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Share-worthy images battle big oil and beyond

5/29/2015

My mother shared the above image in a Facebook link with me because she knows what makes my heart go thumpety-thump: a dazzling visual pattern tied to a hefty underlying concept.

@billmckibben shared this staggering image on Twitter.

I and thousands of other social media users were seduced to hitting the Grist hotlink to view more photos of the kayaktavists' protest of Shell Oil's monstrosity that arrived in Seattle's port the Saturday before last.
You had me at yellow.

But I'm more captivated by the increasing power of those images to effect change. (#sHellNo)

"Your mom and 58% of Americans are on Facebook" screams the USA Today headline. And three out of 10 of them get at least some news while they're connecting with their Friends, according to the venerable U.S.-based Pew Research Centre.

Speaking of images that send a point home:

The Pew research shows that 78 per cent of Facebook news users "mostly see news when on Facebook for other reasons." It's that seductive power of images that is changing the news agenda and the media landscape. Long gone are the days when corporate media could control the flow of information to keep their advertisers happy and their friends in political power. Individual access to compelling still and moving images is taking on the status quo. It may start by tripping over a single powerful image but it can lead to a whole new era of information-gathering, where images are too pretty or pretty horrifying to resist clicking on for more info — and often too close for comfort:

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Playing with mud -- and new/old ideas

5/22/2015

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Where it all began: The Mud Girls retreat that sowed the seed for new/old building modes.

Playing with mainly found materials, and whenever possible with other people, offers me the chance to learn about properties and potential of those throw-away materials as well as about collaborative problem-solving and new/old modes of social interaction. I try not to overthink that link between materials and the inherent social nature of our species but just go with the urge to make the connections.

Working with cob – natural concrete that uses clay, sand and straw – provides a glimpse of an alternative to the inevitable glass-tower existence, the reliance on fossil fuels and the hazardous extraction and distribution process.

There’s nothing like bunker fuel hitting the local beaches or the growing Pacific trash vortex not so far away from those freighters to inspire alternatives. The solutions to these problems require alternative thinking, which depends on playing with ideas.

Excavating as exercise: Digging out a 60-inch diameter, 18-inch-deep hole. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

I got that first glimpse in a two-week cob-house-building workshop in the forest atop a Gulf Island, just days after I closed the door on my office job at a city newspaper. It was a tough adjustment, moving from a hierarchical corporate media culture to a loose, collaborative course-movement.

By day I hauled boulders and danced the sand into the clay with the Mud Girls, the kind of people I had never cross paths with in a Vancouver editorial department. By night I slept alone in a tent on a mossy outcrop.

Drainage is essential for natural clay-building on the Wet Coast. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

How was it? my friends asked after I returned. "Wild" was the only way I could describe this foreign experience.

Ten years later, I’ve been aching to dig my hands back into that feeling of the possibility of building something out of nothing, with others, testing our physical strength and forging connections with others who have a line on a local source for our materials.

The project is a cob oven, on a Gulf Island. The goal is to bake a pizza by the end of the summer.

Phase 1 is complete: creating a solid foundation for the oven. This is essential for protecting the cob from the Wet Coast climate.

Teach your children well: Hands-on learning that building materials are as close as under foot. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

The first two days were all about excavation. I hacked through thick salal root and hauled out bucket after bucket of compressed silt aggregate. The kids were eager to get into the act of shoveling the dirt onto the screen, then pouring water through the screen until just the rocks remained. I laid down some found French drain then back-filled with the gravel and stones until the site was pretty much level.

Next up: Building a dry-stack stone foundation – with a little help from my friends. Stay tuned.

Embedded labour: A solid foundation for the next phase. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

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From disaster to 'Discomforter': 5 lessons learned

5/15/2015

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There is really no way to know whether a blanket covered in brightly coloured buttons will read until the very end of all the work so I wanted to build in the likelihood of failure. That's how I came to decide on "The devil is in the details" as the line of text that would appear on a QR code reader. If it didn't read successfully at least it would prove the rule.

But it wasn't as simple as that. The details that bedevilled me began with my big idea to use masking tape to indicate the grid instead of tailor's chalk (too dusty), disappearing-ink marker (fades too quickly) or basting (tedious).

