creative process - carlyn yandle

Learning to play, to learn

5/29/2014

I would rather watch the little kids in my life play than watch the best TV. But it's tricky because they don't like to be observed and if they feel I'm too interested, they are on to me and it all comes to a halt.

I have to refrain from the urge to referee, guide, demonstrate or facilitate. Because it's only when they're sure the adults are not interested that the seriously unstructured play comes on, with all its small power struggles and shared moments of joy. (See legendary Lynda Barry talk about play at the end of this post.)

I'm fascinated by the ability of kids to spontaneously engage in creative collaboration (a.k.a. 'play') with other kids they didn't know 10 minutes before. It's a lesson in the power of putting ourselves out there creatively, to let go of control and all expectations.

Playing with toy bits after hours at the VAG. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

In the past week, I took my inner kid out to play with strangers in two distinct venues: the Vancouver Art Gallery, in preparation for the opening of Douglas Coupland's major solo show, and at the first Arts & Crafts Social at a small Mount Pleasant neighbourhood gallery.

After-hours at the Vancouver Art Gallery, we were all quickly introduced before we were invited to attack and stack Coupland's priceless/useless toy bits to assemble his imposing 'Brick Wall' at the entrance of the exhibit, under the artist's direction. We were just playing but in retrospect we were problem-solving issues of density, colour, weight, communication, and give-and-take. We were just talking but on reflection we were wrangling with issues of value, object-images, collections, consumption, globalization and categorization.

A few days later, I hauled out one of my portable projects and headed to the inaugural Arts & Crafts Social (#HAWCsocial) at Hot Art Wet City Gallery hosted by Rachael Ashe and Kim Werker.

The beauty of a drop-in, BYOP (project) event is that if you're feeling a little shy, at least you have your work to focus until you're comfortable enough to mingle. The tables soon filled up with conversation-starters beyond the beer and wine: stabby felt needles, crochet and rug hooks, Thai take-out, Sharpies on canvas, a digital drawing pad and an old manual typewriter.

You play, you learn — about other methods, applications, directions. And you get to hang with people not typical of your usual social circle. To me it was worth the admission-by-donation just to get a glimpse of the unrestrained mind of Billy Patko (below, left). Which got me thinking: what would Patko's prolific doodles look like in a large-scale format? (See Photoshop'd sketch, below.)

Just playing.

Coupland's show, Everywhere is Anywhere is Anything is Everything runs May 31 to Sept.1. The next Arts & Crafts Social at Hot Art Wet City is June 25, 7:30 - 11pm.

The unfathomable drives next generation of artists

4/17/2014

Detail from Emily Carr Masters student Duobaitis' ink on board work, '(re) formatting', 2014.

How we're feeling about our place in an uncertain world is evident on art school walls.

This is where the next generation of emerging artists grapples with the shape-shifting natural and built environment, consciously or subconsciously.

The increasingly puzzling, distracted, technically fraught visual field reflects students' reactions and responses to the relentless and devastating images of catastrophe and the bombardment of data-graphics, encompassing everything from micro-surgical robots to data-graphics on global human migration patterns.

It's all enough to make a person retreat to a quiet corner to knit or knot. Or draw. Or collage. Or build.

Dallas Duobaitis' recent work in his first year Masters program deals with some of those topics — maybe. That's the beauty of abstracted images; they engage the ideas and thoughts of the viewer who is also negotiating this particular, uncertain time and space. This artwork resonates because it is of our time.

Detail from Motut-Firth's installation (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Monique Motut-Firth (disclosure: friend) also grapples with those themes in her first-year Masters installation, part of the It's Not You, It's Me show at the Concourse Gallery. Her found print images of largely domestic objects (including pictures of women) are meticulously constructed into robot-esque clusters that hover on the gallery wall, in conversation with Duobaitis' work that includes a motion-sensor-activated oculus/dream-catcher contraption (see below).

This emerging genre of work is not created in a Vancouver vacuum but is in conversation with creatives all over the world, in reaction to innovations that provide answers to problems but also more questions, as seen in this documentary from Japan on the future of robots in our daily lives and this one on the horrifying/banal reality of surveillance in the UK.

