carlyn yandle
  • about
  • the creative process
  • crafted objects
  • public art
  • painting
  • exhibitions
  • contact

Who says sculpture has no business in business?

3/27/2015

Comments

 
Picture"Unfixtures": Found lamp bases, utensils, gesso.
I liked the idea of messing with the overlooked and the banal to open up possible new understandings about preconceived notions.


There was something delicious about a collection of attractive objects -- flat white familiar forms at a personal/counter-top scale -- that is also just a little disturbing for its wrongness. Those little electrical cords suggest hazard. They seem to say, Whatever you do, don't plug us in, so in a sense they have some visual power.

I was thinking about Martha Rosler's groundbreaking feminist video, "Semiotics of the Kitchen" (1975 - edited version below) when I came up with my "Unfixtures" sculpture series.
Ah, the power of uncertain objects. What was an experiment in found-object sculpture is an eye-catching visual for a company in the business of creative work.


PictureEggbeater Creative's new brochure (Clay Yandle photo)
"I love the plug part," my brother Clay said in a text the other day, after sending me pics of his company's latest brochures and business cards. "It makes it real... like you could fire it up and it would start doing whatever the hell it would do."

Unfixtures are a permanent fixture (when they're not showing in a gallery) at my brother's office. One of the pieces in particular seemed to be speaking to him as he was trying to come up with a name for a new web-design/branding partnership a while back.

"It was the perfect storm of me trying so hard to come up with a name and just staring at the sculpture led me to understand how this business was the mix of two companies," he wrote. eggbeater creative was born.

"It was whimsical and interesting, and then there was the obvious part of the eggbeaters working as light bulb (idea) metaphors. The sculpture had traditionally conflicted parts, but they were together in a way that worked." 

The company logo (seen at the bottom left of the brochure in this image) riffs on the sculpture and the lower-case 'e'.

Below: A time-lapsed view of a painting commissioned for Eggbeater Creative:

Comments

Art student's off-grid heater would make quite the gift

12/19/2014

Comments

 
Dear Santa,

I know I haven't written since I was a kid, and when it comes to wants, I'm pretty much good. Unlike a lot of my neighbours who rent homes that are slated for demolition in the coming year or who have to hit the food bank at the end of every month when the money runs out, I'm safe and secure — for now.

You see, I'm a bit of a prepper. I worry about the security of all our food and the hikes in cost of living in the era of climate change so I've been doing workarounds for a lot of that. I have a kitchen garden and my main way of getting around is by bike. My work- and social life surrounds making, mostly with materials that have already served their primary purpose. If the power grid or the banks fail, I can at least charge up my bike lights and headlamps with my Biolite camp stove, using bits of cardboard and twigs so I can get out there and be of some use. My one weak spot, though, is heat. Condos with wood-burning fireplaces being a rarity in these parts, I would have no choice but to go outdoors and hang by the bonfires in the streets. 
Picture
But now I see there is the Egloo, a table-top terracotta dome-thing that can throw off 70C degrees of radiant heat using just a few votive candles. Pant! Pant!

It's the brainchild of Marco Zagaria, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Trouble is, it's not quite available yet. Zagaria has been hand-making the prototypes on a potter's wheel (promo video below) and is currently crowd-sourcing funding — already surpassing his goal by 15 per cent at the time of this writing — to have them mass-produced. So here's where you come in, Santa. I don't know if I can wait, what with us all teetering on this edge of the Ring of Fire and seismologists referring to the imminent major earthquake as The Big One. I figure if you can squeeze your girth into a gas fireplace exhaust vent you can put an Egloo under my tree pronto. 

However, as is my nature, I am prepped for the disaster of that not happening as well, so I've sourced some of Zagaria's own research and have latched onto a snippet of his virtual collaboration that he tagged as one of his YouTube 'favorites', a simple arrangement of one clay plot bolted inside another, resting on some thin cinderblocks. (See YouTube clip, at bottom.) It ain't pretty, but it will do the job in a pinch and uses stuff in my immediate vicinity.

Just goes to show, it takes a creative like that Italian art student to arrive at that balance between form and function that marks brilliant industrial design, which begets attraction which begets demand which begets profit motive which begets financial backing which begets wide-scale production which begets marketing to preppers like me. 

