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Mammoth social sculpture going up at Draw Down event

6/5/2015

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I'm not knocking social media. Hitting 'Like' to one posted act of injustice after another is nothing like joining a sit-in at your MP's office or marching in protest. But I also get that there is power in those tweets and online petitions. We saw it this week when Tim Hortons decided it had had enough bad press and was breaking its ad deal with Enbridge.

Still, there's a lot we lose by going through life connecting with one another mostly via screen-pecking 'like' or tweeting or 'gramming. We are, after all, a social species; our well-being is dependent on sharing space in the actual physical world. Consider this: If someone took away your ability to connect on social media you might get seriously miffed. If you were allowed unlimited social media access but had to connect in physical isolation from all other humans, you might get seriously unhinged.
PictureEarly days of the Network. Photo by Debbie Tuepah
There is something profoundly healthy about being around the energy of other people. It's the why for clubs and associations, parties and gatherings. And it's the why behind the Network sculpture/social engagement project.

Artist Debbie Tuepah and I came up with the idea just a few years after the birth of Twitter and Facebook, and within a year of the debut of Instagram and Pinterest. We felt a need to create a physical alternative to all this virtual social networking — some low-barrier, small-footprint way to bring people together. Something that would be collaborative but less skill-based than, say, a quilting bee, but offering similar tactile engagement.

This thread of an idea soon joined other threads: the materials should be found/donated and should be the stuff that ordinarily ends up in a landfill. Synthetic, petroleum-based fabrics and sheeting would do the trick. (No one knows what to do with those lurid-coloured Fortrel bedspreads and vinyl shower curtains.)

PictureThe more people work on it, the more visually interesting it becomes.
We cleared the decks and hung several strands from a hook in the studio ceiling, like I did as a kid when making those macrame plant hangers. We added one strand to another by simple knotting. We held parties and invited friends to bring their friends to tie one on. Kids got knotty and businessmen who thought the whole thing a little weird at first were soon weaving free-style. 

We knew we were onto something. A year later it made its public debut at the Mini Maker Faire at the PNE, where it grew into the gargantuan piece it is today.

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The Network is too big for any studio parties now. This mammoth collaborative sculpture demands the kind of space like the Atrium of the Mount Pleasant community centre, where it will be suspended on Saturday, June 20, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. as part of the city-wide Draw Down event. 

Come on down, tie one on, grab a thread and take part in this social medium in the actual, physical world.


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craftsmanship at the core of paper art show

4/4/2014

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PictureClockwise from top: Connie Sabo, Rachael Ashe and Sarah Gee Miller with their respective works. (Carlyn Yandle photos)


Sarah Gee Miller says she's pretty handy. That's the understatement of the evening. Her paper 'paintings' are not only visually stunning and conceptually rich but they resonate with the dedication of a serious craftsman.

Funny how the word 'crafts' only gets the serious respect it deserves when the 'man' is attached to it. Suddenly the mind moves from, say, knitting or embroidering to, say, boat-building or blacksmithing. Here at the Voices from Another Room show at the Hot Art Wet City gallery, the craftsmanship is here in the medium of paper.

It's that juxtaposition between the humble, ephemeral material and the heavy-duty skill and commitment of craftsmanship that makes this show of five artists' work so compelling. The results of that individual devotional patience, determination, repetition is on view. And I can attest that there's also frustration, physical exertion, second-guessing and the flops. You don't get to this calibre of work without enduring a few hard battles.

The conceptual elements of the pieces in this group show may reference particular art genres (or not) but the methods are perhaps unconsciously rooted in this region that is built on a New World culture of self-sufficiency, innovation and handwork, in a medium fitting for this corner of the world that was built in large part on the pulp and paper industry. Location, whether in art or real estate, is everything.

The beauty of the group show that has that one connecting thread — or in this case, wood fibre — is in how far that thread can be stretched, from Miller's totemic paintings to Sabo's heavy net-like installations of twisted newspaper, to Ashe's filigree screens, to Alison Woodward's three-dimensional twisted fairytale vignettes and Joseph Wu's origami sculptures. But beyond the medium there's the other connecting thread of craftsmanship, which Wu articulates as both a scientific and artistic exploration.

This is a show of skill that is developed through the often meditative repetitive act of carving or twisting or folding, but the art is in the repetition of those expanding skills. It is how Sabo's net works have led her to ideas about laminating newspaper blocks, or how Miller's paper paintings grew out of her own drawing machine.

