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A visual antidote for this flatulent football weekend

1/30/2015

As we approach what is arguably the year's most gaseous weekend otherwise known as the SuperBowl, with overfed folks lumbering around downtown in painted faces of lurid blue and green, I have just the antidote.

Carol Prusa draws out the fields on one of her large orbs. (Photo from krab-ko.livejournal.com)

A quick deke around the beer-fueled crowds at the overcharged Yaletown hotspots will land you in the pristine, almost floating world of Carol Prusa's curious disks and spheres on display at Jennifer Kostuik Gallery.

It was a smallish, audibly quiet opening night Thursday as these things go, but the work here almost commanded all jaws to drop softly. When you're compelled to view each trippy sculptural world thisclose you must whisper your reactions -- which are somewhere along the lines of, "Unfreakingbelieveable."

It's why Prusa did not need to raise her voice beyond conversational level to talk about her inspirations (mathematics, popular culture, biology, nature) and technique: hundreds of hours for each piece, layering meticulous drawing and painting using brushes only a few hairs thick or wire.

Unbounded (Emergent), 24 "x 24", silverpoint, graphite, titanium white pigment with acrylic binder on circular acrylic panel

I am a sucker for conceptual work carried by the kind of craftsmanship that can only result from a lifetime of devotional practice. In Prusa's case, it's nearing 40 years of dedication that now includes attending her shows all over the world as well as teaching at the university level.

When asked at the opening why she chose a monochromatic palette she said that she used to express her work in colour when she lived in the Midwest but since moving to Florida found the bright backdrop a little too much, so the silvers, whites, greys and blacks (and pinpoints of LED lighting from within) offered some respite, some equilibrium.

Kind of like what this show offers, in the thick of the sensual assault that is the football industrial complex at its apex.

Prusa's focus comes down to the wire - and the tiniest brush. (From blueriderart.com)

Overflow, new work by Carol Prusa, continues at the Jennifer Kostuik Gallery to Feb. 22.

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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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Shab-fab granny squares cover it all

1/16/2015

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Maybe it's the chilly monochromatic climate at work here, but I'm suddenly wrapping myself up granny squares. The more I think about them, the more potential I see.

There's a lot of culture woven into those fuzzy little colour grids. They're there in the background of popular culture, infusing irony and cozy home-yness, nostalgia and disdain. One graces the couches of neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler's nerdy apartment and Roseanne's working-class house. Jemaine sleeps under one (badly).

Sure, they achieve that soupçon of shabbiness or tastelessness essential to the story but those set decorators are no idiots; granny squares inject hits of high colour and pattern to the visual field. They are trippy, decorative non-decor objects. Their form is used because of their assumed function over form.

They are the throws that are thrown around, their colourful geometry reflected and refracted so that they radiate western domestic culture, love it or hate it.

Cate Blanchett adorned a designer version on the red carpet, to a chorus of derision by the fashion police, which secured the actress more publicity.

There's something delicious in the mix between haute couture and the easy, scrappy crochet method that results in over 13,000 Etsy items under the search term, "granny squares".

I've loved/hated granny squares ever since my cousin and I were given matching shrink vests at age 10, from our moms. I would have been wearing that single, large purple granny square at a time when the Italian dads in the neighbourhood were setting up that granny-square pattern in concrete breeze walls around their brand new Vancouver Specials.

One breeze wall in a photo essay by the author of joy-n-wonder.blogspot.ca

Like the blankets, the breeze walls evoke utility and thrift but are visually interesting enough to warrant new consideration. The modularity of granny squares and breeze-wall blocks ooze with potential, especially as a mash-up.

Granny squares command attention. The Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum took on new dimensions when it was covered in thousands of donated granny squares as part of its CAFAM Granny Squared installation a couple of years ago.

Suddenly, a city that is generally at odds with notions of the handmade, the domestic and the artisanal was attracting mainstream media attention for its collaborative crocheted culture jam.

A couple of years before that, in 2011, members of many Finnish women's organizations and the craft teachers' union blanketed Helsinki Cathedral's steps in 3,800 granny square tilkkupeitosta (Finnish for 'quilt').

