Title

Vantage

Artist

Khouri, Marie

Date

2011

Medium

concrete

Type

sculpture

Owner

Bosa Developments

Accession Number

NA

Location

4388 Lougheed Hwy.

Category

Private Development Public Art

Collection

Public Art

Lat/Long

49.265979,-123.006296

View in Google Maps

http://www.google.com/maps?q=49.265979,-123.006296

This sculpture is based on balance, rhythm and vitality. The artist describes her practice as “rooted in a profound sense of dislocation and the search for a greater sense of place.” She uses an extensive hands-on process that employs traditional hand-sculpting techniques, which are then scaled and translated to their final form, in this case, in concrete.

Vancouver-based sculptor, Marie Khouri, represents the broad multi cultural and diverse demographic of Western Canada. Born in Egypt and raised in Lebanon, Khouri has developed a vast range of cultural and historical influences within her practice. With a childhood interrupted during the Lebanese Civil War, Khouri was relocated to Spain, Italy and Canada, finally settling in Paris where she was classically trained in sculpture at l’École du Louvre. On her return to Vancouver, a retrospective of her life took form in her sculpture, reflecting a passion for innovation and spontaneity. Khouri’s work resides at the often-tenuous place between art and design, with a close integration of form and function, reminiscent of modernist thinking best epitomized by the Bauhaus School. Despite their formalist impulses, the sculptures she creates are not without feeling. Greatly influenced by Henry Moore’s idea of direct carving, Marie Khouri’s sculptures blend and extend metaphors of language, form and the body to propose an inextricable link - both political and personal - to a life deeply affected by the complex histories of the Middle East. It is from these histories that her most evocative works emerge, rooted in a profound sense of dislocation and the search for a greater sense of place. Each sculpture is formed through an extensive hands-on process that employs traditional sculpting techniques alongside contemporary innovations in material and building standards. Her timeless and unconstrained forms remain firmly situated in the contemporary moment, pushing the barriers of the medium where the surfaces reveal the entire process and the finished sculpture reveals the evolutionary method by which it was created.