Category: Performance

Dancing on the edge

11/3/2024

This craftiest time of year is laced with pain

When you’ve recently lost a loved one, certain annual occasions are rough: Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries. For me, it’s Halloween. That’s when my brother was a full-steam-ahead creative force and crafty collaborator.
Right about now I’m missing his super-charged energy. I need the distraction from the dead-heat US election campaign. Whenever I’m in near fetal position watching the news of the latest misogynist spew, I wish he would walk through the front door and shatter that chatter with his usual greeting, Hey. What’s goin’ on?

My brother has been my biggest backer, my major motivator. His material explorations, unlike my mincing attempts, were bold. He took keen notice of my flirtations with trendy crafty products over the years and turned them up to 11, sponge-painting, glue-gunning, Mod-Podging and needle-felting the ridiculous and the outsized. One Halloween, in the days (weeks?) before, he and his two sons papier-maché’d two gigantic skulls that he illuminated and suspended at their front door to create all the charm of Colonel Kurtz’ camp in Apocalypse Now. He did it for the kids — all the kids.

He designed craft beer labels and websites, hand-built playhouses and kitchen cabinetry from scratch and baked up a scale-model gingerbread house of his own house. He decorated birthday cakes with panache and had a penchant for dinner plating. His Instagram account is (still) full of irreverent, self-deprecating and appreciative posts of various craftiness.

Nothing I made was too weird for his liking. Sometimes our unsolicited viewpoints clashed, which I liked because there was good takeaway there. He wasn’t shy about serving up some meaty feedback about my work-in-progress but scoffed at the notion that he was an artist himself. He often ran his well-rendered hand-drawn or Illustrator sketches by me. I would tell him that they were overly complex. He would give me the screw-you look and eventually edit his design.

My brother never saw himself as an artist.

Two years ago, as summer turned to Fall he was couch-bound and riding waves of excruciating pain. I would text him stoopid videos of us synchro-dancing at a house party or bloopers from our teenage nephews’ film projects.

A couple of days before that Halloween my brother was on a fentanyl drip in the palliative care ward when the younger teenage son showed up for his dad’s creative input, in an almost-finished Semi-Pro costume. He spent the evening bedside, drawing the logo with felt pens on the singlet fashioned from an old T-shirt. Meanwhile our niece, 12, had asked for my assistance in transforming her into a strip of bacon. I received the required hand-rendering of her idea and figured it out. She cut and sewed up red and brown strips of felt to a body-height casing of white felt. It was as hasty as her drawing. I took a photo and sent it to my brother.

The day before Halloween he critiqued it. “Needs some ‘distressed’ coloring around the edges,” he texted from his hospital bed. “Maybe some of that bacon scent spray that I always see in dollar stores… what about a sash or banner that says ‘Maple Leaf’ on it?” But basic bacon was all I could muster and when I forwarded him our sister’s Halloween-night reveal photo of three girls in character of butcher, pig and bacon he texted back: “You nailed it!” Liar. But I lived for his praise.

Three days before he left this world on Christmas Day I texted him a video of our crotch-rock front-porch lip-sync from Halloween the year before.

He replied with a heart emoji.

Leader of the pack

Just a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection

6/20/2024

I have my share of obtrusive thoughts but this week it’s an ear-worm: Arcade Fire’s "Reflektor."

It jumped into my head while on a brilliant morning bike ride this week, after passing someone walking while talking into her phone raised in that most flattering angle of a few inches above her face. A few minutes later I passed another camera-ready performer, also sharing sunny enthusiasm into her screen. And before I finished my ride I saw another person in the same mode of performance. Aside from the tricky logistics of walking with a screen in front of one’s face, I wondered if an authentic, personal experience of the physical world is possible if you’re doing it while engaging through the mediated space of a tiny screen.

I thought I found the connector. It’s just a reflektor.

