creative process - carlyn yandle

A beautiful craftivism in a flowery part of the world

11/8/2017

MORE THAN DECORATION: Flower images carry deep cultural significance for the Maya. Left: A figure dating from 600-900bc nestled in a lily. Centre: Needlepoint detail from a huipil (top), part of a traditional everyday dress. Right: Jesus emerging from a lily in an oil painting of the Immaculate Conception. Carlyn Yandle photos

I've made it my mission to shake things up by injecting the handmade domestic — doilies, quilts, sweaters and rugs — into austere, authoritative spaces and places, from pristine galleries to sketchy undersides of my city, pushing back on everyday misogynistic descriptors like 'girly' or 'old-lady' or the slightly derogatory 'frou-frou' and 'flowery.'

Then I landed in Merida, Mexico, last week where there is no fight against things flowery and archetypical feminine. Here in the capital of the Yucatan state and the ancient Maya culture (not dead but flourishing against all odds, by the way, like Canada's indigenous people) the streets are a flowery visual field of richly needleworked garments and handmade decorative traditions woven throughout the city, from tiled floors to architectural details and murals.

Above and far right: Carpet-like ceramic tile floor artworks are more than decorative. At left, a four-petal flower signifies universal realms; Centre: Merida's impressive El Gran Museo Del Mundo Maya pays tribute to the importance of the handmade floral motif in one of its exhibit salons. Carlyn Yandle photos

Flowers are so sacred and symbolic in the highly complex Maya culture that the Franciscan missionaries, in service of the Catholic Church, appropriated specific flower designs in their battle for their souls, in a cultural war of the roses (and lilies and other healing, spiritually-weighty blooms).

Left: This rare depiction in oil of Fray Francisco de Santa Ana appeals to the Mayan sense of the sacred. At right, typical religious imagry is embellished with rich floral motifs in a visual appropriation of Mayan culture. Carlyn Yandle photos

Coming from the land of yoga pants, I'm fascinated by this idea that an acceptable form of everyday dress is one's own hand-stitched art piece in the form of brightly-coloured cultural patterns of flowers on white cotton or linen tops and tunics, over an underskirt edged in a thick band of white lace.

No made-in-China. No apologies, no fading away.

Gritty beauty seen in foundations of this pretty city

2/28/2017

It feels like the Internet has killed the fun of taking snapshots of beautiful cities and people. So many times over the last four months in Mexico I've raised my camera (phone) to capture an impressive bronze sculpture or some baroque church facade then thought: This is pointless. A Google-image search with a few key words (Guanajuato, musicians, Don Quixote, Pipila) would produce hundreds of better-quality stock photos. We're saturated in instagrammable images. I miss those old pocket travel photo albums.

This might explain all the selfie sticks threatening to take your eye out in the crowded plazas on any given night here; putting yourself in the picture with all the famous stuff behind will guarantee a unique photo.

So I have very little in terms of a photographic record for my time here. Every view of the strolling musicians in the plazas, or the teenage girls decked in ballgowns for their quinceanera (debut) parties, the food vendors, the street singers dressed in Renaissance-style hose and puffed velvet jackets are already done. So done.

Then last week I finally started to see that the one signature-Guanajuato element that I've been captivated by is actually a worthy photo subject: the retaining walls that barely seem to be holding back the jumble of colourful, cubic houses clinging to the surrounding hills.

There's a compelling visual story in those layers of peeling paint on crumbling plaster on adobe bricks stacked on crudely cut limestone foundations. The traces of human activity in one section of wall speaks to the human habitation in this city that has its roots in the 1500s. It's quite a study in social history and handwork, an unplanned, almost invisible beauty, especially to a tourist whose port town of Vancouver has been replaced by a gleaming, pristine city of glass.

I'm seeing them as found abstracts, images of unintentional collages and mixed-media works by generations of people who work with their hands.

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.

Some powerful signs at Sochi

2/14/2014

Alex Livesey/Getty Images

The signs, they are a-changing.

But to see them you have to look past the visual bombardment of dead-eyed-Kardashian-object images, pop-up balloon-boob ads, and the opening scenes of violence against women on CSI: Whatever.

The signs are there, at the current Olympics, on the helmet of Calgary skeleton racer Sarah Reid, the fashion-baggy gear of female snowboarders, the bulk of the women's ice hockey team jerseys.

They read: Fierce, driven, focused, fearless.

For me, the Sochi Olympics has been a perfect study in semiotics (the study of signs). They're captivating in their complete contradiction to the prevailing mass-media image of young women, and they point to an emerging, alternative 'system of signification,' as the academics might call it. Calgary-based Sarah Reid, 26, shows it in the haunting helmet she conceived with artist and goalie Jason Bartziokas (Alberta College of Art and Design grad '04).

Team Canada playing Finland at Sochi (Canadian Press photo)

The ice hockey team displays it in their uniforms and their team effort — so rarely seen in the culture of young adult women.

It took some hard lobbying on their part to get here on the ice or in the half-pipe, and it took a lawsuit win to get them the chance to fly through the ski-jumping competitions. (International Olympics Committee members have a history of excluding women, notably because the sport may injure their reproductive organs.)

