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Art in the Park installation defines a communal space

Sculptor Marie Khouri creates large-scale work for Harmony Arts Festival
Marie Khouri
Inspired by the multiculturalism of West Vancouver and the community nature of the Harmony Arts Festival, Marie Khouri thinks of You and I as a place where people of different backgrounds can engage with each other and gather as one.

Art in the Park: Marie Khouri - You and I outdoor installation in West Vancouver's Millennium Park. For more information visit harmonyarts.ca.

Marie Khouri cradles a curvy clay figure in the palm of her hand. It's cool to the touch and has a satisfying weight for its small size.

Over several months, this preliminary maquette evolved into an 11-footlong sculpture now nestled in the grass at Millennium Park in West Vancouver. It is one in a series of sculpted Arabic letters that make up Khouri's outdoor installation You and I, in place for the duration of the Harmony Arts Festival.

The complete work contains seven Arabic letter pieces and three accents.

Viewed from above, and read from right to left, the script reads "ana wa enta," an Arabic phrase that translates to "You and I." The sleek and sinuous white shapes invite visitors to interact with them and sit within their nooks and alcoves.

Like much of Khouri's large-scale sculptural work, "You and I" started out small.

"Everything really starts in the palm of my hand," she says.

Wearing paint-splattered overalls in the basement workshop of her Vancouver home, Khouri explains how You and I came to be. First, she hand-moulded the 10 individual pieces out of clay. These were then digitally scanned to produce slightly larger Styrofoam models. Khouri carved these to achieve her desired proportions and had them scanned again to produce full-sized pieces made of a very dense Styrofoam. Using wire brushes, hot knives and sanders, she shaped and smoothed each one to perfection.

"This methodology allows me not to have to go from a block," she explains. "It shortcuts my work by a lot."

Once satisfied with the shapes, each piece was sprayed with a coat of polyurethane, sanded down, and then sprayed and sanded three more times. The final step was paint.

"It was a very ambitious project to do," she says.

Born in Egypt and raised in Lebanon, Khouri moved to Vancouver for the first time as a teenager after the Lebanese Civil War. "There was a lot of baggage that I had brought with me here," she says.

She lived in Paris for 25 years, where she trained in sculpture at l'Ecole du Louvre and practised her art. Nine years ago, she returned to Vancouver with her husband and children. Fluent in Arabic, English, French, Italian and Spanish, she likens her sculpture to a sixth language that allows her to express the things she cannot say.

"I wanted to speak about the Middle East," she says. "It's been in turmoil forever, this area, and it just never seems to be able to settle for whatever reason."

You and I follows on the tail of a 2014 exhibit at Vancouver's Equinox Gallery entitled Let's Sit and Talk for which Khouri sculpted 15 Arabic letters and six accents that spanned 75 feet. The piece served as seating, much like You and I does, and offered subtle commentary on the violence besieging the land where she grew up.

"What if we can sit down and try to speak instead of taking our frontiers for what they are?" she asks.

Inspired by the multiculturalism of West Vancouver and the community nature of the Harmony Arts Festival, Khouri created You and I as a place where people of different backgrounds can engage with each other and gather as one. Arabic text is usually connected when it is written, but Khouri has taken the liberty of separating each letter as it might appear in an alphabet chart or crossword puzzle.

"By writing it separately, it allowed me to give back the true reality of the letter itself," she explains.

She also stylized the writing and says people who read Arabic likely won't realize the sculptures are words at first sight, but the text will still be legible from a bird's eye vantage point.

"I didn't want it to be something that was too obvious, but I didn't want it to be something that didn't make sense. It had to make sense, it had to be Arabic, it had to be recognized."

When Khouri arrived in Canada the second time, she set up a studio at Capilano University. In France, she had been limited to small-scale sculptures that could be displayed on pedestals and stored on shelves, but in Canada she had the freedom to work as big as she wanted.

"That's when I started doing public art," she says.

Khouri's first foray into public art happened during the 2009 Vancouver Biennale. She was asked to do a sculpture outside the Olympic Village station on the Canada Line and created a piece of functional art that would serve as a bench. She was admittedly worried its pristine white surface would be an inviting canvas for graffiti.

"It was there for twoand-a-half years, never ever been tagged, which is something that I felt very good about," she says.

It did, however, become popular among skaters and made the news when its unintended use as a piece of skateboard apparatus resulted in scrapes and gouges. It was a lesson learned for Khouri.

"That was my way of understanding that public art is going to do what it wants," she says. "You put it out there, you think it, and you do your best for the space. Then it's owned by the city, it's owned by the people that ride the street, that walk the street, that live it."

Also a furniture and jewelry designer, Khouri works in a number of mediums including concrete, bronze, wood and steel. She sells to private buyers, exhibits in galleries and has public pieces installed across Metro Vancouver and internationally. One of her cast bronze sculptures is featured outside Polygon's Canyon Springs development in Lynn Valley.

Formerly a financier and language interpreter, Khouri didn't explore her creative side until she was in her mid-30s. She's ever grateful she did.

"This has all been a big part of my healing process, my therapy," she says of her art. "If you see images of me then and images of me now, I'm not the same woman anymore. My life has really been completely transformed."