Art that stops to admire sunset, any time of day
Last Updated: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 | 2:52 PM ET
CBC Arts
An artist in Vancouver is documenting a common occurrence that few commuters can stop to enjoy – sunset from the Burrard Bridge.
Eric Deis spends a couple of hours on the bridge every evening, facing west, and photographing the sunset.
It's cold work.
One of 700 images in 'Yesterday's Sunset.'
(Photo courtesy of Eric Deis)
"I suit up with some thick socks, boots, long johns, winter jacket, then I go out to the bridge and basically once everything's set up I have to do jumping jacks and pushups to keep warm because the wind is pretty swift on the bridge," Deis said in an interview with CBC Radio.
He takes more than 700 exposures every evening, as thousands of cars rumble over one of Vancouver's busiest bridges.
The images he captures are rebroadcast by 9:00 the next morning at the Western Front gallery in a work he calls Yesterday's Sunset.
'Until Then, Then' exhibit at Vancouver's Western Front gallery.
(Photo courtesy of Eric Deis)
Yesterday's Sunset is part of a larger exhibit at the Western Front called Until Then, Then, which looks at nostalgia and future utopias.
It features the work of Paul Ramirez Jonas, Holly Ward, and Elizabeth Zvonar, as well as Deis's photos.
Zovnar's take on nostalgia is a pair of mirrors that give an Alice in Wonderland image within an image, reflecting in one another.
Deis's Sunset replays for eight hours a day, a piece of urban nostalgia that he hopes will restore some art to everyday living.
"You get up when it's dark, go to work, and come home when it's dark and you've missed the sun entirely," he says.
But with Yesterday's Sunset, visitors to the small show can see what they've missed. Sometimes that's not much, on the rainy west coast, but sometimes, it's remarkable, Deis says.
"If it's a clear day, the sky is starting to become an orangey color already and the beach is lit up. What happens then is, once it gets to a certain darkness, the city lights up. The blue fades out and the yellow city fades in," he says.
Deis is an emerging Vancouver artist who works with photography, sculpture and video. A graduate of Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and the University of California at San Diego, he has exhibited in Denmark, Ireland, Brazil, Mexico, Serbia, the U.S. and Germany.
