The Vancouver Art Gallery currently has a grand array of art by many different artists. Most notably is Yoko Ono’s exhibit, Growing Freedom; the instruction of Yoko Ono and the art of John and Yoko. On October 27th my visual arts 1o1 class went on a trip to the gallery. The gallery featured a lot of art so I’m mostly going to be talking about the ones that stuck with me after having some time to reflect.

Yoko Ono

Most of the main floor of the gallery was dedicated to Yoko Ono’s work. With a section dedicated to the art, she made with John Lennon. I’ve been a fan of the Beatles since I can remember. I grew up listening to them with my dad. I always knew Yoko as “the

one who broke up the Beatles” but I had never seen any of her art before. Pretty much all of her pieces were interactive in some way. My favourite one was this chessboard where every piece was white. It was called ‘play it by trust’. As you got further into the game it became very hard to remember which pieces were yours. You simply had to trust that your partner wasn’t gonna lie to you.

Another work that I really liked was this wooden board on the wall. Beside it was a hammer and a box of nails. There weren’t any instructions, just a bunch of nails put into the board. So my friend and I added our own contribution. It was cool to see the pattern that people started to follow!

Painted Tapestries

Unfortunately, I don’t remember the name of this series or the artist that created it. But it’s the first one shown in this video from the VAG website.

This piece was one of my favourites in the exhibit. The tapestries were hung in a way that required you to walk around them. You could get up as close to them as you wanted, but since they were an art piece you also wanted to keep your distance. I really liked the abstract designs on the tapestries. The artist put shoes on the ground with these mixed media legs coming out of them. From behind the tapestry it looked like there were people on the other side and as you walked around you realized it wasn’t real people.

The Vancouver Art gallery is a great place to go for lots of art in one place! There are always very cool exhibits going on and i really enjoyed visiting this time around.