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

Comments

  1. 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. 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

Almost last chapter... In which our Go Stargazing team watch Astonishing Aurora Borealis seen from the deck of the Astonishing Borealis!!!

The weather brightened considerably and the snowy peaks lining our sail down the fjiords  looked glorious and sparkly in the sunshine against a (mainly) blue sky back drop.   More awesome scenary.... the Go Stargazing team wrapt up their lectures ... only searching for the illusive Northern Lights remained.  The tension from the night before dissolved in the sunshine the forecast for Aurora borealis was looking fairly positive - it was the captains farewell cocktsil party so everyone had their gladrags on.. We ate dinner and sky remained clear so we headed back to our room and donned as many layers as we could move in and proceeded to deck 10 in anticipation of stars and northern lights..... it did not dissappiont - just we got there as the bridge announced that the lights could be seen on the starboard side of the ship. It was stunning. Slowly the intensity built. The auroral green became brighter and bigger areas appe...

Vigo

We left the ship to explore Vigo. Its a much larger place then we expected... although tbh I hadn't given ut a lot of thought. Its a real mish mash of old and new and having got a map from tourist info we decided to follow the walking trail to the Monte Castro... the highest point of the town.  Most of the town was pretty much as everywhere else... lots of traffic... lots of people... one or two interesting buildings and a lot of shopping. We headed to the art gallery - this has been a year of gallery visits so we we seen o reason to change now.  The Museo de Marco is housed in the towns ex prison building and its very grand. In fact, I think that on this occaision the building might have been more interesting than the art....  Although the visiting exhibition by Susanne S D Themlitz was strangely compelling. It was a huge varied collection of eclectic items... found, salavaged, manipulated and arranged in lots of ways - weirdly inspiring - and mostly enjoyable to look at...

verdant lushness

Its a never ending island hop... today we hopped of the boat at Kingstown, on the island St. Vincents and Grenadine. Once through the usual port duty free - cheap booze and diamonds to go milarkey we were straight into the town... crazy noisy smelly chaos... refreshingly no tat shops for tourists, just local markets and street traders all vying for local sales.  Music blasting from everywhere, cars (very battered and often very pimped) all over the roads - parked in the middle of the street, loading, unloading, chatting seemingly oblivious to the total traffic jam caused behind them...  We walked through this mayhem - the temperatures were rising probably about 30 degrees - tourists evident by trying to walk on the shady side of the street - even when we turned off the main drag and there were less people it was still like carnival time with music blasting everywhere. Its very atmospheric and mostly promotes a good vibe although I have heard '3 little birds' everywhich way a...