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Paintings under the Cambie Bridge - "A False Creek"

If you've been under or near the Cambie bridge over the past couple of days you likely noticed some interesting painting happening on its pilings as well as on the lamp posts in Cooper's Park.

If you've been under or near the Cambie bridge over the past couple of days you likely noticed some interesting painting happening on its pilings as well as on the lamp posts in Cooper's Park. More than some pretty blue lines, it's a piece of public artwork that's been commissioned by the City of Vancouver and is the work of Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky.

Photo: @CityOfVancouver on Twitter

The painting is meant to be an eye-pleasing way of highlighting the city’s relationship to its natural setting as well as the limits and possibilities of engineering the space. Literally, it "indicate[s] a rise in sea level to five metres above Canada Mean Sea Level, the marker used as the basis for the surveying the City of Vancouver. A five metre rise in sea level would be the result of the partial melting of the major ice sheets on earth, including the West Antarctic and Greenland, due to a sustained increase in average global temperatures of three degrees. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects sea level rising between four and six metres in the event of a partial melting of the earth’s major ice sheets. This change would take place over hundreds of years.".

They've got a MICRO SITE for the project that has a map of the creek's past, present and future - and the 100 years from now visualization is, surprisingly, lower than 100 years ago - as well as some abstract visualizations of what some of the current neighbourhoods would look like under water.

Neighbourhoods like my new neighbourhood (AHEM!)...

A False Creek was commissioned by the City of Vancouver as part of Changing Times, a series of artists’ projects that reflect the past, present and future of our City. Learn more at afalsecreek.ca.