Duobaitis and his latest installation at Emily Carr University.

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The Emily Carr University gallery walls have since been transformed for the annual Foundation Show, often the very first showing of work from the university's first year students as young as 18 and from all over the world. The Foundation Show continues to April 26.

Motion sensors activate Duobaitis' chilling/thrilling installation of metal and threads. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

The pretty and the pretty awful make it into Eastside murals

4/11/2014

Urban Crow (detail), by Richard Tetrault

I have this vague, hippie-era-soaked memory of my brother and I hanging with my father as he painted a wall alongside some other artists. Forty years later I suggested to my brother that he swing by my own mural project last summer, reminding him of those times when we were to come see the art in the making.

There's a humble history of mural-making in East Vancouver, but well-known Strathcona-based artist Richard Tetrault has taken it to new heights. Speaking in Vancouver and Richmond this week, his survey of his large-scale, collaborative, very public paintings emphasizes place and history.

His work is about layers: the often conflicting layers of histories of Vancouver's distinct communities and the layers of translucent colour that identify his painting style.

Iconic hydro poles and back lanes, Urban Crow (detail)

The very-Vancouver images of construction cranes, crows, and hydro wires take on symbolic meaning in his murals. But behind the expansive visuals on the sides of buildings or retaining walls is a whole other skill area: working with Eastside communities to create the content that is often contentious but necessary, he says, in moving forward. So, residential schools and the 'bad' Balmoral hotel sign are depicted, often despite some objections by those who are haunted by them, but in a way that acknowledges their impact without further torment.

Then there is the challenge of the logistics of securing funding and handling swing stages and working while exposed to the elements. These are skills that only develop from a lifetime of experience in public mural-making, and are invisible in his slideshow of works that show, say, collaborating members of the Chinese, First Nations, and Japanese community represented in the Radius mural at the Firehall Theatre in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (below).

The Radius mural in progress at the Firehall Theatre.

Some of that background can be seen in the short film (see YouTube clip, below) about the immense Through the Eye of the Raven collaborative mural on the Orwell Hotel.

Tetrault is heavily influenced by his own early-adult years in Mexico, absorbing the social art murals by the likes of the big three — Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros — whose large-scale public artworks were created to speak to a largely illiterate indigenous population.

Siqueiros' Revolutionaries (detail), 1957-65

What makes a good/important contemporary mural remains the subject of great debate, making this public artform fraught with issues.

Is a mural without a message — such as to remember a history of struggle, to give rights or hope to the wronged, to call to action — mere decoration? Is colour, beauty and skill worthy enough of public funding? What are the parameters for officially sanctioning one kind of expression over another? Should the public have input into what is being funded?

One Terrace local shares his views on the Enbridge campaign. Photo by Josh Massey

Unauthorized murals — also known as graffiti — are fleeting but can also pack a punch, as famously seen in Bansky's surreptitiously created scenes.

It can be seen in the work of my cousin in Terrace BC. (name withheld) for his anti-Enbridge art on the public property of the old Skeena Bridge and possibly painted out by now. For the people, by the people.

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Richard Tetrault's murals can be seen in the flesh with the help of the interactive maps in this self-guided Eastside Mural Tour.

Something potent in unapproved public art

2/7/2014

It's official: the Dude Chilling Park sign, a guerrilla-art installation by recent Emily Carr industrial design grad Viktor Briestensky, has been reinstated, with full approval by the city's parks board.

Something was gained, but something was lost in there too.

It's not about the loss of the official park name. All you local monarchists can breathe a sigh of relief; there's no report of any move to officially rename the park itself (named in 1972 after the bordering street which was named after Queen VIctoria's German rellies.)

It's encouraging that the City listened to the community on this, especially recognizing that Dude Chilling Park is a better locator for all of us who use this rare bit of green space in Mount Pleasant. That would mostly be the dog people who have been referring to this meeting spot by some version of that name since the public art piece of the tubular reclining dude by Denman Island artist Michael Dennis was installed there back in 1991 when the area was still pretty sketchy.

So, yeah, it's kind of fun to have that sign back — it even made a line for the Jimmy Kimmel show — but it's lost its original spontaneous, anti-authoriarian potency.

