public Art Registry
A Sign for the City
Artwork has been removed.
A Sign for the City
Transit bus shelters in Vancouver; Georgia Straight, weekly newspaper
The artwork has been removed from this location.
Civic
2011
posters, newspaper ads, book, website, tweet
Two-dimensional artwork
No longer in place
City of Vancouver
Celebrate Vancouver 125 - Changing Times
Description of work
Twelve posters designed as transit shelter ads; twelve full-page ads in The Georgia Straight; an edition of calendar notebooks; and a website: www.asignforthecity.ca. Commissioned by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program with the support of Vancouver 125 and the participation of the Government of Canada. Supported also by the BC Arts Council. Research: Kim Duff, Donato Mancini, Lorinc Vass.
Artist statement
A Sign for the City is a public art project by Sabine Bitter and Helmut Webber that reassigns the meaning of Vancouver's Nine O'clock Gun. The twelve-pound cannon in Stanley Park is now fired nightly to mark the time. Previously it was fired to signal the close of the fishing day and as a navigational aid. For this project, each daily cannon blast is symbolically dedicated to a cultural, social, or political figure or event in Vancouver or BC's history relevant to that date. The project acoustically memorializes the culture and politics that ground this history, towards imagining Vancouver as a socially and spatially just city. For one year, beginning May 2011, "A Sign for the City" circulated the 365 dates through monthly memorial calendars in the form of transit shelter ads, full-page ads in The Georgia Straight, and an edition of calendar notebooks, which could be picked up at the Audain Gallery SFU Woodward's; Or Gallery; READ Books, Chareles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr University; The People's Co-op Bookstore; Pulpfiction Books and Spartacus Books
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