Echoes
Michel Goulet, Canada
Description
Title: Echoes
Artist: Michel Goulet (b. 1944, Canada)
Medium: 16 unique stainless-steel chairs
Dimensions: 91 x 42 x 36 cm (36 x 16.5 x 14 inches) each; entire installation: 0.92 x 11 x 0.36 metres (3 feet x 36 feet x 14 inches)
Weight: 45 kg (101 lbs) each
Location: Kitsilano Beach (Cornwall Avenue and Arbutus Street) in Vancouver
Echoes is a series of sixteen one-of-a-kind stainless-steel chairs created exclusively for the Vancouver Biennale Open Air Museum by Canadian artist Michel Goulet. Each chair is unique in design and has an inscription in French or English reflecting emotions, everyday observations, and dreamlike thoughts.
The chairs have been positioned to encourage human interaction and communication and installed so that, when sunlight hits them at the perfect angle, the phrases and aphorisms are projected onto the ground below as one large poem. One such text is “HE ARRIVED EARLY I ARRIVED LATE SO WE MET”; another is “pousser un cri plus loin dans la gorge.”
Echoes first appeared in the 2002-2004 Vancouver International Sculpture Project as a set of twelve chairs on the walkway along Sunset Beach in the city’s West End neighbourhood. A second installation of twelve chairs, Elsewhere, was simultaneously installed on English Bay beach.
Remaining at Sunset Beach for the 2005-2007 Vancouver Biennale, Echoes was relocated in 2010 to a different location (adjacent Kitsilano Beach on Vancouver’s West Side)—with an additional four chairs—during the 2009-2011 Vancouver Biennale.
In April 2013, the artwork—which has offered a place of respite for thousands of passersby—was donated by the Vancouver Biennale to the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Collection via financial support from the artist as well as the Buschlen Mowatt Nichol Foundation.
Listen to the Audio Tour by Jessica Wallin:
Watch the Echoes Video Guided Tour
Press Coverage
