Where did the sticky mess disappear to? In case you’ve ever wondered, Douglas Coupland’s Gumhead is thousands of kilometres away from its original Vancouver ‘home’ at the corner of Robson and Howe streets.
For the past few months, the seven-foot-tall interactive art piece has been sitting inside the first floor of the Holt Renfrew Men’s store on Toronto’s Bloor Street shopping district. It is part of the Royal Ontario Museum and Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art’s joint exhibition of Coupland’s Everything Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything exhibit, which was a feature exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery last summer.
However, the Gumhead received a ‘clean slate’ for its Toronto foray. Cleaners delicately and carefully removed the DNA of Vancouverites from the self-portrait statue so that Torontonians would be able to chew and stick their own gum on the art piece.
Gumhead was last seen at the clothing store on March 30 covered with a layer of gum. With the exhibition now in its final weeks, the statue has since been relocated off-site.
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