Inside Teamlab's 100,000-square-metre Borderless Digital Art Gallery. Photo by Charley Yandle

My nephew, a fine-arts student, just returned from Japan where he spent many hours at various digital installations presented by the Tokyo-based Teamlab “artist collective.” The images and videos he took while moving through the 100,000-square-metre Borderless Digital Art Gallery show multi-levelled mirrored spaces, light shows and walls of sound.

Just a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection

The several Teamlab immersive experiences in different regions were the highlight of his month-long trip. Is it just for young people?, I texted. All ages, he replied. As these massive permanent installations sprout up in shiny boom cities from Singapore to Abu Dhabi I am seeing a more dystopian view of humanity crowding into these cool sensory retreats from some burning global realities.

I scanned the website for any writing on social or political context beyond “Life is a miraculous phenomenon that emerges from a flow in a continuous world.”

Thought you would bring me to the resurrector. Turns out it was just a reflektor

I’ve learned to trust the confluence of obtrusive thoughts and my experience of the world. It’s a brain-hurt process that I work through by writing and through conversations that might begin with my four favourite words: “I have this idea.”

I have this idea, I said to a different young nephew a couple of months ago. Soon we were doing photo portraiture in the forest, exploring a mirror’s ability to erase the subject.

Above, left and right: Forest portraiture with subject-negating mirror.

I have this idea, an artist friend said to me last month, and soon I was sewing up a garment from the picture in his head. This became Abyss, a wearable artwork featuring two FaceTiming iPads to create the illusion of a torso with a large hole straight through the back. Performing Abyss attracts attention to the self for having nothing of substance at the core.

Will I see you on the other side? We all got things to hide

Above: Testing the invisibility effect of ‘Abyss’ by artist/architect David Weir (@djweir.art)

I guess I’m reflecting on that notion that is as old as Greek mythology: one’s mirrored reflection is a seductive trap, or a distraction on the path to complete social disengagement. And I’m reflecting on the opposite, that mindful reflection and self-reflection is the route to social engagement.

Crawling out of that trap, or taking a different path, may be as simple as reflecting on the sign on the door of my old apartment neighbour, a social worker: “Don’t just say something, stand there.”

Audio version of this post is at carlynyandle.substack.com

Halloween a reminder of fiery end to a neighbourhood hub

10/22/2022

Just a week before Halloween — prime creative costume time — we in these parts are again reminded of the tragic, toxic end to our local Value Village.

The general love-hate relationship came to a fiery finish one summer night four months ago yet I can’t shake thoughts of all the stuff that went up into black, acrid smoke that hung over the East End the next day. Those long aisles thick with petroleum-derived clothing, incinerated. The shelves on top of those aisles crammed with knicknacks, contorting in flames. The baskets would have burst first but would the candles, as accelerants, have melted the glass vases? I would like these images to stop.

The Hastings/Victoria Value Village linked the communities of Hastings Sunrise, The Drive, and the Downtown Eastside. Until it didn't. (Found photos)

I’d like to make peace with the fire, seeing it as the ultimate cleanse, a final decluttering. But there’s a bigger hole beyond the charred rubble that remains today; after 40 years we’ve lost a social hub that attracted a colourful congregation of non-conforming fashionistas, DIYers, vintage-hunters and regular folk of all ages and on limited budgets from all over Hastings Sunrise, the Downtown Eastside and The Drive.

Yes, the prices were crazy by the end — you could get the same wine glass for a buck cheaper at the newish dollar stores a few blocks away — and the recent switch-over to self-checkouts led to some comical performance-art moments. But the diverse, unpredictable clientele was generally served well by employees and security guards with the steely nerves of air-traffic controllers.

And yes, this was no mom-and-pop shop but one of more than 300 locations here in Canada, the U.S. and Australia. Savers, Inc. is an international, privately-held company far removed from its original San Francisco thrift shop that opened in an old Mission District theatre in 1954.