"The open relation between problem solving and problem finding... builds and expands skills," according to author Richard Sennett in The Craftsman. "But this can't be a one-off event. Skill opens up in this way only because the rhythm of solving and opening up occurs again and again."

Voices from Another Room: 5 Artists Explore Paper continues to April 25, Wed-Sat noon to 5 p.m. at 2206 Main (at 6th Ave.), Vancouver.






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Put down that Blackberry and go get some blackberries

8/1/2013

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I so adore this old World War I royalty-free poster created for the Canada Food Board that I post it in my kitchen every year during the putting-food-by months, already underway.

I love the displayed array of fresh produce that would never be pushed by a private enterprise (where's the profit margins in stuff you can grow?) and the chief goals of saving and not wasting. So anti-capitalist. There's nary a scrap of the patriarchy in this national call to action. You want to live well? Listen to what your grandmother's got to say, girl, and you'll be wanting not. 

It's propaganda art you can really sink your teeth into.

There's an art to putting food by without relying on electricity, and an art to harvesting what's wilding in your environment, also known as foraging. We do it with intention (in jeans and long-sleeved shirts, with hook, snips, and yogurt containers) or without intention (leaning one's barely clad beach-bound body into the thicket for a few juicy morsels). 

We are not wanting for blackberries in this corner of the world, to put by, or put in a pie — and not just for the fruit. In what should become an extension of this very Vancouver (and Vancouver Island) activity, the ubiquitous rogue species of Himalayan blackberry can be harvested for their durable 'vegetable leather.'

PictureDavid Gowman photo from The Georgia Straight, straight.com
The time of this writing is the perfect time to reap a particular harvest, according to local artist
Sharon Kallis. It's late enough in the growing season for the canes to reach the thickness of a baby's arm and shoot 10 feet in the air in search for cyclists to take down or paths to take over. But it's not so late in the season that the menacing-looking vines are too woody to be able to be stripped. That hits around mid-August.

Why would want to strip the canes? It's a rhetorical question for anyone who likes to make something out of nothing, and this is even better: make stuff, while hacking into this invasive species' ability to turn diverse urban woodlands into a thorny monocrop.

Kallis, whose special interest is in social engagement, shows how to strip blackberry vines (or watch this video) to wrestle down this barbed invader and amass some very usable material that can be used immediately or stored for later to make useful things like baskets or privacy screens, and useless, more interesting things like installations. Some inspiration from the prolific American sculptor Patrick Dougherty:

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Crossing Over, American Craft Museum, New York, New York, 1996.
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Dougherty installing at the North Carolina Museaum of Art, 2009.
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Summer Palace, 2009. Morris Arboretum, Philadelphia.
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Maker's mecca in downtown Toronto (for now)

11/9/2012

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A real trip: Toronto's textile-retail district is a visual feast for any kind of maker. (Carlyn Yandle photos)
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Stephen Cruise's 1997 public artwork at Richmond and Spadina. (Carlyn Yandle photo)
Like other Vancouver makers, I mourn the latest closures of stores dedicated to those who work with their hands, hearts and heads, for love or livelihood. Last month it was the needlework shop in my neighbourhood. Dressew is fast becoming the city's last great fabric store standing.

So the first chance I got while in Toronto last week I headed to the mecca for fibre-arts-makers: the Queen/Richmond/Spadina area. This bit of heaven boasts 100-year-old storefronts jam-packed with notions both humble and grand: a button shop — just buttons — next to one devoted to beads or ribbon or wool or shiny embellishments. Across from a luxury textiles boutique is a warehouse crammed with tables heaped with remnants. All in the space of a couple of blocks, and right in the thick of the city.

Yet even Canada's biggest textile retail district appears threatened by encroaching condo towers. (Note the billboard in this photo hawking pre-sale units in the "Fabrik" development on the site of the old King Textiles building.) 

Just when you think you're the last fabric-hound standing there's the World of Threads festival to restore the soul. This multi-venue Oakville-Toronto event showcases staggeringly skillful works embedded with rich ideas and spaces to consider, and to transcend. Despite the diversity of media and methods, a thread runs though this fest: in an all-too-consumptive art world these artists are grateful for the chance to show. The value of the work is not foremost in commericial saleability but is in the maker's connection to the material itself, the often transcendent physical experience of the making, and the connectedness to the pattern of art forms that pass down through families and through every culture.


