carlyn yandle
  • blog
  • painting
  • public art
  • sculpture & mixed media
  • exhibitions
  • about
  • contact

The power of fiber seen in the corridors of power

3/20/2015

Comments

 
PictureRania El-Alloul says she a Quebec judge told her to remove her headscarf. (cbc.ca photo)
When I see the debate raging around women wearing the hajib (head scarf) or niqab (cloth covering the face) in Canada, I think about the male gaze. 

The latest controversy surrounds the woman who was reportedly told to remove her hajib in a Quebec courtroom last month -- by a female judge, for the record -- but it's another example of denying women's personal boundaries.

The court order that she remove this square of fabric so connected to her identity and religion and expose herself in the public sphere reminds me of the long history of the male gaze evident throughout the corridors of the world's most prestigious art museums. It is there in the countless images of nude women created by white heterosexual male artist-geniuses, for the perspective of an implied white, heterosexual male audience. It is the why for the Guerrilla Girls protest movement that began with women donning gorilla masks in 1985 and taking on the Museum of Modern Art's status quo. 

When the male gaze is reversed -- when a woman can watch, unwatched -- it is at the very least disconcerting in this culture that values women for their appearance. Whether she is covered by a gorilla mask or a niqab, she induces a quiet horror for the status quo, sparking debate. Our society is hardly the voice of reason when it comes to female oppression; not when a woman in a niqab shopping at Whole Foods may incite more controversy than any number of women in the same aisle who've altered their bodies through toxin injections or the surgeon's scalpel. 

The issue, whether we're talking priceless portraits or shifting demographic landscapes, is freedom of choice. 

While our male-dominated courts and all levels of government wrestle with appropriate women's garments, three women tell it like it is from their point of view -- under the veil or in defiance of it -- on CBC Radio's The Current here.

Comments

Compelling art all part of the protest

11/28/2014

Comments

 
The war in the woods is heating up again. Except it's not the people against forestry giants MacMillan-Bloedel or Fletcher Challenge; on this day it's Kinder Morgan. 
PictureYagis Eating an Oil Tanker by Ian Reid Nusi. (Photo by Christopher Glawe)
Oil-pipeline officials are doing their best to try to shape protestors at Burnaby Mountain these past weeks as a small group of environmentalist wackos. Meanwhile, the movement is growing. And so is the art.

Marshall McLuhan said, "Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it." And that's what I think about when I see this work by Ian Reid Nusi. Yup, that would be an oil tanker in that sea monster's mouth, carved in response to the prospect of the Northern Gateway oil pipeline moving tar sands diluted bitumen to the coast and onto tankers. (Artist interview clip below)

Environmental protests have shaped this province, and some important artworks have been a part of that.
PictureWallace's CP IV, 1993-95, 178 x 300 cm (from Canadian Art magazine)
It's in Ian Wallace's large-scale photo collage murals (reconfirmed as important works five years later in Canadian Art magazine).

His plywood patterns interrupt the protest images from the summer of 1993, the height of the fight to save Clayoquot Sound, the largest unlogged temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island. About 800 protestors were arrested and carted away, while Wallace created a whole new way of seeing art, protest and the role and position of the visual artist.

Wallace's artworks endure, and also serve as a reminder to those who view them in galleries that what multinational corporation spin-doctors would like to refer to as a green-y lunatic fringe is actually a large and diverse population of British Columbians who are willing to inconvenience themselves for the sake of protecting the oceans or the last of the great rainforests.
PictureHeadwaters of the Stein, B.C., August 1988 (from tonionley.com)
Toni Onley has been in there too. As part of the large protest to protect the Stein Valley from logging, he organized a plan to fly in well-established artists to the vital watershed area to paint their impressions, with sales going to help the campaign to save it from a plan for the Mitsubishi company to log the old growth for disposable chopsticks. 

Onley, who died in 2004, recalled painting a watercolour in support of a Stein cultural centre while “Chief Perry Redon, the chairman of the Lilloet Tribal Council... beat his drum and sang to the four quarters. I was inspired and soon we had a watercolour for the Stein poster….”

PictureKen Wu photo by T.J. Watt (tjwatt.com)
Many paintings of the beauty of the protested areas of the Stein, the Carmanah Valley, Clayoquot Sound helped fund the continuing protest, and today form important collections and are captured in coffee table books like Carmanah: Artistic Visions of an Ancient Rainforest. 

But there's nothing like a compelling photograph to bring the stark reality of the protest home.

