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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

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