What am I saying? — you're Santa. Surely you know all about the value of artists in economics and sustainability innovations. 

Wishfully,
Carlyn


Comments

Is Instagram a godsend for artists, a social drug, or worse?

11/14/2014

Comments

 
I've been giving Instagram a lot of thought. And I've concluded that I'm exhausted.
Picture(Photo by Carlyn Yandle)
I realize that Instagam can turn a small-town lady with a crafty idea into an international business success story, but that's quickly eclipsed by thoughts of more insidious, multinational business antics: top-level consumer marketers who court those Grammars' "Insta-fluence": Nike, Holiday Inn, Burberry. (More at this New York Times article.)

I think about how encouraging it is to have people following you in your creative endeavours, but then I think about the shared similarities among the top social-media savvy "micro-celebrities", our exploding narcissistic culture and the easy-pickins' exploitation for big-brand profit and almost-free fame.

I realize that Instagram can open a door for artists to the big wide sharing world and that by refusing to open that door runs the risk of a lifetime of professional obscurity. Indeed, "Instagram is custom made for the art world," says New York Observer opinion-writer/billionaire financier/art collector Adam Lindemann. But he then adds: "You get a quick flash of an image with virtually no text or explanation. There’s no need to read. It’s perfect for people with zero attention span, zero education and zero interest in learning about anything—perfect, in other words, for the art collectors of today. You could go so far as to say that the successful art of this current generation must be Instagramable to succeed, and if it doesn’t look good on Instagram, it ain’t working in this instant-gratification art world: goldfish have longer attention spans than ‘grammers."

Picture(Photo by Ariel Zambelich/WIRED)
I  realize that it's free and with the help of such apps as Latergram, it's possible to keep the phone-pecking at a daily minimum, but I can't help thinking about these guys: the Instagram and Facebook engineers who recently moved all Instagram photos to Facebook's data centre, without any users the wiser, as reported by Wired. 

I realize that this is a wee worried whisper in the hell-yeah storm of 200 million mostly female, mostly under-35 Instagrammers.  And I realize that I may be overthinking the whole thing. I could be expanding my visual horizons, connecting with artists around the world, but instead I'm fixated on what becomes of the millions of bits of personal information being sucked into that data centre in Forest City, North Carolina (as suggested in the Wired article) every day, and how that data has been used and how it will be, soon enough.

PictureA slideshow still from How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet (wired.com)
Last year the FBI and the National Security Agency were handed over the ability to suck up people's photos, videos, emails and documents, after the largest businesses online allowed the agencies access to their servers. According to a ground-shaking Washington Post article last year, "The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden."

I think about Instagram and I think about what's monitored, what's censored (no pubes!), what's the next app to eclipse Instagram's success (Snapchat or Bolt?).  I think about how all these social media apps contribute to the time-sucking attention to that little gadget that is now as much a part of the restaurant table as the cutlery and that has turned a busload of riders into something resembling group prayer. I think about how Rogers is a dealer, getting rich on its users' increasing dependency on data, more data.

Am I overthinking Instagram and the rest of the global social re-wiring? Yes, but I might not be thinking about it enough either.

Comments

Fleeting acts of self-expression hold special power

8/1/2014

Comments

 
PictureZen Garden, Buddhist Temple, Japan
The first time I saw a "dry landscape" Zen garden in one of the hundreds of temples in Kyoto, my brain sort of short-circuited.

This was the mid-'80s, and here was a Zen Buddhist priest meticulously raking the gravel against a lurid neon backdrop of sudden affluence and an alarming amount of consumer waste, often un-used and in its original packaging.

Now, of course, we get it. We have been seduced by the easy acquisition of stuff, then oppressed by all our stuff as the economy contracted (and nearly collapsed in the U.S.) We realized the two-car-garage life was not for us and now we spend a lot of time and angst trying to figure out how to part with our stuff.  We have been hoodwinked by marketers who prey on and play up our inadequacies, even inventing a highly lucrative shopping 'holiday', Cyber-Monday.

PictureLeah Biggs photo
There's an entire genre of art that reflects our dis-ease with all the stuff (see 10 visuals here) and painters have had to re-think their practice (of eking out a living) now that 'original' oil paintings sell at Winner's for $39.99, straight from Dafen Village, China.