T.J. Watt's photo of Ken Wu, the Ancient Forest Alliance’s executive director, sits atop a massive red cedar stump in the Upper Walbran Valley on Vancouver Island. The photo earns its place as an important visual of the struggle to retain a small portion of the natural environment, but its place is also determined by this image that is forceful in its subject of scale and a unique moment in time.

PictureShawn Hunt's Untitled, 2013
The Kinder Morgan survey crew has to be out of Burnaby Mountain in a few days, but the protests against the transport of a dirty, risky diluted bitumen in lieu of real government investment in clean energy sources has just begun. 

It's there on the faces of the growing protestors, and in the art that's growing along with it. And sometimes, as in this surrealist portrait by Shawn Hunt, it's in the faces in the art.

This is the history of environmental struggle in this corner of the world, and part of the history of art, too.

Comments

Over-thinking will be the death of me

3/22/2013

Comments

 
My biggest obstacle is over-thinking — not to be confused with big thinking. Over-thinking is my umbrella term for all the second-guessing, the predicting, the analyzing and the re-thinking that can turn my mind into a maelstrom. It's unproductive and it's exhausting and it's why I and many of my maker friends are involved in repetitive, obsessive (I prefer the term "devotional") artwork methods. The focus required is just the ticket to get out of the rabbit's hole of circular thinking. Less mental chatter, more mindfulness.

Making is the key to learning for me. As the work takes shape I try to make out what it's saying, where it's situated in the whole art discourse thingy. It's clear that I have to be clear about my intentions, where I'm going with all this, and why. Some thought is necessary.

But over-thinking is a form of self-sabotage and it has threatened the existence of my latest project, Monumental Doily. As I hook into those strands I find myself grasping at threads from my art history and cultural theory classes, trying to work in ideas of power struggles and psychoanalysis. Next thing you know I'm assuming the posture of German artist-shaman/renegade educator/former Nazi militiaman Joseph Beuys, in some sort of feminist response to his famous 1974 performance art piece, I Like America and America Likes Me (below, left) until my Inner Victorian Grandlady cries, "Enough nonsense!" (She would never say, "I call bullshit!")
Picture
This is usually the point where I have to fight the urge to scrap the whole project and herein lies the conflict. 

Picture
I have to be able to speak about my work but I have a pretty low tolerance for too much artspeak. I like artwork that has me at Hello, that hooks me in to investigate further and is not just some in-joke designed for the rarified few who have had the benefit of art-historical education. 

It should evoke a wide range of responses from a wide range of viewers — 'multiple points of entry', as they say. It should resonate in different ways and over time, and not rely on an instruction manual disguised as an artist statement full of exclusionary academic language (unless the point of the artwork is to create a feeling of alienation). Yet if it's too definitive, it's over quickly, like a trick, and I'm done. Next!
Picture
Elitism is ugly and I really do agree with Beuys' belief that everyone is an artist, or at least can be if she would just shut out the rational jibber-jabber already and hook into the emotional/spiritual, the unquantifiable, even the unreasonable. (Beuys' beautiful mind is behind his urban intervention project, 7000 Oaks)

Sometimes a giant doily is just a giant doily, material evidence of one person's attempt to connect in an increasingly chaotic, hectic, overly-quantified and unrationally rationalized world. 

Comments





    Get this column by email:

    * indicates required

    RSS Feed

    browse by topic:

    All
    Abstract Painting
    Activism
    Additive
    Aesthetics
    AgentC Gallery
    Alison Woodward
    Aluminum
    Appropriation
    Architecture
    Arleigh Wood
    Art
    Art Discourse
    Art History
    Artist
    Artist Residency
    Artist Statement
    Art School
    Art Show
    Art Spiegelman
    Assemblage
    Author
    Banksy
    Bauhaus
    Beauty
    Betsy Greer
    Big Data
    Billy Patko
    Blogs
    Blog Tour
    Bob Krieger
    Books
    Bruce MacKinnon
    Building
    Bull Kelp
    Business
    Buttons
    Carlyn Yandle
    Caroline Eriksson
    Cartoon
    Ceca Georgieva
    Challenge
    Children
    Christmas
    Cindy Sherman
    Cirque Du Soleil
    City Planning
    Cityspace Gallery
    Clay Yandle
    Climate Change
    Cluster
    Cob
    Cob Oven
    Collaboration
    Collage
    Color
    Colour
    Commission
    Community
    Composition
    Conceptual Art
    Connie Sabo
    Construction
    Craft
    Craft Blogs
    Craftivism
    Crafts
    Craftsmanship
    Creative Process
    Critique
    Crochet
    Cross-stitch
    Cultural Hub
    Cultural Studies
    Culture
    Culture Jamming
    Culturejammingc9d75664fd
    Cycling
    Dafen Village
    Dallas-duobaitis
    Dance
    Data-graphic
    Dear Human
    Deep Craft
    Denim
    Denyse Thomasos
    Design
    Display
    Distraction
    Doilies
    Doily
    Domestic
    Domestic Interventions
    Douglas-coupland
    Draw Down
    Drawing
    DSquared2
    Dude-chilling-park
    Dyeing
    Eastend
    Eastside Culture Crawl
    Ecuad
    Editorial
    Edward Burtynsky
    Eggbeater Creative
    Embroidery
    Emily Blincoe
    Emily Carr University
    Environment
    Environmental Art
    Exhibit
    Exhibition
    Experimentation
    Exploration
    Expression
    Fabric
    Fabricating
    Facebook
    Failure
    Fashion
    Festival
    Fiber
    Fiber Arts
    Fibre
    Fibre Arts
    Film
    Flow
    Foraging
    Form
    Found Objects
    Fractal
    Free Store
    Gallery
    Gallery-row
    Garden
    Garment
    Gentrification
    Gingerbread
    Globalization
    Glue
    Graffiti
    Granny Square
    Granville-island
    Green Space
    Grid
    Guanajuato
    Guerrilla Art
    Guerrilla Girls
    Halloween
    Handwork
    Haywood Bandstand
    Health
    Hideki-kuwajima
    Hot Art Wet City
    Ian Reid
    Ian Wallace
    Ideas
    Images
    Industrial Design
    Industry
    Innovation
    Inspiration
    Instagram
    Installation
    Intervention
    Invention
    Irena Werning
    Janet Wang
    Jeans
    Joel Bakan
    Joseph Beuys
    Joseph-wu
    Journalism
    Kim Piper Werker
    Kimsooja
    Knitting
    Knots
    Knotting
    Kyoto
    Landon Mackenzie
    Landscape
    Leanne Prain
    Lecture
    Liz Magor
    Lost Painting
    Lumiere Festival
    Lynda Barry
    Macrame
    Maker
    Making
    Malcolm Gladwell
    Male Gaze
    Maquette
    Marie Kondo
    Marketing
    Mark Lewis
    Martha Rosler
    Maya
    Media
    Meditative
    Metalworker
    Mister Rogers
    Mixed Media
    Monique Motut-Firth
    Monte Clark
    Mosaic
    Motivation
    Mt. Pleasant Community Centre
    Mud Girls
    Mural
    Natalie Jeremijenko
    Nature
    Needlework
    Neon
    Net
    Network
    Networking
    Neuroplasticity
    New Forms Festival
    Newspapers
    Nick Cave
    Noah Goodis
    North Vancouver
    Omer Arbel
    Openings
    Organization
    #overthinking
    Paint
    Painting
    Paper
    Pattern
    Pechakucha
    Pecha Kucha
    Perception
    Performance
    Performance Art
    Photography
    Playing
    Political Art
    Polly-apfelbaum
    Pompidou
    Poodle
    Port Coquitlam
    Portrait
    Process
    Production
    Project
    Protest
    Psychedelic
    Public Art
    Qr Code
    Quilt
    Quilting
    Rachael Ashe
    Rachel Lafo
    Raw Materials
    Recycle
    Research
    Retreat
    Rhonda Weppler
    Richard-tetrault
    Richmond Art Gallery
    Right Brain
    Rondle-west
    Rug
    Ryan-mcelhinney
    Safety
    Sarah-gee-miller
    Saskatchewan
    Scale
    Sculpture
    Seaweed
    Semiotics
    Sewing
    Sharon Kallis
    Shawn Hunt
    Shigeru Ban
    Sketchup
    Social Engagement
    Social-engagement
    Social History
    Social Justice
    Social Media
    South-granville
    Stitching
    Storage
    Street Art
    Studio
    Subversive Stitch
    Surrealism
    Surrey
    Tagging
    Technology
    Terry Fox Theatre
    Textile
    Thrift Stores
    TJ Watt
    TO DO
    Tools
    Toronto Design Offsite
    Toybits
    Trevor Mahovsky
    Typography
    Upcycling
    Urban Design
    Use Object
    Use Objects
    Vancouver
    Vancouver Art Gallery
    Vancouver International Airport
    Video
    Visual Field
    Visual-field
    Visual Language
    Wallace Stegner House
    Wall Hanging
    Weaving
    William Morris
    Wood
    Wool
    Work Wraps
    Writing
    Yarn Bombing
    YVR
    Zaha Hadid
    Zendoodle

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.