That tape plan might have worked if I had removed it in a timely manner, like within a few days or even weeks. But when you pull masking tape off of fine white cotton sheeting after 13 months you are left with a hard, yellowed embedded adhesive residue. You scrape it, scrub it, attack it with solvents and still it does not un-adhere. In desperation, you ball up the entire quilt and chuck it into the washing machine, despite the raw edges and exposed batting. When it comes out in a tight mass of threads and shrunken batting you curse your hare-brained impulsiveness. You let out a little scream when you realize that the colours from many of those buttons have inexplicably run, bleeding all over the white cotton. (Lesson 2: Research your materials.) At this point you roll yourself up into a little ball and go fetal in a corner somewhere until you're ready to rejoin humanity.

I knew going into my second QR Quilt project that there was a very good chance that after sewing more than 1,000 buttons into three layers of fabric the pattern may not be recognized by the QR code reader. But I also knew that I had a fighting chance after the surprising success of the readable QR Quilt: After Douglas Coupland. My quilt version of his painting, I Wait and I Wait and I Wait for God to Appear proved that a quilt composed of scraps of coloured business shirts and scattered buttons could contain a message as easily as the typical black and white grid. After several weeks of piecing over 1,000 squares together into one queen-sized square I stood back, aimed my phone at the quilt, and prayed. The sentence appeared, like a message from god.

I wanted that euphoria again. I needed it. (Lesson 1: Avoid great expectations.)

You eventually decide that the title has suddenly gained poignancy (Lesson 3: Embrace unexpected results) so you pick away at the binding selvedge threads from the quilt-ball until you can hang the wet, lead-apron-heavy slab of fiber and plastic to dry for several days. You start to notice that the sheeting is puckering from the shrinking and is sagging from the weight of all that hard plastic in this queen-sized quilt of the damned. Turns out some of those buttons were of some early plastic vintage that were painted after they were fabricated. (Who knew?)

You attempt to find salvation from a bottle of stain-remover -- Out, damned spot! Out, I say! -- but it looks worse. The next time you have the nerve to look at this fabricated failure you notice that -- praise the lord -- the bleaching agent has worked -- sort of. You stipple-quilt out the sags and bags and the rest of the discolouration disappears -- also sort of. You trim it square and bind it in black with a devil-may-care attitude. After it's finished you realize that the stippling was essential for creating enough rigidity to prevent the buttons from sagging when it hangs. You like the resulting topography. (Lesson 4: Innovate solutions.)

Then you air the whole sordid story on your blog, knowing that sharing the anguish is part of the process, though you regret you don't have any images that would give the full impact of the horror story. (Lesson 5: Photodocument the process, even failure.)

The title of this work is Discomforter (The Devil is in the Details). It's a cumbersome title befitting this project that took me to the edge of my sanity, or at least close enough to see that there is in fact an edge and I know I can't go there again.

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twentysomethings' bedrooms a compelling grad show work

5/8/2015

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"Hazel Cheng, 21, Bedroom in Family Home" (Photo by Mary Wendel Genosa)

What I’d really like to see is a ‘realitylink’: an aggregate site devoted to photo tours of real Vancouver homes where people actually live, cook, eat, sleep, play, fight, have babies, raise children, have pets, grow old. Except there’s no incentive for people to post photos of their very personal spaces for the viewing interest of perfect strangers.

Occasionally, though, you get a glimpse of that rich world of personal spaces. That’s why I lingered so long at the final project of Mary Wendel Genosa during the Emily Carr University graduation show opening last weekend, and why I went back a few days later. The graduating photography student's compelling large-scale portraits of twentysomethings in their sleeping quarters, Bedroom Biographies are a glimpse into the values of the newest generation of adults. The narratives are rich here. There is the straddling of childhood and adulthood; the impermanence at this time of life; dislocation and alienation; engendered spaces and objects. Each 91cm X 60cm tableau is rich with signifiers and most devoid of self-consciousness. There is sincerity in each image, an inherent trust between subject and photographer.

