Un-titled
Un-titled
By Germaine Koh
The large south-facing expanse of windows of Olympic Village Station are covered with a field of black-framed hexagonal shapes. Sunlight shines through the hexes to reveal richly coloured imagery of plants native to the area—berries, mosses, great conifers, the reeds and rushes of the Skwachàys salt marsh—creating an effect that resembles stained glass whose imagery is a representation and reminder of the original flora, land and water of the area. The hexagons are arranged to suggest a vast, abstracted map of the original terrain of False Creek South, viewed in the same orientation as would have appeared from the vantage point of the station, looking uphill and south, including the many streams that used to run down the areas known today as Mount Pleasant and Fairview Slopes and drain into False Creek.
Germaine Koh is an artist and organizer whose work ranges widely across media. Her work adapts familiar objects, everyday actions, and common spaces to create situations that look at the significance of communal experiences and the connections between people, technology, and natural systems. She served as the City of Vancouver’s first Engineering Artist in Residence in 2018-20. Koh was a 2023 laureate of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, a 2023-24 Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, and since 2024 she is Assistant Professor at University of British Columbia.