What is emerging is a conversation about what really matters, which inevitably concludes with 'experiences.' It would be nice to think this shared revelation is rooted in our own free will, but really, the marketers have shot themselves in the collective foot. A rampant, speculative real estate

PictureBeck's fleeting design at a French ski resort uses snowshoes and clotheslines.
market has forced mortgage-choked folks into smaller quarters where there is just no room for more stuff. Car-ownership is being increasingly seen as a hangover from another marketing era and self-expression is no longer synonymous with the home-decor category.  Expression is becoming a participatory practice, enhanced by that one burgeoning consumption category — the ubiquitous personal screen and all its accompanying non-object data packages, games and apps. Mobility-marketing promotes an era of impermanence. Photos are as fleeting as the gravel-raking or the daily rice-flower Kolam drawings of South Indian women (see video, at bottom) or the snowshoe-patterns created by Englishman Simon Beck (left).

PictureCarlyn Yandle photo
Retail therapy is slowly being replaced by escape therapy. We balance rocks and create Calder-esque mobiles of driftwood. We take pictures, we post them on our blogs. We have amassed nothing but memories of that mindful, meditative moment of exploring the surface and mass of natural objects. We share them and are inspired by others' sharing.

Priceless.







Comments

Art walk a reason to browse South Granville again

6/20/2014

Comments

 
PictureThe neighbourhood as it was when I lived there.
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with South Granville, the shopping strip between 6th and 16th Avenues.

This was the neighbourhood of my first apartment, a $350-per-month studio in the old Greenwood Lodge, in the '80s. It was also the first-apartment area of family members reaching back to the 1950s. This is where my boyfriend brought home deli from Szasz's, cornish pasties from the butcher and cinnamon buns from the bakery next to that.

My last job as newspaper editor was in the former Pitman secretarial school, in the historic Dick Building at Broadway and Granville. I moved into my office when the only trace of the old Aristocratic restaurant on the opposite corner was the refurbished neon sign in the newly built Chapters.

For the next five years I had a front row seat for the neighbourhood transition from the clutter of green grocers and diners to high-end designer clothing and objet shops. During my last months at the newspaper, the strip started to reek of exclusivity and it became quite the challenge to find a place to buy a banana or a pair of socks.  Today it is identified as a food desert and the outgoing point of exodus for several art galleries, due to high rents and lack of space.

Despite the bad rap, there are some good upscale galleries that make South Granville a reason to browse, especially this Saturday (June 21, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.) during the 3rd annual Art Walk (map). The 18 galleries and antique dealers that form what the retailer-community association has dubbed Gallery Row is putting out the coffee and cookies, hosting artist talks and demos and generally readying themselves for a spike in walk-in traffic. It's a smart move that is no doubt in reaction to the loss of key galleries Winsor, Monte Clark, and Equinox to 'The Flats.'

If you've ever wanted to see inside those slightly intimidating spaces, this is the day.






Comments

procraftination spikes when math hits

1/24/2014

Comments

 
I was told there would be no math.

Turns out there’s nothing but math in making things, and all kinds of math in packaging it all up for clients and justifying it all to Revenue Canada.

I love to build stuff but I am not wired to readily tackle building an Excel spreadsheet, or at least I tend to steer clear of that sort of construction for fear of stirring the ugly, frustrated beast within. So instead of getting myself educated — knowledge is power yada yada — I go into serious procraftination mode. Need a project budget by Monday? Who wants a pair of knitted slippers!

Excel what now? 
The only thing I excel in when faced with spreadsheets and cost projections is making busy-busy with the hands, anxiety being the main fuel source for my handwork. I might even chart my productivity during tax time, if I could only drag my eyes away from my latest DIY obsession.

‘But it’s so simple. You don’t even have to do math.’ 
Can’t talk; making household cleaner out of orange peels.
‘There are lots of marketing courses for artists.’
Orrrr… a jewelry-making course, to make tiny silver sculptures! Sign me up.

