carlyn yandle
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Painting like no one is watching

12/28/2012

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Mukai has been quietly working and reworking her paintings and drawings for 30 years.
Painting feels a lot like grasping for words to me. There’s general comprehension there, thanks to some study, but I don’t have enough command of my own visual language to express myself with eloquence. It’s like there are gaps in vocabulary.

This is why I often leave well-curated gallery shows humbled (on a good day) or discouraged (most days). Still, there's the possibility of an epiphanic moment, like the one I had last month at an opening at Trench Gallery, just east of Gastown.

The Alchemy of Practice was a collection of the mostly unseen drawings and paintings by an artist I was not familiar with: Amy Mukai (whose only google presence is in relation to this show). Friends and I moved around the gallery perimeter, peering at the intricate and subtle spatial puzzles and geometric patterns done in acrylic gouache, ink, or oil on paper until we bumped into the show’s curator, Craig Sibley, who told us he recognized the exquisiteness of the never-before-shown works when he was visiting her husband. Mukai created them between going to art school in the ‘70s, raising a family, getting a biology degree and doing pollination research at SFU. The artwork is something she did for herself, quite removed from the show-and-tell scene.

It was another example of the Malcolm Gladwell rule: it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill. Mukai’s devotion to her subject matter built her a fully realized body of work that revealed a fluency in her visual language.

And here’s where the epiphany hit: It doesn’t matter if you have a list of show credits; it’s the practice that counts.

Mukai was there at her opening, but I was a little shy to say hi, and she seemed a little shy herself. Then there’s the problem of what to say after “Great show” without putting her on the spot. But I would have liked to say that this show has inspired me to brave the obscurity, to ignore the art trends, to keep practising communicating between heart and head and hand.

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Mukai's very personal works have a fully realized language of their own.


 
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Seasonal spectacle lights up the senses

12/21/2012

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VIrtual spin art: Twirl your smartphone and click. Better: Twirl yourself and click.
Art is in the everyday, even at the Van Dusen Gardens on another miserable rainy night last week.

There's no narrative in those hundreds of thousands of LED coloured lightbulbs strung through the Shaughnessy woodland gardens, no theatrical arc, nothing to learn – except a lot about perception and spatiality.

There's the miles of electrical wiring, the line of light that creates convoluting volumes that expand and contract as the body moves through the narrow paths and under tree canopies. And there's the absence of any sort of perceptible pattern, pulling viewers into the mystic. The lights are not lashed to the grid-like constructed environment for the annual Festival of Lights, but literally connected to nature, the thickets and groves and clumps. Against the black void of the heavens and earth, this luminous sculptural installation is not unlike the universe.

The visual field is not static but not kinetic. The movement is random, shivering, swaying and trembling in the icy gusts, unaffected by all the wandering visitors (well, except for the giant conifer with the four control buttons. That was fun).

The whole immersive light-sculpture has a whiff of "the alogic of dreams rather than the logic of most art," as Susan Sontag described the '60s Happenings movement.

It was a little psychedelic escape from this Crassmas season.


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Thickets thick with neon tulip-like sconces made from plastic water bottles (above) and tunnels of violet lights (right) all contribute to an embodied experience. 

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That poodle is telling us something

12/14/2012

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At first I didn't see what the fuss was about at the official artwork unveiling last weekend at Main and 18th. Unless the soggy mess of dirt and blue metal fencing in front of the new condo complex was some sort of  statement about building boom upheaval.

Maureen Smith, consultant for the Vancouver's Public art Program, had to point it out. Look up. Waaaay up. And there it was: a giant version of a ceramic poodle figurine, perched like surveillance infrastructure. The kind of object that you used to find along that area of Main Street but now would be more likely mined at a Value Village or Dollar Giant.

Whoa! I said.
That's the kind of reaction we like, she said.

Scale is a funny thing. Blown up to absurd proportions, the humble household curio becomes monumental. The condo-dwellers across the street now have a ceramic dog overseer. What's not to love?

You could blame it all on the artist's mother.
Gisele Amantea has said she owes her sensibility to the household curios that were the backdrop of Italian Catholic upbringing in Montreal. But we all know there's more to that story. Amantea has spent her prolific career riffing on the flocked wallpaper and the domestic clutter of cherubs and roses of her childhood.

The permanent sculpture is part of Amantea's Memento series that also involves slathering the outside of some No. 3 Main buses in what only appears to be a pink knitted cozy, as part of the ongoing 88 Blocks of Main public art program.

I take it all as a sign that my giant crocheted poodle idea I wrote about last month isn't completely ridiculous. Or maybe it is, and that's something to explore. 

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Photo courtesy of the Buzzer.







Poodles on parade:
By appropriating an advertising space, these curios raise fresh curiosity: Is it a Fido ad? The latest Telus animal? What's not to love about a hit of squishy pinkness against grey tarmac? More info

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Breaking up is hard to do

12/7/2012

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It's the most wonder-what-to-make time of the year — or used to be, for me. It was all tra-la-la-la-la and glue-guns and glitter puff paint back when I had the 9-5 office job. Messing with sparkle and colour was just the thing for fending off the stress of the day and the inky wet nights. My right brain happily buzzed as I explored how to make new kinds of gifties, from jester-style ski toques to mini twig wreaths. I even hosted an annual alcohol-fueled Craft Night for the Craftily Impaired. (Celebrity tangent: One year one of those half-gassed girlfriends ended up showing her little collection of homemade cards to an approving Eric "Will" McCormack at a bar later that night.)

But now I'm discovering that an emerging art practice is a major buzz-kill to what used to be a craft-tastic, shamelessly uncritical seasonal activity, a creative retreat from my daily managerial role. My extensive craft repertoire remains an important foundation for my work now but I have to move on. Learning quilling or book-binding is not moving my work forward, and the ol' right brain now needs a break at the end of the day. Those pure, fun seasonal jollies I used to get from learning to make a thing have now been replaced by regret for the time and effort spent on silly seasonal notions.

It's like I'm breaking up with crafting, but know I'll be seduced into a few more one-night stands before it's all over. 
This may be a glimmer of what the struggle looks like. 
To get through this transition I've been getting that hit of passion for making by cruising some serious crafters' blogs and online magazines. My primal heart beats, "Me make! Me make!" but my right brain says, "Not tonight; I have a headache."

Some crafty temptations, with seductively-free instructions:
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Snowflake gift-topper

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Felted slippers made from old wool sweaters. I'm so tempted.

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Origami business card holder

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Table-top tree made out of cereal boxes (pant! pant!)

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    Cross-posted at
    carlynyandle.substack.com

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