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Putting art value to good use

2/28/2012

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The art world doesn't have much use for "use objects" as art objects. There's really nothing valuable about them beyond their use value. And the fact that they're laboriously handmade doesn't cut it either, I realized several years ago in the middle of a big-box bedding store as I examined the hand-stitching of a $69 queen-sized made-in-China quilt. Much of art value to do with uniqueness and innovation -— stuff that's quite outside the massive production lines that keeps Bed, Bath and Beyond in business.

I've struggled with the uneasy relationship between useful things and art things, and have poked around their parameters through my own practice. And what I've come up with is this: my collection of handmade, spider-web-delicate doilies crocheted by the great-aunts are not considered artworks (yet). But reproducing them in a painting series makes them art (for now). The distinctions often lie in the intended environments for the objects. Doilies, although formerly employed to protect domestic surfaces in order to extend their lifespan, are most likely found in thrift-store bins. Paintings are intended for the walls of public or commercial galleries or upscale living rooms. And therein lies the awful truth about how we value those different spaces. Original art exudes investment value. Use objects are only worth the function they serve.

So what to make of the ceremonial robes on display at the Bill Reid Gallery last year? The "Time Warp" show revealed that the erroneously known ‘blanket’ is far from the household craft the word suggests but a magnificent artwork that honours the wearer and carries culture through its use.

I haven't quite put it all together but there's a hint of where this exploration is going in the Logo Sweater I knit in the weeks leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympics. It was in its wearing by a number of people during the Games (to their peril) that contributes to its intrinsic value as an art object. All while its assumed use value works against accepting it as an artwork.




At right: Haida Weaver Tracy Auchter Yahgulanaaswith "Graduation Robe" (Ann Seymour photo from Bill Reid Gallery site) Below: Logo Sweater, 2010.

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Unravelling the mystery of an unravelling rug (It's a lo-o-ong story)

3/25/2011

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Design has the most to say about the origin of what is commonly known as an Oriental carpet. But the patterns woven into a mysterious tattered, dun-coloured wool rug that has been in my family for as long as I can remember have led to more questions than answers.

My mother purchased the rug in 1969 at a Salvation Army thrift store in East Vancouver. As a long-time social justice activist, she was attracted to the two major central designs in the rug. They looked to her like bombs, and she was attracted to the notion that it may have been made in creative reaction to the war-zone region where it was woven.

This curious design saved it from an uncertain future 40 years ago, and saved it again during a recent “shoveling-out” of the old family cabin. Aside from the two bomb-like figures there are other mysterious pattern features: dark indigo lines of arrows that appear to point in specific directions; an intriguing, restrained use of white as a border highlight; faint yet distinct lines of pattern resembling field rows. The ‘bombs’ themselves are marked by subtle differences, including the fact that they are not the same size.

My general, limited knowledge of handmade area rugs told me at first glance that this was, at the very least, an Oriental rug, due to its pattern of a border surrounding a central field. It was also likely tribal, due to its asymmetrical dimensions — 80 centimetres at one end and 100 at the other — indicating it was made on a small, simple and probably transportable loom. It was also likely an important size to its nomadic makers; at just 170 centimeters in length and an almost brocade-like thickness, this lightweight carpet packs easily. The colourway reflects the largely barren region of the largely nomadic Central Asia, at least prior to 1969. The lack of saturated colours indicated that the wool might have been natural, from animals that would have been important for nomadic peoples such as camel, goats and sheep, or would have been dyed using natural plants or minerals found or traded in the region.

But it is the simple, abstracted geometrical patterning that is the most compelling indicator of its roots in rural Central Asia, as opposed to China, India and Persia where the complexity of those stable cultures is representative in the largely floral, ornate patterning.

Pattern would provide both definitive answers to location, but also more questions about how complex ideas of culture, the physical environment and the mystic can be embedded and encoded in deceptively simple patterns.

My hunch was that this was a prayer rug, and the ‘bombs’ were directional elements contributing to its purpose of orienting the worshiper toward Mecca.

Initial research did confirm that this was not a “war rug”, a highly collectible type that first appeared in the Steppes region of Afghanistan and northern Pakistan following the Soviet invasion in 1979.

So are these central features in the field known among collectors as the “main stripe” ships, buildings, fish? Anything resembling the images is at odds with the arid geographic location in which this rug was likely made.