I am aware that there are marketing resources and income tax tips just for visual artists but my feeble research into online tutorials and tips is quickly sidetracked:
Picture'Gridus' served up by a Moscow-based design studio. (artlebedev.com)
In my defence, it’s better not to try to grapple with the month-end reconciliation reports and annual income projections, because even I don’t have to do the math to know that the numbers are bad. What other kind of a business model has galleries demanding artists pay a submission fee (typically $35-50) just to send images of their work, then, if accepted, exhibit fees to show the work that the artists pay to ship to and from the gallery, with a commission to the gallery if the work is sold? That's before any travel expenses to actually attend the gallery opening. Any accountant would advise switching occupations.

You don't have to crunch those figures to understand that unless you've got a highly marketable 'product', this is no way to make a living.

The fact is, artists are easy-picking. We will do what we must  for free, even paying to get it out there to be part of the dialogue.  We may not make it as models in business, but at least we're making.


Comments

    RSS Feed

    browse by topic:

    All
    Abstract Painting
    Activism
    Additive
    Aesthetics
    AgentC Gallery
    Alison Woodward
    Aluminum
    Anxiety
    Appropriation
    Architecture
    Arleigh Wood
    Art
    Art Business
    Art Discourse
    Art History
    Artist
    Artist Residency
    Artist Statement
    Artist Talk
    Art Marketing
    Art Quilt
    Art School
    Art Show
    Art Spiegelman
    Assemblage
    Author
    Banksy
    Bauhaus
    Beauty
    Betsy Greer
    Big Data
    Billy Patko
    Blogs
    Blog Tour
    Bob Krieger
    Body Of Work
    Books
    Boro
    Braided Rug
    Braiding
    Bruce MacKinnon
    Bruce Mau
    Building
    Bull Kelp
    Business
    Buttons
    Carlyn Yandle
    Caroline Eriksson
    Cartoon
    Ceca Georgieva
    Challenge
    Children
    Christmas
    Cindy Sherman
    Cirque Du Soleil
    City As Site
    City Planning
    Cityspace Gallery
    Clay Yandle
    Climate Change
    Cluster
    Cob
    Cob Oven
    Collaboration
    Collage
    Colonialism
    Color
    Colour
    Commission
    Community
    Community Building
    Composition
    Conceptual Art
    Conceptual Craft
    Connie Sabo
    Construction
    Coronavirus
    Costume
    Cover
    Cover-19
    Covid
    Craft
    Craft Blogs
    Craftivism
    Crafts
    Craftsmanship
    Creative Process
    Critique
    Crochet
    Cross-stitch
    Cultural Hub
    Cultural Studies
    Culture
    Culture Jamming
    Culturejammingc9d75664fd
    Current Conditions
    Cycling
    Dafen Village
    Dallas-duobaitis
    Dance
    Data-graphic
    Data-graphic
    Dear Human
    Deep Craft
    Denim
    Denyse Thomasos
    Design
    Discomforter
    Display
    Distraction
    Distracts
    DIY
    Doilies
    Doily
    Domestic
    Domestic Interventions
    Douglas-coupland
    Draw Down
    Drawing
    DSquared2
    Dude-chilling-park
    Dyeing
    Eastend
    Eastside Culture Crawl
    ECUAD
    ECUAD MFA
    Editorial
    Edward Burtynsky
    Eggbeater Creative
    Embellishment
    Embroidery
    Emily Blincoe
    Emily Carr Cozy
    Emily Carr University
    Environment
    Environmental Art
    Exhibit
    Exhibition
    Experimentation
    Exploration
    Expression
    Fabric
    Fabricating
    Facebook
    Failure
    Fashion
    Feminist
    Feminist Art
    Festival
    Fiber
    Fiber Artist
    Fiber Arts
    Fibre
    Fibre Arts
    Film
    First Saturday Open Studios
    Flo
    Flow
    Foraging
    Form
    Foundlings
    Found Materials
    Found Objects
    Fractal
    Free Store
    Fuzzy Logic
    Gallery
    Gallery-row
    Garden
    Garment
    Gentrification
    Gill Benzion
    Gingerbread
