Love Your Bean

Outdoor Sculpture Installation

This installation is part of a series of artworks on loan from the Vancouver Biennale to Arts on the Ave, in collaboration with The Places, as part of an effort to transform the neighbourhood into a community arts district.

Vancouver Biennale is a non-profit charitable organization that exhibits great art in public space, as a catalyst for learning, community engagement, and social action.

About the Artwork

“The sculptures in Love Your Bean break the boundaries that exists between objects and humans. They compel one to touch them, crossing borders when you allow yourself to be led by your senses.” – Cosimo Cavallaro

According to Cosimo Cavallaro, the bean is the truest shape to create, a shape that occurs naturally through process. Unlike a perfect circle that can be traced, a bean is an organic shape, one that cannot be easily duplicated and one that changes with each person that creates it. The beans are whimsical, joyful, interactive, and a little bit unsettling as they seduce and dwarf their viewers by their sweetness and smooth form. “Love your bean” was a mantra that Cavallaro told himself while he worked on the highly polished fibreglass resin of the sculpture, inspiring a deeper focus on the nature of love shape, and colour.

About the Artist

Cosimo Cavallaro is an artist and filmmaker. He was born in Montreal in 1961 to Italian immigrants and grew up in both Canada and Italy. He began his artistic practice as a sculptor in Montreal in the early 1980s, had a successful film career, became internationally renowned for his use of food in installation art as a symbol of desire and excess, and is now based in the United States—where he most recently built a cheese wall along the Mexico border.