On Friday (July 27) and again on August 5, look to the skies for a provocative aerial artwork to soar about English Bay.

We can't tell you exactly what it will look like, but we can confirm this: the conceptual project Feminist Art Land Retreat will be staging an "alternate experience" to the Celebration of Light international fireworks competition on the day before and the day after the event. 

We can also tell you the Contemporary Art Gallery has been working with these art instigators on the "series of interventions", called FLAR AIR and FLAR  AIRWAVES. The former is the two aerial works; the latter refers to the a poster campaign throughout the downtown promoting a webcast of three duos of specially commissioned international musicians and artists to accompany each of the three fireworks displays. The Celebration of Light starts Saturday night [July 28] with South Africa, followed by Sweden on Wednesday [August 1], and South Korea on the following Saturday [August 4], and FLAR will broadcast its own simulcast here.

And just what is Feminist Art Land Retreat? It launched out of Vancouver in 2010 with a yellow-paper 1960s-protest-style poster advertising a Feminist Land Art Retreat in Elaho Valley on Labour Day weekend. It featured a mirrored image of a famous work of "land art" (a conceptual-art movement that built work out of the earth itself), Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty--mirrored to look like everything, it's been posited, from ovaries to IUDs.

While that imagined retreat never took place, the conceptual project continued with its intergenerational, international team of artists, FLAR using its biting humour to produce such pseudo-promotional materials as posters, t-shirts, postcards, and temporary tattoos. It also works in video and performance, ever playing with the language of feminist art, fashion, and advertising.

You can see its installation  Free Reign at the Audain Gallery at SFU Woodward's until August 4.

It's shown in Berlin and Cologne, and last summer it was artist-in-residence for the Contemporary Art Gallery at its Burrard Marina Field House.

FLAR AIR and FLAR AIRWAVES are supported by the City of Vancouver through its Cultural Services Public Art Program.