Mystery ship inhabited by homeless pirates: bad public art in Ottawa
Tiffany Douglas is a first-year student and is participating in Maureen Korp’s FYSM Special Studies in Art History – Visual Literacy. Throughout the term, students will seek out Ottawa’s arts scene and critique the good, the bad and the ugly according to a set of criteria they discuss in the classroom.
Mystery Ship is the second in a series of student submissions that critique Ottawa-area public art to be included in This Week @ FASS.
Mystery ship inhabited by homeless pirates: bad public art in Ottawa
By Tiffany Douglas
Ahoy matey! A mystery pirate ship has sailed ashore, straight into the parking lot of the General Motors Court in Ottawa, Ontario. Previously, the site at 300 Sussex drive was home to the Canadian War Museum. Today the building stands empty, the signage outdated, and the parking lot invaded by an enormous seaworthy structure. Site imposed and twenty feet tall, the work resembles a chunk of a sailboat, a bit of flotsam or jetsam. Sea-green planks construct a bit of a deck, while a dirty yellow railing surrounds the perimeter. Constructed of wood that has not been properly sealed, the appearance of the “deck” is heavily weathered. Chips in its varnish are visible everywhere. Worse yet, littered with trash, it is inhabited by the homeless. More of a community garbage dump than a work of art; the structure’s dilapidation nominates it to be one of the worst pieces of publicly displayed art within the city.
Perhaps a talented artist constructed it some time ago. Today it is a wreck requiring restoration and upkeep. The deck should be moved to a location by the water. There, it would be a boat, representing the movement and journeys of the people of Ottawa. A location near water might allow the boat to look whole. Today the deck lacks direction; there is no prow, nor stern. Lacking a sail, the boat cannot move.
The only thing more disappointing than the appearance of the deck is its lack of a captain. One can only speculate about past adventures of the mast at sea. Quite possibly the ship was originally used as a visual line to set up the entrance to the former Canadian War Museum. Yet, upon investigation, no artist name could be found engraved in the wood.
Nearby a sign tells that the Canadian War Museum has moved to a new location. Every piece of the collection made it safely to a new destination, yet the boat remains, embedded in pavement; left to drown in a sea of skyscrapers. Workers at neighboring buildings are unaware of the boats history or the artist who designed the work. No one at the current Canadian War Museum was able to offer any information about the ship. So it stands; the mystery ship without a captain, lost in the sea of the city.