Opening Friday, March 22 2013, 8 pm

Atlantean Timepiece - Kevin Murphy

Kevin Murphy’s Atlantean Timepiece is the fourth project in UNIT/PITT’s series What Future.

Influenced by widespread concerns surrounding sea level rise, geological instability, earthquakes, and flooding in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, Atlantean Timepiece imagines the future sunken city through the lens of an identification/misidentification with the Atlantis narrative, and the trope of the romantic ruin.

The project proposes the development of a hypothetical public clock for Vancouver, resembling a beacon, crystal, or glass high-rise tower. This reimagined clock tower would become activated only when flooded. Degrading at different rates in seawater, the structure’s materials would transform into a chemical timeline, giving potential observers in the distant future a window into the elapsed time since the city’s submersion.

In the interim, the structure would function as a tenuous monument to these potential events, acting as a site for the crystallization of local anxieties, and linking past, present, and future as imagined spaces and times.

Kevin Murphy is a Vancouver artist who works primarily in 3 dimensions, using a variety of materials in combination with systems, cycles, and organisms. He most often investigates human relationships to ideas of “Nature” and the natural or nonhuman world, and how these manifest in material, economic, and imaginative terms. Kevin received a BFA from the University of British Columbia in 2009, and currently works there as the Drawing, Painting & Sculpture Technician.

What Future is supported by a grant from the Vancouver Foundation.

Atlantean Timepiece - books

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