Described Tour | Mowry Baden

Saturday May 4, 2019 at 10:30 am at the Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver | Map

Admission is free for visitors with sight loss and a companion. Please contact donna@vocaleye.ca to reserve your spot as capacity is limited.

The fifth in this new series of monthly described tours at the Vancouver Art Gallery for visitors of all ages who are blind or partially sighted.  The gallery’s Educators have been specially trained by VocalEye in visual description techniques that complement their backgrounds in art history and material practice. Educators will provide in-depth information about historical context, artistic conventions and interpretive trends as they relate to observable aesthetic characteristics and the exhibition’s core ideas. The tour will highlight a small selection of artwork from this exhibit. Sign in at the table beside the Coat Check in the gallery lobby by 10:30 am.

VocalEye’s Sighted Guides are available to meet adults with vision loss (18 years of age and over) at the Burrard Sky Train station and accompany them to and from the Gallery. To arrange a Sighted Guide meet-up, please contact Donna at least 3 days in advance: donna@vocaleye.ca

The Vancouver Art Gallery is wheelchair accessible. Wheelchairs are also available on site for visitor use and may be reserved in advance by calling 604-662-4700.


This exhibition comprises internationally acclaimed Victoria-based artist Mowry Baden’s work from the late 1960s to the present. Baden is known for producing intricate, sometimes humorous sculptural works and installations that borrow from the fields of perceptual psychology, science and architecture, and often solicit the audience’s participation.

Mowry Baden deploys objects and forms that range from seat belts and reconfigured industrial devices to purpose-built rooms in which ping-pong balls ricochet off the walls. The recipient of the prestigious Governor General’s Award and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Baden disrupts our reliance on vision and instills a heightened sensory awareness of our position in, and movement through, space. Works spanning more than forty years of Baden’s prolific career will be on view as part of this survey presentation.

“At this Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition, touching the art is encouraged”CBC News