To fully appreciate our local loss you would have to go back to 1980 when this Value Village opened, the first one in Canada (near as I can figure; someone please correct me on this). Before that, the only cheap one-stop clothing/housewares store in the vicinity was Zellers, further east up the hill, which used to be Fedco. (Insert Napoleon Dynamite sigh here.) All that changed when the department-sized thrift store opened us up to a whole world of self-expression. We could actually afford to take fashion risks, and they could include long wool coats from the '40s or '50s, '60s glam boots or ’70s caftans — the opposite of the flimsy fast-fashion mall stock that fed the summertime fire. (“I took pride in being alternative,” my youngest sister says. “I was teased by some random teens though.”) It was also an escape of the day, the kids, the worries, where one can mindlessly flip through those racks of clothes like beads on a rosary, with no chance of encountering pushy sales staff.

So I guess this is an overdue obituary, the kind that would be written about someone who was quite the opportunist and just a little creepy but who also opened up the door for us to question the status quo, think creatively, fly our freak flags and mingle with the all-sorts people in the neighbourhood.

Above: The East Hastings Value Village was one of the few hassle-free spots left where a diverse community of regulars could find basics, fun stuff and common ground. (Found photo)

My needling starts with a need to build community

11/10/2018

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The other day I did this because it really needed to happen. All that gleaming new-campus architecture, surrounded by other gleaming buildings and gleaming buildings yet-to-come was begging for a little fuzzying up.

I did my undergrad at the old Emily Carr University of Art and Design campus which was decidedly less smooth and metallic and more crafty, situated as it was in the Granville Island artisan mecca on the ocean's edge. I liked running my hand along the old wooden posts carved with decades of scrawled text, and all the wiring and ductwork that in the last few years looked like a set out of Brazil. I miss the giant murals on the cement factory silos next door and the funky houseboats and the food stalls in the public market and Opus Art Supplies 30 feet away from the front entrance.

The new serene, clean Emily Carr building is surrounded by new and planned condos that most students could never afford, high-tech companies and, soon, an elevated rapid transit rail line. As much as I wanted to return for graduate studies, I was not convinced that I would be a good fit here, so asking for permission and access to the sign was a bit of a trial balloon for me. I got quick and full support for the idea and its installation, and now see this new white space as a blank canvas, ready for the next era of student artistic expression.

This is my first solo yarn-bombing foray. A bunch of us attacked the old school back in the day for a textile-themed student show but I have yet to meet my people here. So the Emily Carr Cozy is not just a balloon, it's a flare. Is there anybody out there?

As I busied my freezing fingers with the stringy stuff (in hard hat, on the Skyjack operated by design tech services maestro Brian) I kept an ear out for reaction. And it was good. Sharing the fuzzy intervention on social media (#craftivism, #subversivestitch etc.) reminds me that I am not alone in my need for needling authority. Indeed, this public performance includes behind-the-scenes connecting with my community of makers to collect their leftover yarn and thrift-store finds even before the main act. (You know who you are.)

Textile interventions in the public sphere have a way of provoking polarizing responses. Some love the often-chaotic hand-wrapping of colourful fiber; others view the crafty messing with architecture with disdain of all things cozy and crafty and engendered female. I liked the idea of having to wear a hard hat and working for four hours in a Skyjack, in the mode of construction workers in the immediate vicinity of my rapidly changing hometown, to complete my knitting job.

The reverse side of the Emily Carr Cozy, seen only from the interior of the school, is like the work behind the scenes in my making: chaotic, improvisational and maybe more interesting than the public side. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

A visual of the process, below. (All photos by Caitlin Eakins)

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Defending the doily in 20 images, 20 seconds each

1/23/2015

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This just uploaded... Six and a half minutes devoted to that question I get a lot:
"What's up with the doilies?"

(Video courtesy of Terry Fox Theatre's PechaKucha program. More info on the entertaining, informative and globally-popular PechaKucha format here.)

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Nothing new on halloween, and that's a good thing

10/31/2014

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What do you do when one of your closest friends is in the hospital with complications and the weather outside is the perfect visual for seasonal depression? You make!

