Skip to main content

Museum of Anthropology


Totem poles in the great hall

Today we went to the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Amazing exhibits of First Nation artifacts, history and art, displayed in a wonderful great hall and surrounding rooms.  Many beautiful totem poles, and other symbolic carvings, creatures, huge dishes, spoons, renovated, reconstructed and some in their original state on show celebrating Canada's early and present history.


Symbolic statues and huge dishes for ceremonial parties.


A ceremonial garment constructed from several pieces of other garments - a kind of recycling!!

In one of the gallery rooms there was an interactive video display where the room was enclosed and different images were projected onto the walls. As you walked around certain bits of the imagery reacted with your shadow causing the projection display to change and suddenly what had been a quiet piece of fluttering art was a red mist, a rainbow or sparkly lights or lightening streaks or huge butterflies flying across the walls.-it was really clever and extremely addictive.  There was 'calming' -for want of a word - music playing and the whole experience was just so serene and pleasant - I could have spent hours in there!!!  I took quite a few photographs but it didn't do it any justice at all.

me trying to capture imagery in video installtion


The museum had many thousands of masks from all over the world and they were just fascinating, again I could have taken a hundred photos and most of them were quite scary.... I wouldn't relish waking up to this lots staring at you after a night on the town!!!

Tribal masks

Labels:

Comments

  1. Unknown20 July 2017 at 15:30

    I would love to have seen the interaction video display, sounds magical, I like the way your shadow (wild hair) is in the foreground.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ruby starrs24 July 2017 at 03:45

    it was the best video installation i've ever seen usually i don't even bother going in to them but this was quite magical i could have spent hours in there making the pictures change it was very therapeutic and great fun

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alesund

Our final destination stop was Alesund. This is a very pretty town in southern Norway built on a peninsula. All the houses are painted pretty colours and a lot of the architecture is all very Art Nouveau based. This is because the town itself was completely burnt to the ground In 1904 by a fire for which they never found the original cause. The whole town had to be rebuilt and this became a huge National Effort and a lot of prominent and up and coming architects flocked to the town to stick there 20 pence in. Consequently the town is very heavily Art Nouveau which was very fashionable at the time. There is this wonderful Museum just off the harbour which is a very beautiful Art Nouveau house. It has amazing panelling, doors, wallpaper, and it's all furnished with beautiful art Nouveau Furniture. It also house a collection of of enameled Art Nouveau Trinkets,boxes, spoons, jewellery, very very beautiful.   There is an interesting collection of old books and paintings a...
1 comment
Read more

Isle of Bute

 Another Landmark Trust tick - this time Ascog House on the Isle of Bute - stunning as always... a very comfortable warm accommodation for the usual 8 suspects. This time we had a wee tower house for Dr Fred and myself - a lovely bedroom up the stairs with a big window and a bathroom al to ourselves - having said that all the other bedrooms in the big house were large and serviced by two bathrooms so there was no hardship for any visitors!   The grounds of the house were very extensive with ponds and secret passages - hidden paths and we even spotted a deer late afternoon - there were lots of old features - ornate staircases and a lovely hidden door which I did a quick sketch of. Bute provided quite a lot of entertainment as well - the weather was kind and we did a a muddy wander down the south of the Island taking in St Blanes Monastery and Kilcannon Bay.  The views were spectacular and it was fabulous to be out in the fresh (and it was fresh on the tops) air and we...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Blue Dot

Excellent evening spent at the first Blue Dot festival held at Jodrell Bank.  Clever use of the radio telescope as back drop for the main stage... there were some major teething issues which hopefully will addressed if this event happens again - mainly access and parking.. it was a nightmare approach to the festival and fortunately as we were only doing one night we decided to ditch the car and chose to walk the last mile and half into the site... what a relief as if we had queued we would most certainly missed Public Service Broadcasting which was one of the reasons we were going.. anyway we caught them and then enjoyed fantastic set by Underworld - danced much of the night away in the rain - my trusty solfest poncho almost kept me dry.. it was a splendid evening and the telescope looked brilliant when lit up when it got dark. There was a rather fab "installation" called a luminarium, lack of site information - another hiccup meant we were really lucky to catch it just ...
Post a Comment
Read more