Katherine Nielsen and Jennifer Skillen play with the numbers (Carlyn Yandle photo)

The wonder remains for the presumably guerrilla-art installation of the third zero to the monolithic '100' statue at the south foot of the Granville Island bridge that suddenly appeared then disappeared in 2008.

The clever appropriation of the existing untitled structure, its meaning and apparent materials speaks of the appropriation of this land. I loved that the extra zero had all the cold, inhumane appearance of the existing cast concrete but was knocked off in painted rigid foam. If art is about afflicting the comfortable, creating some community dialogue or shaking up public preconceptions, this was working.

I've searched for any information on what genius did it (and how it was installed) and the circumstances for its sudden disappearance. Was it completely unsanctioned, or part of a past public art biennale?

Both the Dude Chilling Park sign and the third zero are beautifully crafted urban landscape interventions but it's the one that was mysteriously removed that keeps me thinking about our social history.

The most powerful art might be made of garbage

11/22/2013

Carlyn Yandle photo

The astronomical private art-investor feeding frenzy at prestigious auction houses is light years away from art. It's a greedy need for prestige, worlds apart from the hand of Picasso or Andy Warhol and, most recently, Francis Bacon and the other Important Artists who conceived those coveted works.

Art is outside the billions of dollars sloshing around the world's art investors; it's in the streets, provoking those who hold the purse strings and the power. You can see it in humble objects, like the garbage monster that prowled around the anti-pipeline rally last weekend at the end of False Creek, towering over the thick crowd, snapping its messy maw at excited kids. It's not pretty, and it certainly has no retail value, as it's made of the usual stuff that ends up in the Pacific Gyre, but it functions as art has and always will. It provokes us to think differently, to re-consider, step out of our complacency and see the world for what it is and where it is headed or could be. This is the power of the visual object.

The makers (presumably the two operators) of the garbage monster were compelled to express themselves through their creativity and labour, with no profit or prestige motives in mind. The object serves to contest the ways and means and plans of those in power, in this place, at a time when the news broke that Canada is dead last in climate change policy in the developed world. It may be a small gesture, but when combined with other creative forms of expression, can turn the tide.

Carlyn Yandle photo

The prevailing discourse was there in the form of an image-object of an actual SUV receiving a giant lethal injection, during Car-free Day on Commercial Drive this past June. The only motive behind this gesture was a need to comment. The high visual impact is art in its purest form and the makers are indisputably artists. And those artists are probably not getting rich if they're spending much of their creative effort on an expression outside of the system of capitalism.

That pretty much has been the history of artists. Their work may have no cash value, but their value to society is priceless.

A potent show of Fabric unfolds at the Vancouver Art Gallery

10/11/2013

Kimsooja with curator Daina Augaitis

Internationally renowned artist Kimsooja was verklempt at the opening reception for her show, Unfolding, at the Vancouver Art Gallery Thursday.

Her audience would soon feel that emotion unfolding as the soft-spoken artist led a tour of the new exhibit that runs to Jan. 26.

Revisiting some 30 years of her deeply personal works, with her son and other close family and friends in attendance, was clearly overwhelming for the Korean-born New York artist , who recently wrapped up another wrapping at the Venice Biennale.

'Overwhelming' is a good descriptor for the show, too.

Bright, satiny boulder-like mounds presented in the Bottari tradition of wrapping gifts in colourful fabrics contain material scraps the artist retrieved from the Tsunami-struck region of Japan.

Visitors feel the unfolding of a singular vulnerability in a cavernous room as simultaneous video screenings reveal the artist standing still in a crowded street in various urban corners of the Earth.

The mix of rusty, worn mechanical objects and brilliant satin fabrics is a visual feast.

Another room featuring truck overloaded with a heap of colours evokes displacement or an unwieldy migration.

This retrospective is a reminder of the potency of found fabric, a culturally embedded material that can be a medium for painting or sculpture, often at the same time, as Kimsooja does so powerfully.

The artist raises those stakes by making material a metaphor for the wrapping and unwrapping, the enfolding, the unfolding, the concealing and exposing that resonates long after leaving the gallery.

A performance of Kimsooja's A Beggar Woman (see video clip, below) is set for Nov. 29 as part of Fuse.