And so I devote this column to the silly business of making and make-believe in trying times.

First, let me say that Halloween is my kind of holiday. It is an intoxicating cocktail of glue guns and spontaneity, material-hacking and thrift-store-hopping, laced with peanut-butter cups and just a smidge of anti-consumerism.

It all sounds a bit contradictory but after a lifetime of costume-making I've pretty much found the place I need to find a little meaning in this sugar-cranked occasion.

It starts in late September, that one time of year when the little people in my life are willing to share their full-throttle imaginations (before their emerging Inner Critic begins to outshout them).

Then I strike out for my usual haunts (thrift shops, ReStore) with an opportunistic eye. My rules for costume-making have been distilled down to one: 'nothing new.' Except for tools and fasteners (glue, thread, pins etc.) all the fabrics and bits must have already finished their first use. There is more than enough stuff already in existence without creating a new market; it's just a matter of moving goods from their past use (clothing, construction scraps, bolt-ends) to my costume purposes.

Finally, there is the fabrication stage, which may or may not involve the tykes in question, depending on age. I encourage them to at least draw something about the costume they envision, or be 'in the manner of' to help me conceive it. I will make a portion of the costume early on for them to play with (business types would call this a progress meeting) and revise as I/we go.

For the price of some semi-toxic treat from their loot bag, I will ensure the costume will be durable and comfy enough for dancing and leaping around during their sugary highs.

To wit, we have three-year-old Mimi's costume this year. She showed me that she needed to be a lock-kneed, arms-extended robot so I scoured the second-hand aisles in search for a way to create the all-important illusion of stiffness. A small bundle of metalic-polyfiber pipe insulation found at the VGH Thrift Store on Broadway and Main fit the bill, coupled with a metallic girls' sweater and silver shoes from the nearby SallyAnn. I found the other bits around the apartment: a couple of unlistenable CDs, metal washers, jar lids, orange wire nuts and silver buttons she selected from my button jars. (Not shown: the extendable treat can made from accordion air duct tubing.)

Dem bones get another daylighting, on another nephew. (Yandle family photos)

I invest some effort in my costumes so that they are durable enough to be passed on to some other kid and have even spotted my handiwork worn, often in new ways, by neighbourhood kids I've never met.

Not a Halloween goes by when someone (always a woman) will say to me, "You have too much free time." It's one of those jokey putdowns but now that I've embraced making full time, I see that throwaway comment for what it is. Mister Rogers sang it to me when I was a kid and I sing it when I'm making with kids: I like to take my time.

My costumes have nothing to do with perfection or approval but are a maker's way of engaging with kids to play in a whole new way before they are fully seduced by the marketing complex.

Like the Mister says, you can think about things and make-believe; all you have to do is think and they'll grow.

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Granville Island needs an injection of innovation

3/7/2014

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Photo of ECUAD's South Building by Stephen Hui/Georgia Straight

When finally — yet suddenly — I graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, I was done, done, done, exhausted after four intense years of input. Now I needed space for four more years of output, to practice and to develop a practice.

But finding a suitable work space in this pricey city is no easy task. Self-(un)employed artists are no match for the slick technology firms and ad agencies that will pay top dollar to set up their cool premises in the port-town-era brick buildings. So we make do, sharing whatever space we can get while keeping an ear open for rumours of where we might be able to jump when the Permit Application billboard springs up in front of our crumbling building.

Intriguing shows at the Charles H. Scott Gallery include the current Hyperflat.

Another art school in another city might play a part in providing studio rental opportunities for its new grads, encouraging a healthy cross-pollination of creative post-school work in industrial design, animation, sculpture, painting, media arts and curatorial services. But Emily Carr University is bursting at the seams and is focused on its campaign to move east to Great Northern Way. It's a grand vision, but what will become of the Granville Island community when the two-building campus vacates? What of the dependable Opus Art Supplies, which depends heavily on the student customer base next door, as well as the other material suppliers on the Island? And the George H. Scott Gallery?

