"Are you down on cars or are you down with cars?"
False Creek—You may have been wondering exactly what that massive totem pole on the grassy median at Quebec Street and Milross Avenue is. The Trans Am Totem is a public art project selected to be a part of the 2014-16 Vancouver Biennale exhibition. The monument, two years in the making, was assembled by North Vancouver artist/sculptor Marcus Bowcott and is best described as a five car vertical traffic jam atop one another and stacked on a 20-foot high old-growth cedar tree stump.
The totem is 10 metres high and weighs 11,340 kilograms located between the Georgia Viaduct and Main Street Station. The overall installation is meant to be seen as accessible public art and a "mediation on the artifacts of our culture as a part of the Open Borders/Crossroads Vancouver curatorial theme". It doubles as local commentary on the ever changing identity and evolving history of the immediate area steeped in our current consumer culture on the move.
It's no coincidence the five scrap cars stacked on top of each other gets bigger and bigger with the titular Trans Am on the very top as it's meant to reflect on the location's logging and industrial past dramatically transformed into the high-rise and traffic filled area of today.
"We’re fascinated by speed, we’re fascinated by consumer objects, and this consumerism has an effect on our nature."
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