Oh the laces you'll go when you're distracted

4/5/2013

We are to understand that being distracted is bad, and being focused is good. Being focused will get the job done while being in the moment is not productive — productivity being the cornerstone of our prevailing Protestant work ethic.

I'm aware that it is absurd to continue measuring our national wellness by Gross Domestic Product stats and I deeply respect those ER and childcare workers who must rely on their mental agility to withstand chaotic conditions but if I'm not at least working toward producing something I start wondering why I'm even here.

I've been forced to think about the virtues of making over the last several weeks as life trumped my fastidious little production schedule. The best I could do was grab a few moments to watch from the sidelines, or catch a glimpse of work by other producers, like Eastern-Canadian metal sculptor Cal Lane whose Gutter Snipes show at Grunt Gallery wound up last week. Lane, known for wielding an oxy-acetylene torch and scrambling around 2,000-gallon oil tanks, is my kinda hands-on gal.

Photo from grunt.ca

She shows serious devotion to her work of imposing filigree patterns into found, often rusted industrial materials. It's the kind of demanding work ethic that recharges my productivity urge, but under the circumstances I had to park that and be content surfing over reviews of her work, her other shows and other collaborators, and soon, other expressions of lace as a pattern.

I'm sure that much has been written about the importance of going on a mental/physical/emotional hiatus, but I usually file that reading for later and get back to the job at hand. That's probably a sign that I may be overdosing on a devotional practice.

Since I couldn't get down to any real work I did a lot of image-surfing between things. This image of the artist's Burnt Lawn installation (right) reminds me that my serious focus can narrow the visual field.

Focusing on not focusing so much is a bit of a trial for me but I'm trying to resist the production compulsion and ride the Googleverse free-form a little more, enjoying the discussion on a related show, Lace in Translation, at Philadelphia University or viewing an interview with Lane at Grunt Gallery (at right).

Lane's 'Burnt Lawn' at The Design Center at Philadelphia University, 2010

And then I did what was only possible due to the distractedness of the last few weeks: I sat back and did nothing but watch a 12-minute video made for a 2009 exhibition of re-imagined manufactured lace that plays in the space between art and production. Time well wasted.

Kerry Polite photo, from The Design Center

Lace Fence, galvanized PVC-coated wire, by Demakersvan, 2009. 16 panels: 152'W x 6.5'H

Over-thinking will be the death of me

3/22/2013

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!")

This is usually the point where I have to fight the urge to scrap the whole project and herein lies the conflict.

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!

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.

Art that has tongues wagging is working

3/15/2013

A few weeks back, one of the local dailies ran a staff photo of a grumpy-looking woman wearing a hand-drawn sign around her neck that read: “Mount Pleasant needs a pool not a poodle on a pole.”

God, I miss the newsroom sometimes. When that kind of photo lands on your desk (so to speak) you do a little happy dance. This is the money shot, the hook into a hot little story, the art that guarantees the front page of a community paper. And the alliteration in the scrawled sentiment doesn’t hurt either.

It's the kind of story that has the community buzzing, the phones ringing, the (e-)letters pouring in. It has, as they say, legs. It promises follow-up stories with new angles, fresh emotions. It fends off the greatest fear for an understaffed newsroom: crickets. (Watch how a CTV news story adds fuel to the fire.)

Successful public art does the same thing. Love it or hate it, it gets people talking, debating, engaging. As I write this the tweets for #MainStPoodle have neared 1,000 since the pooch made the papers. (My December post on the freshly erected poodle is here.)

It's all grist for the mill for those on the media sidelines but now that I'm out from behind the desk and in the rejection-rich realm of art-making, I wonder how the poodle-producer, Montreal artist Gisele Amantea, feels about people griping over the seven-foot-tall porcelain pooch’s $97K price tag. How does any public-art-maker, for that matter, not feel at least a little wounded by the slings and arrows launched against their own creative expression? An opinion piece in a newspaper is tomorrow's fish-wrap (it sounds archaic even as I write it) but public art endures. It could torment the critics for decades; the criticism could torment the artist for life.