    Globalization
    Glue
    Grad 2020
    Graffiti
    Granny Square
    Granville-island
    Green Space
    Grid
    Guanajuato
    Guerrilla Art
    Guerrilla Girls
    Halloween
    Handmade
    Handmaking
    Hand Stitching
    Hand-stitching
    Handwork
    Hashtags
    Haywood Bandstand
    Healing
    Health
    Hearth
    Hideki-kuwajima
    Homelessness
    Hot Art Wet City
    Hybrid Thinking
    Ian Reid
    Ian Wallace
    Ideas
    Identity
    Images
    Incomplete Manifesto For Growth
    Industrial Design
    Industry
    Innovation
    Inspiration
    Instagram
    Installation
    Intervention
    Invention
    Irena Werning
    Janet Wang
    Jeans
    Jeff Wilson
    Joel Bakan
    Joseph Beuys
    Joseph-wu
    Journalism
    Joyful Making In Perilous Times
    Judith Scott
    Kim Piper Werker
    Kimsooja
    Knitting
    Knots
    Knotting
    Kyoto
    Labor
    Labour
    Landon Mackenzie
    Landscape
    Leanne Prain
    Lecture
    Lighthouse
    Liz Magor
    Log Cabin
    Logo Sweater
    LOoW
    Lost Painting
    Lumiere Festival
    Lynda Barry
    Macrame
    Maker
    Making
    Malcolm Gladwell
    Male Gaze
    Maquette
    Marie Kondo
    Marketing
    Mark Lewis
    Martha Rosler
    Masks
    Material Exploration
    Mathematics
    Maya
    Media
    Meditative
    Metalworker
    MFA
    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
    Online Talk
    Openings
    Organization
    Origami
    #overthinking
    Paint
    Painting
    Pandemic
    Paper
    Paper Sculpture
    Parkade Quilt
    Patriarchy
    Pattern
    Pechakucha
    Pecha Kucha
    Perception
    Performance
    Performance Art
    Photography
    Playing
    Political Art
    Polly-apfelbaum
    Pompidou
    Poodle
    Port Coquitlam
    Portrait
    Process
    Production
    Profession
    Project
    Protest
    Psychedelic
    Public Art
    Qr Code
    Quilt
    Quilt Block
    Quilting
    Rachael Ashe
    Rachel Lafo
    Ravages
    Raw Materials
    Rebar
    Recycle
    Recycling
    Research
    Residency
    Resurge
    Retreat
    Rhonda Weppler
    Richard-tetrault
    Richmond Art Gallery
    Right Brain
    Rondle-west
    Rug
    Ryan-mcelhinney
    Safe Supply
    Safety
    Sarah-gee-miller
    Sashiko
    Saskatchewan
    Scaffolds
    Scale
    Scraps
    Sculpture
    Seaweed
    Semiotics
    Sewing
    Sharon Kallis
    Shawn Hunt
    Shigeru Ban
    Sketchup
    Slow Craft
    Smocking
    Social Engagement
    Social-engagement
    Social History
    Social Justice
    Social Media
    Soft Sculpture
    South-granville
    Space Craft
    Spore
    Stitching
    Storage
    Street Art
    Studio
    Styrophobe
    Subversive Stitch
    Surrealism
    Surrey
    Tagging
    Talking Art
    Tapestry
    Tattoo
    Technology
    Terry Fox Theatre
    Text
    Textile
    Thrifting
    Thrift Stores
    TJ Watt
    TO DO
    Tools
    Toronto Design Offsite
    Toybits
    Trash
    Trash Art
    Trevor Mahovsky
    Typography
    Tyvek
    Unbridled
    Unfixtures
    Upcycling
    Urban Design
    Use Object
    Use Objects
    Utility
    Value Village
    Vancouver
    Vancouver Art Gallery
    Vancouver International Airport
    Video
    Video Tour
    Visual Field
    Visual-field
    Visual Language
    Wallace Stegner House
    Wall Hanging
    Waterwork
    Weaving
    William Morris
    Wood
    Wool
    Work Wraps
    Wrap I
    Wrap II
    Writing
    Yarn Bombing
    YVR
    Zaha Hadid
    Zendoodle
    Zero Waste Art
    Zero-waste Art

    Archives

    October 2022
    August 2022
    June 2022
    November 2021
    April 2021
    September 2020
    April 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    April 2019
    November 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    November 2017
    September 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
Picture