Other than these two confounding images, this particular carpet resembles Turkmen rugs in terms of size and colours, however, the main stripe lacks the typical pattern of rectangular or octagonal ‘guls’ that many believe to be heraldic emblems. Also, its lack of a mihrab, or prayer arch, in the main stripe arguably discounts this as a prayer rug.

The simple abstracted geometrical border design of narrow frames, known as the guard stripe provides structure and focus in the same way that a frame highlights a painting but it is also the most useful part of a carpet’s design in determining place of origin. The border of the rug in question features a number of motifs, from a turret-like pattern, and a linking of triangles that may derive from the Tree of Life that is characteristic of all Oriental rugs including the strictly geometric pattern of Turkmen rugs. Any interruption of the flow of the pattern around the corners would indicate that the rug was copied from another rug or done by memory.

The fact that the dyes in my rug are essentially shades of brown, with navy and white used as outline connects it to the general group of Turkmen rugs, which are traditionally dyed with madder in shades that include browns and brick shades, and the limited use of black or dark brown outlines for to create subtle emphasis. 

However, the almost minimalist ground and subdued patterning points to weavers of tribal groups distinct from the Turkmen with whom they are usually associated. 

Research also reveals that the Balouch rug, also known as Beluch or Baluchistan, is often described as monotonous and drab. One blue and a small amount of white is typically used in contrast to a range of browns. This is an accurate description of my rug, which locates it within a people, but it is the one specific pattern set of the Balouch that is more intriguing.

The Balouch often incorporates the Tree of Life design, often on a camel ground, like mine. It may be an Engsi, a rug traditionally used as a closure on the tent-like entrance of nomadic dwelling, specifically a Khatchli design. Adding weight to that theory is the typical design of a Khatchli, which is Armenian for ‘cross-like.' A “cruciform paneling” essentially segments the rug main stripe into quarters and includes and “elem” panel at the bottom. The cross-like shape can be seen to mimic the panels in many wooden doors but also suggests a garden, according to one collector I found at a website on Oriental carpets.

This rug does seem to bear traces of the Khatchli layout, although without the elem panel. However, the two main images remain at odds with any examples shown in Khatchli rugs.

It was only after seeing an image posted on an online discussion board of a similar ‘bomb’ that I realized my rug was pictured upside-down. One collector/writer discusses this uncommon design:

“The footed vase design is referred to as Qalem Dani, or pen holder. Because of the protruding leaf forms, Westerners think of an upright holder for a quill or pen. The weavers more likely had in mind the Persian type of long, ovate, papier-mâché or wooden pencil box, richly ornamented with lacquer painting. It graphically shows how a pattern is simplified and then a specific element is extracted to become a major design element.”

The author says he believes the Yacub Khani sub-group of Balouchi weavers, who were not known for making prayer rugs, made the footed vase rug.

The arguments and theories continue, now more likely in online discussion boards dedicated to specific topics under the subject of the Oriental rug.

Three collector/academics at the most prominent non-commercial website for collectors of Oriental rugs I was able to locate weighed in on the rug and gave three different interpretations of the design. One suggested it was an Afghan rug featuring a design reflecting the narrow and pointed headstones of the area:

“The arrow-like devices could represent cypress trees, which have been associated with cemeteries for a very long time, or a fence around a tomb. Afghans and others visit cemeteries on their New Year. Some areas have a tradition of weaving a rug for the funeral and in Turkey many were then donated to the local mosque.”

Another agreed that it was likely not used for a door, also known as an “Engsi”, because it lacked the typical bottom panel design in the pattern. He theorized it was a Balouch floor rug, featuring an old design no longer used but roughly translated as “inkwell,” which may refer to the aforementioned “pen-holder” theory.

Another aficionado attributed the uniqueness of this rug to the possibility that it was a knock-off of another, more valuable rug style, while others on the discussion board suggested rugs with similar ‘emblems’ may be referencing the espaliered trees the weaving cultural groups were known for cultivating. 

The lively discussion reveals that although these tribal rug designs appear simple they are difficult to attribute and interpret because of a long history of cultural change in the region. As cities changed hands, so did the redistribution of tribal motifs to the point that the patterns cannot be definitively attributed to a particular group.

The exact meaning of specific patterns may be lost or simply unfathomable to western sensibilities, but their mystery continues to inspire discussion on matters both mundane and supernatural.

Considering the political upheaval and harsh physical environment in which this rug was likely created, it is reassuring that some aspects of tribal culture cannot be accessed, exposed, dissected and explained in definite terms.




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