New York City artist Dennis Oppenheim’s 1997 public artwork, Device to Root Out Evil installed in Coal Harbour was never intended to be permanent but plenty of Vancouverites squawked that the piece known as the 'upside-down church' was “sacrilegious” or worse: view-hampering. But does an artist of that international stature have all the steely resilience to chalk up the chatter to 'community engagement'?

(Above: photo by Papalars)

I wonder because I felt that pang of rejection as I was photo-documenting the installation of Crossover, the scramble-style four-way crosswalk in Steveston in 2011. My design was an attempt to weave together the history of the Japanese net-makers and the modern-day marine flavour of this corner of the Lower Mainland using a simple, enduring motif. I was not prepared for the few individuals who showed up while I was snapping photos, griping at anyone within earshot that this was a colosal waste of taxpayers' dollars, not to mention a safety hazard. (I'm not so resilient that I could resist following up on the hazard part and I'm relieved to learn it's a safety improvement.)

The other day an artist friend who had to return to the salaried workplace said she never realized how much rejection she had to deal with as a full-time working artist. I'm starting to see that this business ain't for sissies.

Out of analysis and into the mystic

2/8/2013

I do so love a shit-disturber, whether it’s fearless Middle-East reporter/author Robert Fisk ripping apart mainstream media last Saturday night downtown or the venerable art critic Jan Verwoert at UBC Wednesday night, talking about “irreconcilable ape-shittedness.”

Robert Fisk

An estimated 1,100 people crowded into St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church to hear Fisk call it as he sees it when it comes to how the West views — and intrudes — on Middle East conflict. Reporting what authority spokesthingies are saying is really no reporting at all, he says. The task at hand is to be witness to the atrocities, whether that’s a busload of Israeli children blown up by a suicide bomber, or Palestinians’ entire communities decimated by Israeli missiles.
Fisk gets plenty of heat for bearing witness, for allowing readers to be witness to the unfathomable, without including the other side of the story, without complying with the required format of including official reaction.

Jan Verwoert

Then on Wednesday night at UBC, at another packed lecture hall, the Berlin art critic/writer Verwoert also argued against prevailing constructs but in the case of visual art it’s the great, grinding academic/analytical machine that surrounds art production.

The rational, scientific view has partially failed us, Verwoert told the audience. The real power is not in representation but in the artist’s success in channeling the essence of the work. The artist is at the existential threshold between spaces, wiring some of those energies together, creating an energy circuit that holds an unquantifiable power.

He gives the example of Gustav Corbet’s The Painter's Studio (1855, above), in which the artist is at work on the threshold between the poor population he relates to, and his privileged patrons who provide his livelihood. The scene raises more questions than answers, with the only conclusion being that the discomfort of those two spaces in one painting creates enduring energy.

“Bearing witness goes beyond making meaning,” he says in his essay, You Make Me Feel Mighty Real. “It’s an avowal of that which may be inexpressible or even impossible to share when what one feels is also felt by the other. Beyond meaning lies feeling. And feeling someone feel what you feel makes all the difference.”

It’s a risky business, thumbing one’s nose at the rational or economic power forces that shape the prevailing structures, or refusing to take a side in a binary view of the world. But assuming the position of witness carries the possibility of new understandings, new discourse, whether the witnessing is expressed in the written word or visually.

This power of the irresolvable, the inconclusive non-statement can be seen in this work (left) by graffiti legend Banksy: Why does the graffiti punk appear to be looking for instruction from a banal global giant? Is Bansky with the anarchist or against him? The power in this work comes from the position of the artist, at the counter between spaces that each contain their own energy, acting as a transference agent, neither healer nor romantic transgressor.

That same irresolvable power is there in this image of a contemporary silkscreen artwork from an unknown Havana artist (right), Cuba PostCastro, circa 2008. The energy lies in the fact that it’s unclear whether the work is an assurance or a warning. The power is in both the formal elements — the geometry, colour and media that composes the image — as well as the history of political art posters, and the artist as witness, at the counter between political and art spaces. It is a powerful art object with no conclusion, no punchline.

At the very least, the irresolvable is awkward. At most, mystical or even magical.

Fisk and Verwoert would probably agree that if everyone’s slightly uncomfortable in the unknowing, you’re probably onto something.