Vancouver Sun reporter Daphne Bramham took on the topic this week. In her story, one of the original designers of Granville Island, architect Norm Hotson, said replacing the school with another educational institution would help modernize the zone. Or it could be re-energized as "an incubator space” for "innovators", he said, or developed into a cultural hub that might include galleries, artist studios, residencies. And he pointed to Paris’s Cité Internationale des Arts as an example.

Toronto's Distillery District was revamped into a cultural hub. (Photo from Artscape website)

It's this kind of forward thinking that could stop the downtown core and Westside from slipping into a blandly privileged area with all the cultural texture of glassy high-end condos.

Granville Island needs a vibrant injection of new ideas and opportunities and Vancouver desperately needs a cultural hub, a multifunctional space with rental studios and residencies for everyone from painters to industrial designers, techies to musicians, performers to writers.

Yes, it's a balancing act. Nobody wants the Island to shut as tight as a tomb at night but the neighbours won't take kindly to the place being mobbed by booze-fueled night-crawlers. Artists and students work all hours, often after a day of slinging Italian coffees or serving Public Market customers. As students we purchase our supplies on the island, we depend on the visitors for our shows and showings. Our work ensures Granville Island is a tourist draw, not a tourist trap, that it is committed to Artisan over Ye Olde, authenticity over Disney.

It may sound like a pipe dream, but Granville Island was part of the inspiration that led the not-for-profit Artscape in Toronto to turn a collection of industrial buildings into a major cultural hub and tourist draw, in a remarkably short time. (See YouTube interview with Tim Jones, president and CEO of CityScape below.)

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when dress-up becomes an artform

10/18/2013

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Thank god for The Walking Dead. It is the one force that has the power to kill off the overpopulation of pink princesses.

All that Pepto-Bismol-hued froth and glitter kicks in my gag reflex but I'm no censor; I've indulged in the princess fantasy of those little girls (and, shockingly, some grown women) for too many years to mention. But there is hope. Pink fatigue appears to have set in this year, at least for Halloween, due, no doubt, to the craze for the undead.

Next battle: the pink aisle.

Princesses and stupid Sexy costumes (popular YouTube clip at the end of this rant) are a waste of a great fantasy opportunity — and an art opportunity.

American photographer Cindy Sherman's long and rich career dedicated to using her body as a blank canvas on which to apply various female personas, makes her an artist of an ever-changing body-sculpture, earning her an important position in conceptual art, performance art, and gender studies.

There's a lot of concept to be mined when altering one's appearance, whether for art or undercover information. Former New York Times restaurant reviewer Ruth Reichl, who donned disguises to ensure she would be treated as a regular restaurant patron, discovered that her different range of personas garnered different reaction from the wait staff. That body effect became equally as interesting as her reviews, and even more so to many of her readers.

Buenos Aires photographer Irena Werning explores the persona of the past, recreating photos of subjects using their own childhood images. She not only recreates the pose and garments, but goes to great lengths to mimic the backdrops and particular photo quality of the original image. Werning insists she has no arching concept in mind in her two-part series, but the effect is there in black and white or colour: a riveting time-based visual study in changes in body and persona.

Above: Christoph 1990 and 2011, Berlin Wall.

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Power of art is as plain as Putin's drag face

10/4/2013

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Whenever I'm hit with another CBC countdown promo of its exclusive Canadian coverage of the Winter Olympics in Sochi that viral image of Putin in drag makeup pops into my head.

That one cheeky act packs a political wallop and reminds me that while the pen is mightier than the sword, there's the same power in the paintbrush. And Photoshop.

That image (which I'm still searching for in the form of a legal-fundraising T-shirt) has me dreaming of an Olympics that has athletes wearing rainbow scarves on the podium. More likely it will be the very real nightmare of the military dragging away brave individuals in the stands and the streets who are demanding justice in the face of a homophobic president and its national political policy of hate.

