UBC Outdoor Art Tour

The outdoor artworks at UBC are a source of aesthetic pleasure, commemorate histories and events, and introduce new ideas and possibilities into the campus environment. The new UBC Outdoor Art Tour features twenty-six sites including works from the University Art Collection, objects of interest, and artwork that has been commissioned or donated to specific departments and faculties. With detailed information on each work, biographical notes on the artists, a map and colour images, the tour invites visitors and members of the UBC community to experience the campus in a different way.

Self Guided Walking Tours

>> Download guide [PDF 1.8 MB]

>> UBC Outdoor Art Tour on Google Maps

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For further information please contact: Naomi Sawada at naomi.sawada@ubc.ca,
tel: (604) 822-3640, or fax: (604) 822-6689

Edgar Heap of Birds
Native Hosts, 1991-2007

Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds

Native Hosts

Edgar Heap of Birds is an internationally known artist and scholar of Cheyenne and Arapaho descent. Native Hosts consists of 12 aluminum signs which make reference to the relationship between First Nations and British Columbia. They are sited at 12 different locations across the northwest sector of the UBC campus. On a white background in red text, British Columbia is spelled backwards followed by the phrase “Today your Host is,” and completed by one of twelve names of British Columbia Indian Bands. Heap of Birds employs the format of official public signage. Signs guide the way a person moves through public space and direct one’s behaviour. The viewer is prompted to consider and to potentially question their authoritative power. These signs use text in an imaginative and disconcerting way to stimulate thoughts about issues of history, public space, land claims, and even generosity and sharing.

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For further information please contact: Naomi Sawada at naomi.sawada@ubc.ca,
tel: (604) 822-3640, or fax: (604) 822-6689

Jamelie Hassan
Because ... there was and there wasn't a city of Baghdad, 1991

Jamelie Hassan

Because ... there was and there wasn't a city of Baghdad

Jamelie Hassan lives in London, Ontario. Over the past three decades she has created a body of work that mines the fields of political and cultural power. Employing a visual language of allegory, metaphor, and testament, Hassan avoids the trap of rhetoric and didacticism. Because . . . there was and there wasn’t a city of Baghdad, the billboard project placed on the outside wall of the gallery, was conceived as a response to the Gulf War in 1991. It uses a photograph that Hassan took during her first visit to Baghdad where she was an Arabic language student. It was exhibited within six months of the war as a billboard in the Canadian city centres of Windsor, and then later London and Vancouver. The work of art is evocative of a postcard or a commercial advertisement for a historical or tourist site and is compelling when set against the context of war, politics, and economics. While almost two decades has passed since the Gulf War, Hassan’s evocative combination of text and image retains currency in the contemporary world.

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For further information please contact: Naomi Sawada at naomi.sawada@ubc.ca,
tel: (604) 822-3640, or fax: (604) 822-6689

Myfanwy MacLeod
Wood for the People, 2002

Myfanwy MacLeod

Wood for the People

Myfanwy MacLeod lives in Vancouver and has frequently worked with the mythos of rural culture and its displacement within an urban imagination. Wood for the People consists of identical cast concrete logs stacked up against an architectural feature—its monochromatic non-functional presence renders it an architectural folly—romantic yet ironic by its transplantation into a formal gallery setting. Stacked along the entryway to the gallery, this symbol of a bucolic lifestyle assumes a defiant stance within the university environment.

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For further information please contact: Naomi Sawada at naomi.sawada@ubc.ca,
tel: (604) 822-3640, or fax: (604) 822-6689

Rodney Graham
Millennial Time Machine: A Landau Carriage Converted to a Mobile Camera Obscura, 2003
View from inside the carriage

Millennial Time Machine

A Landau Carriage Converted to a Mobile Camera Obscura

Rodney Graham

Unveiled on June 25, 2003, this sculpture is the first work of art to be commissioned for the campus of University of British Columbia since 1976. Millennial Time Machine is a 19th century, horse drawn landau, whose carriage has been converted into a camera obscura. The camera obscura, which produces an image that is upside down and reversed, was an influential precursor to the modern, multi-lens camera. During the late 1500s to 1800s, the camera obscura was used as a model for explaining human vision and it stood as a model, in both rational and empiricist thought, of how observation leads to truthful inferences about the world. It was widely used as an instrument of scientific inquiry, artistic practice, and popular entertainment.

Millennial Time Machine is housed in a glass walled pavilion at the south-west corner of Main Mall and Memorial Road on the campus of the University of British Columbia. Positioned to overlook the landscaped bowl between Koerner Library and Main Library, the camera obscura focuses on a young sequoia tree that will grow to maturity. The tree and location are also meant to raise ideas about the university as a place where knowledge, technologies, and histories are constructed, and how this information is passed to generations of students.

Born in 1949 in Vancouver where he still lives and works, Rodney Graham is one of the most celebrated artists in the history of Canadian art. Among his recurring concerns are the camera and modern technologies of picture-making. For it is through the medium of photography that we now represent the world and what we used to call nature. Millennial Time Machine offers an image of hope for the future. It is also haunted by the idea of the disappearance of nature and the natural world as it becomes transformed into economy.

We gratefully acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts Millennium Fund, the Morris and Helen Belkin Foundation, British Columbia 2000 Recognition Plan, and the University of British Columbia for their support of this project.

Design: Rodney Graham and superkül • Structural Engineer: Fast and Epp • Mechanical Engineer: The Sheltair Group Resource Consultants Inc. • Electrical Engineer: Pacific Rim Consultants Ltd. • Project Manager: Dianna Foldi, UBC Land and Building Services • Contractor: The Haebler Group General Contractors

The Millennial Time Machine is located at the corner of Main Mall and Memorial Road, University of British Columbia

For further information, or to book a tour please contact Public Programs at 604.822.3640

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For further information please contact: Naomi Sawada at naomi.sawada@ubc.ca,
tel: (604) 822-3640, or fax: (604) 822-6689