Yet another Vancouver Bienale exhibit, and again, it's giant heads. I'm guessing the jury that selected these pieces was following out some kind of theme. These ones are upside down. The title of the piece is Cabeza Vainilla, Cabeza Córdoba, Cabeza Chiapas, and it's by Mexican artist Javier Marin. "Cabeza" means head, so Heads of Vainilla (?), of Cordoba, and Chiapas, the last two being places. Maybe Vainilla is a town too, but running the word through a on-line translator gives you "hemstitching."

The Bienale website says that the statues are made of a mix of polyester resin and iron, which is what gives them their red colour. The artist's statement reads –

In these gigantic heads one can sense strength, decay, dignity and history. The red color of the Mexican clay suggests remnants of some ancient monument to unknown heroes and the struggles of a people to become an independent nation.

– to which I would attach the standard caveat, trust the work, not the words.

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This shot shows the three heads as a group, and, seen this way they make a certain kind of sense. However, when I first came upon them, it was from the other side, and they looked more like alien lumps or blobs, some kind of science fiction nightmare. It's interesting that the only way to see all three heads, as heads, is to stand in the middle of them, the artist's point being, I suppose, that you can't step back from the piece and observe it, you have to implicate yourself in the process of viewing. I see the point, but I don't think one's viewing really works that way.

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And this is the way that I first came upon these statues. I was crossing the boulevard and literally bumped into them, and since I was crossing on my way to a store, I didn't go around to the front until I had finished my shopping (for wine glasses) and was walking back to where I had parked. To me, they just looked like bizarre monsters left over from some science fiction movie from the 1980s, blobbish creatures of some kind, with their bandylegs and stumps of tails.

I doubt that this sort of mystification was the artist's full intention, but it was definitely part of it – otherwise why set the heads upside down, as if we were the ones who were living the wrong way up, and they were the sane ones. As well, when I came back to shoot these photographs, a week later, the roughness of the craft, was much more apparent, and by roughness, I mean such features as the steel plates used to hold it together, the overall unfinished look of the surfaces, and (in the case of this statute) the giant arrow incised deeply into the back.

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The two northernmost heads, one male, one female. I shot all of these at ISO 800 because the light underneath the skytrain line was somewhat dim. The result is, of course, that the "outside", the boulevard, is much lighter than it normally would be, and in fact, I decided to enhance that by blowing out the highlights.

It takes a moment to realize that the hairstyles of these two disembodied heads are highly non-normative, that is, that they have been embellished greatly partly in order to provide a stable base for the works.

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This one had a lot of spill light from the boulevard, and the result is that the red has gotten somewhat washed out. Here you can see too, that the over-ornate and involved hairstyle has morphed into curls of neck-skin, which is likewise scrolled and rolled.

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