A taste of things to come was most recently seen when Russian artist Konstantin Altunin fled to Paris to seek asylum after his painting of Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in lingerie was seized along with three other paintings in his August show. The crime is unclear. It may be promoting homosexuality to minors. Or hooliganism, which sounds funny but landed the members of Pussy Riot with two years' hard time for performing a "punk prayer" in Moscow's main Orthodox cathedral last year after Putin was reinstated as president.

So 'performance', even if it's a sloppy dance in homemade hoods, is mightier than the sword. The heavy hand of Putin's policies may be winning the battle — Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova ended her nine-day hunger strike last week to protest working conditions in the women's prison, to no avail, apparently — but the war for social justice is just beginning.

It's unclear whether these unlikely political terrorists (the three convicted seen here pose with their verdict) see it that way.

Taking on the U.S. President or his policies through art has none of that threat of individual freedom of expression. True, there may be a sort of White House Down going on there at the moment, in the form of a government shutdown over a glacial move toward universal health care, but you don't go to jail for performing or painting or Photoshopping your president in a political artwork.

You can march on Washington, carrying your homemade sign depicting your president's head on a Pez dispenser spouting one Lie after another, or you can even tattoo his face on the sole of your foot so you can stomp on his image with every step (below) but you can't mess with individuals. And in these parts that includes private companies, as we learned in viewing The Corporation (written by Vancouver's own Joel Bakan, UBC law professor).

You want a taste of the kind of trouble you can bring upon yourself via the paintbrush or Photoshop or performance, take on some of those individual-companies. You might not land in the gulag but you may find yourself paying through the pocketbook in legal defence fees for violating their 'individual' rights.

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Getting ready to scream 'Woo!' with the rest of you

9/13/2013

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You can thank Europeans’ dwindling Christian faith for a sensory bombardment that's taking over Europe. The poor attendance at all the churches and cathedrals has been a boon to a new totally immersive art-architecture experience of sound and image, artist-architect Francois Wunschel said in a lecture at Emily Carr University Wednesday night, while fellow Frenchman musician Fernando Favier manipulated the audio.

From left: Pierre Schneider, in front of a scaffolding support; Fernando Favier and Francois Wunschel.

All these old, underused stone edifices became opportunities to develop new forms of public engagement, said Wunschel. Pierre Schneider, his colleague at the Paris-based 1024 Architecture firm, shared with the audience some video examples: building facades visually distort and morph into faces; public squares transform into pulsating spaces of light and sound, all controlled by simple devices like a public microphone or a joystick.

Using MadMapping — AutoCad-like building-design software that overlays the spaces on actual architecture — Wunschel and Schneider are innovators in the growing artform that turns hard surfaces into an embodied experience that has become a signature European urban festival experience.

Tonight Vancouverites will get a (free) taste of all that at 10 p.m., behind Emily Carr’s digital media building on Great Northern Way, when the Paris team joins forces with some local artists as they premiere Live/Work, a 10-metre cube of scaffolding that promises to be a “manifestation of interdisciplinarity, collaboration and an exploration of the contemporary landscape in relation to changing cultural and economic conditions.” Gotta love that artspeak. (Translation: A bombardment of lights and sound that will have the locals yelling, “Woooooo!”)

Hypercube is all part of the New Forms Festival 13.

Below: Two videos of distinctive, immersive physical experience of sound, light: A voice-activated setup allows the public to animate a building in Lyons, France. At bottom: Transporting a dance club crowd through light and sound.

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<<Previous

Dancing on the edge

Just a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection

Halloween a reminder of fiery end to a neighbourhood hub

My needling starts with a need to build community

Defending the doily in 20 images, 20 seconds each

Nothing new on halloween, and that's a good thing

Granville Island needs an injection of innovation

when dress-up becomes an artform

Power of art is as plain as Putin's drag face

Getting ready to scream 'Woo!' with the rest of you

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