Where Art and Innovation Connect

From the cutting-edge architecture and sustainable infrastructure to the thriving university campuses and the explosion of office buildings and research facilities, there’s no doubt that a major new urban hub is unfolding here in Surrey’s City Centre. What’s fuelling that growth is the remarkable thinking, creativity and courage of the people who live and work here.

Those same values are evident right here in the Civic Hotel, reflected in the unique, commissioned art installations throughout our bright, sunlit building. Installations include sculpture, digital art, murals and photographs found in the lobby, hallways and even in the guest rooms. Through casual or studied interactions with the art, guests and visitors can engage and play with ideas of place, technology, identity and time.

Launch, a stunning David Robinson sculpture suspended from the ceiling greets, visitors as they enter the lobby or walk down from the business mezzanine. The life-size canoe woven in wood carries a sculpted woman with a paddle. Her strong form expresses the taut balance between the skeletal, ancient form of the boat and the unrelenting forces of time pulling on it, as well as the interplay between the different cultural and material forms of visual art.

A digital art work, Signals, hangs in the business lounge off the lobby. This video installation was created by artists Nicolas Sassoon and Rick Silva and curated by Kate Armstrong. It is the inaugural work for Civic Hotel’s Connectify Collaborative Digital Art Program with Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Featuring a changing panoramic ocean vista on a seamless loop, it references themes of mutation, human disruption of the environment and its effects on the evolving natures of ecology. Specially created for this site, the videos shift throughout the day.

Each of the 16 floors represents a different region in the province, from the Peace River in the northwest, to the urban centre of Metro Vancouver. Renowned Canadian landscape photographer Rick Blacklaws and encaustic artist Garry Kennedy collaborated to create a tailored art program for each hotel floor based on adapting the 29 regions of BC into 16, with consideration of biome, climate, wildlife, and population. Each hotel room is named after an urban centre or landmark in the region and showcases images from that area.

By offering art that questions and challenges conventional ideas of place, culture and time, the Civic Hotel is providing guests and visitors with a chance to experience them in unexpected ways. It’s a unique opportunity to reimagine and inspire your connections to the social, physical and technological communities that are unfolding around us.