The concourse was a crush on opening night at Emily Carr University’s Spring grad show. Seventies’ disco music fuelled giddy graduates clutching bouquets, hugging, posing for parents’ photos in front of their exhibits of graphite-drawn urban dystopias, bent wood-lam furniture and natural-dyed crocheted robes.
“What’s the point?” he said. “We’re shutting down, like, tomorrow.” The point, as every visual artist knows, is the photo-documentation for that fleeting moment of exhibition, especially fleeting in the hours before the pandemic lockdown. I pushed back on his push-back, he sighed dramatically and dragged the big ladder to the centre of the Sculpture Gallery.
I learned this need to be fierce and focused when it comes to displaying work from a moment of horror during my undergrad grad show a decade earlier.
I must have had a hunch that my installation might not go down as envisioned because I convinced my instructors to allocate me two final exhibit spaces since I had one foot in the painting department and the other in sculpture. The painting installation was easy: bang in two hooks, hang on wall. The sculpture piece was a little trickier.
My dream was that those gallery-goers here for the sculpture, certainly a few internationally renowned curators and well-heeled collectors among them, would wander into my designated space in the third-floor room at the end of the long hall and stop in their tracks. What is this curious, lacy, bone-y floor installation?
Ah, I would say in a soft voice that I would still need to cultivate. I see you’ve noticed “Ravages.” A conversation would ensue. I would talk about my fascination with middens of bone and shell that hold clues to past and enduring Indigenous civilizations and cultures. I would speak to my own position as a settler descendant on this unceded coastal land, my anthropological curiosity awakened in high school that led to university studies in anthro/sociology. I would direct their eye to the use of found colonialist objects hand-crocheted in the round that evoke the fractal pattern of shoreline sandstone worn by time and event. I would link the distressed, chalky concretization of those abject objects to my immediate ever-changing environment of urban decay and hasty condo-tower construction, and my identity as a Mature Student trying not to feel like a decrepit bag of bones ha ha. You people get me!
Articulating the ideas in the making is an essential part of conceptual art studies and I spent weeks — months — thinking about how to talk about what I was making while scouring thrift stores for hand-made doilies and manipulating them in the sculpture lab to ossify with plasters then concrete thin-set. When that failed, I camped out in the mold-making shop mucking around with fibreglass and turning out copies of doilies in hardening acrylic too shiny so I coated them with gesso. Despite working under respirator my lungs complained and my skin erupted so when deadline hit for grad show submissions I went with what I had plus that large painting, a story for another time.
In the hours before opening night I assembled “Ravages,” propping some of the limp, cracking doilies onto each other house-of-cards style. The assembly was precarious but there was no breeze and I had a “Do not touch” sign beside the work so I went home to get fancified.
The main floor galleries were packed by 6pm, with people backing into dangling ceiling suspensions and failing to not step on floor installations. While my friends and family were preoccupied I slipped up to the empty third-floor room at the end of the hall. “Ravages” had collapsed into a pool of flat doilies like scraps from a factory floor. If it were not for the other students’ art I would have turned off the light and locked the door. Nothing to see here. I re-directed my people to the painting.
There is no photo-documentation of “Ravages;” some pictures are just too sad to take but here I am writing about it because there is a point in all this.
Art school, I want to tell all those kids holding bouquets and posing with friends beside their work last week, is not the culmination of your art-making ability but just your art right now. Unless you have a marketable skill like illustration, animation or industrial design, chances are you are going to have to do something else besides making art to earn a living and that’s okay; a fine arts degree is not a meal ticket.
All three artworks have since been seen by more than mice in other exhibitions, with the latest being Classics Reimagined, a US-based online show of 30 mostly American artists. During another unexpected life moment, it’s the only way this outspoken Canadian gets to mingle with our besieged maker friends.