An East Vancouver installation has been selected as one of the best public artworks in North America.

Flow, at 1 Kingsway outside the new Mount Pleasant Community Centre, is a multimedia, photo-based project by local artist Fiona Bowie and computer scientist Sidney Fels. It is a changing, 24-hour projection of different images of crows, commuters, landscapes, and a host of characters on translucent windows. The movement of passersby can clear the image so they can look straight through to a street scene again.

This week, the City-commissioned work became the only Canadian art selected by Americans for the Arts (AFTA) as part of their top 40 public most innovative art works installed in 2009 in North America. AFTA is a nonprofit organization that advances the arts.

Winning art projects will be featured on the 2010 Americans for the Arts Year in Review DVD compilation, available on-line at www.artsusa.org.

Bowie is an assistant professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Another of her public artworks, Surface, is featured on-line here.

You can find out more about Flow at www.flow1kingsway.com.