The accompanying hardcover book covering Wendel Genosa’s complete series includes reflective commentary by the subjects, elevating them from person-objects to thinking individuals. But it is their personal spaces that speak loudest of their struggles and their need for solace and comfort. You can see it in the stuff, in the lack of stuff, the kind of stuff, their arrangement of the stuff.

If you believe what you see on realtylink.org, most Vancouverites live in clutter-free, pristine homes with gleaming hardwood and stainless steel appliances, matchy-match, neutral livingroom furniture and large abstracted landscape paintings on the otherwise empty gallery-white walls.

There’s nothing like clicking on the “additional pictures” or "virtual tour" to realize that your own home (and by ‘your’ I mean ‘my’) is an unphotogenic jumble of memory-things you can’t get rid of for sentimental reasons. Your space is unsuitable for realtylink viewing because it is not a market-commodity; it’s a refuge from all that superficiality.

"Messica Mae, 26, Bedroom in Shared Home" (Photo by Mary Wendel Genosa)

Unreal real-estate photo tours can suck us into believing that everyone else is living a peaceful, uncluttered, happy existence, especially those in their 20s. These weighty portraits remind us of those early adult years that were the best of times and the worst of times. Real life is much more messy.
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The Show 2015 continues at the Granville Island campus until May 17, 10 am to 8 pm Monday to Friday, 10 am to 6 pm Saturday and Sunday. Take in one of the free one-hour tours on Saturday, May 9, 1 pm, Thursday, May 14, 6 p.m or Saturday, May 16, 1 pm. (Meet in the foyer of the North Building five minutes prior to a tour.)

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Street art saves us from a Pretty empty city

5/1/2015

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A masked Spock commands attention at one of many houses slated for demolition outside the King Edward Canada Line station. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

The alienating effect of walking by blocks of empty homes is seen in the writing on the wall. It is there in the masked Spock and other super-hero mashups that adorn the boarded-up exteriors of several houses near the King Edward Canada Line station. Like graffiti art, the houses are here today, gone tomorrow. In two years this corner -- and every two-block stretches radiating from all of the city's rapid transit stations -- will be transformed into homes that are not rented out and that most people who use that transit couldn't afford anyway.

I don't mourn the loss of those sprawling old ranchers; they're an inefficient use of city land. I worry about losing the street art, when every last residential development has been exploited and the bland luxurious uniformity will deter diverse forms of artistic expression.

As if we need any evidence of the relevance, interest and proliferation of unauthorized street art, almost 9,000 images tagged 'vancouvergraffiti' have been uploaded to Instagram (at this writing). There's even an app for that, Curb, created by three former UBC students who envisioned an evolving street-art wiki-gallery. (Spot some local work in Curb's promotional video, below.)

Only when the art is sanctioned do we get a glimpse of some of the particularly artistic street murals, like in this time-lapse video of Ilya Viryachev, a rising star in Vancouver's animation industry. I'm holding out hope that the hundreds of digital artists moving into the new Microsoft and Imageworks headquarters (beside the Vancouver Art Gallery) this month will share some of their talent outside their new downtown digs.

This week the local news was full of the City of Vancouver's attempt to at least count empty homes, presumably as a baby step toward dealing with the housing crisis (ie. no one except the rich and heavily subsidized can afford to live here). But recently when we were dropping off a friend in his MacKenzie Heights neighbourhood on the Westside it was eerily clear that it may be too little, too late. It was twilight on a Sunday evening but most of the impressive homes with manicured lawns on his block were empty, he said, with the rare interior lights likely on timers.

It was at this moment that it hit me: that this disparity between the over-housed and the homeless is out of control. The popular Beautiful Empty Homes website can't keep up with the latest high-end residential property deals and the crisis is also plaguing the Eastside. The City may be mulling a wiki-registry of empty houses and condos but this tell-on-your-neighbours scheme may just add fuel to the fire.

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Share-worthy images battle big oil and beyond

Playing with mud -- and new/old ideas

From disaster to 'Discomforter': 5 lessons learned

twentysomethings' bedrooms a compelling grad show work

Street art saves us from a Pretty empty city

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