Maskull Lasserre, "Acoustic Anvil: A Small Weight to Forge the Sea" in progress at George Third and Son (photo by roaming-the-planet)
The Vancouver Biennale has installed Maskull Lasserre's dramatic Acoustic Anvil: A Small Weight to Forge the Sea in Leg-In-Boot Square along the city's seawall.
The second sculpture of this year's biennale, it follows Saudi Arabian artist Ajlan Gharem's Paradise Has Many Gates, unveiled last month in Vanier Park.
Lasserre's monolithic red sculpture is emblematic of the forger's tool and draws attention to the industrial history of False Creek.
Historically, Leg-In-Boot Square was a site for boat building and stevedores. At one point, it housed a police station where a human leg, still trapped in a boot, was displayed in the hope that someone would lay claim. The event is now memorialized in the square's name, although the leg's origin was never discovered.
The industrial history of False Creek was all but erased by Expo 86, when the area was reimagined as a massive residential development.
Lasserre says his work refers to the massive tapered hulls of floating ships. It mirrors naval mooring bollards in material and construction and hints, formally, at a reddened upturned boot.
"My hope is to develop a work that does not simply occupy the heavy end of the spectrum, but opens a territory between weight and sound, massive permanence and the fugitive fragility of an imagined fluid core," says Lasserre.
Source: Vancouver Biennale