Germany's Natalie Geisenberger steels herself in luge training at Sochi. (Reuters/Arnd Wiegmann)

US snowboarder Karly Shorr, risking her reproductive organs in the slopestyle qualifiers. (Reuters)

Although they're still banned from competing in a few Nordic Combined events, the women are alternative models to the Victoria's Secret variety for young girls. But we're not there yet. Not when there are only 24 women in the 110-member International Olympic Committee. (More neat stats here.)

I keep these visual signs at hand, to show whenever one of the young girls in my life is confronted with another misogynist music video. See here? See how they run, ski, jump, spiral, play well together, delight in their own abilities?
Visual signs as new modes of thinking.

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.

Of portraits and the patriarchy

1/3/2014

When my brother showed me his inherited oil painting of a senior citizen, my first thought was: Yeesh. No wonder the young nudes endure.

They may not be remembered by history, like this unfamiliar subject, but they are pretty enough to pass down for generations of display.

It's not kind to speak ill of the dead, even if that dead man is the paternal grandfather we apparently met a few times as tykes, but he's not exactly a looker. Despite the fact that he is skillfully rendered by accomplished B.C. painter Robert Genn it's hard to know where the inherited painting should live. With no particular connection to the person — he is the divorced father of our divorced father — he's a deftly-done stranger hanging around my brother's house, a visual connection to our genetic past (and perhaps my brother's future).

If Vancouver had a portrait gallery, there may be some interest in acquiring the depiction of this man we never knew as Grandpa, but any value would only be attached to the painter, not the painted. Portrait galleries typically feature those subjects who have had an impact on society, those who have made a difference. I have gazed at crowds of those Important People in my one tour of the National Portrait Gallery in London, most of whom looked a lot like this guy. And I recall Beatrix Potter. And a smattering of pretties. Seething over the fact that there were few or no sisters on the wall I stomped out and headed to the nearest pub. Less than 25 per cent of the Important People in the National Portrait Gallery are women, but you won't spot that statistic on its official website. (It took some digging to mine that factoid.) Judging by the Gallery's own website it appears there is some serious back-peddling to the point where it is actually featuring female subjects.

So perhaps we should all be sighing with relief that there's no historical portrait display of Important People in our town because it would doubtless be a colonialist accumulation of all the second-rate royals and British government officials that are already remembered in a huge chunk of schools, streets and parks in these parts.

But portraiture is changing. The powerful, triumphant expressions of the dudes in charge are being challenged by the likes of Alastair Adams, who is enjoying a great amount of attention for his freshly unveiled, in-your-face portrait of former Labour Prime Minister Tony "Coalition of the Willing" Blair. The artist hands the judgment to the viewer.

However, he's still a dude among dudes who make up most of the minglers on the geo-political stage, remembered in oils by famous artists and hung in prestigious galleries and palatial spaces.

Portrait painters have a hand in remembering. Their own perspective of what is worthy of their efforts has played a part in the patriarchy. The deceased wife of the old man hanging at my brother's house was the accomplished former head librarian at UBC. People still ask me if I'm related to Anne Yandle, whose image will soon be forgotten to history.

Hello, nudes and old men.

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.

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

10/4/2013

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.

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.

Power struggles embedded in newspaper photos

2/15/2013

Venerable city newspaper reporter John Mackie has an eye for old things Vancouver. He was intrinsic in the broad-daylighting of Fred Herzog’s mid-century images, and more recently he has given deserved public exposure to a visual goldmine of prints by Vancouver Sun and Province photographers, some dead, some still on the job.

Just as Mackie’s passion for historical images of the momentous and the everyday led to a major Vancouver Art Gallery show for Herzog in 2007, it’s also been the impetus for a new exhibit of a 500-image sample of the newspaper photos at Satellite Gallery in the old A&B Sound building on Seymour.

But here it’s not just about the images — although there are some gems here, including a shot of the Duke of Edinburgh having a chin-wag with top Nazi Joseph Goebbels — but the ratty prints themselves. Most are yellowed with age or by hasty hand-developing in the darkroom under deadline duress. Some of the black-and-whites are slashed by red crop marks. Some subjects are halo'd in hand-drawn black felt pen to “knock out” the background, or have sizes scrawled in the margins in standard-issue blue grease pencil.

Anyone who has worked in newspapers before it all went digital knows that these are also the markings of daily power struggles between photographers and page editors or graphic artists, or, in the case of community weeklies where I spent my career, photographers and the reporters who were responsible for laying out their own sections of the paper.

Ian Lindsay's 1976 image of Andy Warhol shows crop marks that instruct the staff photographer's composition be reduced to a head shot. The decision eliminates the original image area that captured the rich visual details of the awkward artist's natty outfit and clasped gnarled hands.

From the behind-the-scenes view of newspapers, the 500 images at the News! show are a history of the heated arguments with staff photographers over creative control and news judgment. They speak of the daily deadline battles, some quietly awkward, others spectacular, that kept a day at the office interesting.

Today that battlefield is all but obscured, as the writers and the shooters are often the same person, or they’re not in the same building. Or country. Or time.

In an age where we’re bombarded by fleeting, non-material images, these little contested objects are mighty weighty indeed.

The Presentation House Gallery-hosted exhibit continues to March 30 at 560 Seymour. John Mackie and Vancouver Sun librarian Kate Bird talk on the topic, “The Accidental Archive” this Saturday at 3 p.m.