PLAYTIME
2016, VANCOUVER, CANADA
COMMISSIONED BY THE CITY OF VANCOUVER
BY MYFANWY MACLEOD & SHANNON OKSANEN
CONCRETE AND PAINT, VARIOUS DIMENSIONS
In 1938, Johan Huizinga wrote in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture that “civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.”
In understanding that play is a key condition in the generation of culture, we can locate play in education, law, health, science, and art. And in its freedom, play is, according to Huizinga, not “ordinary” or “real” life, but offers a space of potential that moves us out of the quotidian.
Playtime, located on the grounds of the BC Children’s Hospital and BC Women’s Hospital and Health Centre, is a constellation of painted concrete objects that could be simultaneously described as a playground and a sculpture park. The hybrid familial grouping is a public artwork by Myfanwy MacLeod and Shannon Oksanen that takes up the question of play in relationship to the mind and the body.
Described by the artists as a site of transition between the everyday and the extraordinary, Playtime offers an unrestricted space for not only childhood imagination, but for creative thought and experience by users of all ages and abilities. Through a tactile approach, the artists encourage an interactive engagement with their work that conjures playgrounds of the post-war period, gardens and parks that are home to corporeal modernist sculptures, as well as the literal bodies of families.
Playtime is comprised of five components that allow for an idea of the family to be interpreted open-endedly. The organic forms, patterned in black and white, are arranged in a semicircle, partially ringing a large oak tree to delineate a space of divertissement, contemplation and respite. The site is peppered with picnic tables, bounded by hedges, a wellness walk, and a bike path, and sits as an under-utilized green space between Queen Elizabeth Park with its crowning Henry Moore sculpture and VanDusen Botanical Garden with its sculpture park and landscape design by Cornelia Oberlander.
The largest components of Playtime are tall “sister” forms entitled Two Figures in Orbit.They evoke the collaboration between the artists and their nod to modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth from whom they borrow the titles for Playtime’s individual groupings. The cluster’s second largest figure, Dryad, is a striped single form that belies its title’s reference to the tree nymph. In between these strong female forms are other familial components: The Family Man (a checkered form that reads as a stationary seesaw or an object from the ancient game of “jacks”), The Magic Stones (four molded sculptures that small bodies might curl around or leap between) and The Musician (a large-scale knuckle ring that bodies can climb and fit into).
Playtime’s groupings point to the ways in which family is constructed, how it can include more or less than is expected, and how its configuration can be ever-shifting. In doing so, it offers a kinship model for children, adults, patients, visitors, workers, and passersby. As the rounded forms connect to the human body in wholeness and in gaps (the healthy body and the unhealthy body), the overall site is a contemplative one where one can step away from stress and find quiet, or step into the unknown and find fun.
Here the rules of the order are undefined; play and playgrounds can be read as cultural critique against authority. The ludic, or spontaneously playful, is critical for human civilization past, present and future. In a moment when play is often programmatic, Playtime’s hybridity - its in-betweenness - offers a necessary space of openness, creativity and free play.
Source: Melanie O’Brian, Director/Curator of SFU Galleries
Photos: Scott Livingstone