The modular motif marries beautifully to existing architecture, as the granny squares take on a Tetris effect, cascading down to the giant public square in this domestic intervention.

But what about the granny square as a building block itself? What if a building appeared to rise out of a giant crocheted coverlet? How could concretized crocheted granny squares be utilized as sculpture?

It's a fuzzy concept worth building on.

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Oh the irony: freedom of expression in a corporate media world

1/9/2015

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I'm writing this as the radio airs a live report of gunfire. The French police have just killed the two brothers who hunted down particular editorial workers at the satirical Paris magazine two days ago, murdering 12.

A bloodbath over hand-drawn images is over (for now), while the global reaction is unfolding in drawings.

French illustrator Lucille Clerc's image that she posted on Twitter went viral after it appeared on a fake Banksy Instagram account.

The call has been sent - and heard - far and wide: Defend free speech by publishing the triggering images of Mohammed, and by taking up the pen or pencil in a massive freedom of expression effort. (Some early responses by cartoonists can be seen here.)

As much as I am deeply offended by some of the cartoons printed in Charlie Hebdo (like this one of the naked young woman with her burqa up her ass, in line with the magazine's support of banning women's right to choose) I will defend all extremists' right to draw and publish extremist drawings. Respecting the right of all dissenting voices is part of a (still mythical) free and open society that nurtures rational thought and behaviour. The world witnessed the alternative on Wednesday morning.

Here in Vancouver, former Province editorial cartoonist Bob Krieger took to the drawing board hours after the news of the murders of his fellow cartoonists and others.

But you won't find this one-panel in the local newspaper anymore; the last Province cartoonist was let go in 2013, the way cartoonists have been unloaded all over the country by their corporate media owners.

Surely it was simply a cost-saving measure, but the result is a pitiful amount of visual commentary, and a corporate curbing of free speech.

This week the Province (owned by Postmedia which also owns the only other paid daily newspaper in this town) ran a guest column on the topic of the need for cartoonists' freedom of expression by Aislin (Terry Mosher) of the Montreal Gazette. That one voice ran in other Postmedia outlets including the Regina Leader-Post, Windsor Star and a whole whack of online news aggregators. And nothing against Aislin, but I miss our own, Vancouver-based critical drawings as we try to absorb the unfathomable. But as Krieger told The Tyee after he was shown the door, "corporate media is way too controlling and they don't want as much of a variety of opinion as newspapers should have."

You can't keep good cartoonists down.

Yet suddenly Canada's corporate media can't get enough visual commentaries, and entire pages have been dedicated to the drawings, sometimes in full colour - a dream to many cartoonists. But look closer at the spread in yesterday's National Post (also owned by Postmedia) and it's clear that less than half of the cartoonists are actually employed by newspapers.

You can see the irony here. Freedom of expression: Yes! ... unless there's more money in clickbait that has no relevance to local readership.

Cartoonists are compelled to make art, to share their expression freely. The papers aren't paying like they used to but the people are clearly paying attention, via social media retweets, hits, and followers. There's a lot of value in that.

It's astounding that the penny has not yet dropped.

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Winter storms lead to brainstorms

1/2/2015

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A Christmas Day king tide served up some thick snarls of bull kelp and I seized on an idea.

Kelp Skein, in progress. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Actually, I had no particular idea in mind; only quite a bit of wonder at the quantity of the stuff. After dragging great hunks of it back to the deck, I started to play. I organized the stuff into visual categories, and soon I was winding the tendrils into a skein, and slicing the bulbs into vessels. Some experiments were left in the elements and others brought indoors to desiccate (and hopefully not moulder and go rank).
Will my 20-pound giant ball shrivel up and break apart? Will the vessels turn into leathery cups? Time will tell and failure will be a teacher.

In the meantime, I turn to the research portion of this playing with materials which leads to playing with ideas.

Material test #2: Drying bulbs on a windowsill (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Kelp bags helped preserve harvests of shorebirds.

No surprise this high-tensile, miraculously durable, bouncy stuff has had many practical uses since ancient times.

The first nations of New Zealand called it Rimurapa, and cut into the honey-comb-like walls of the blades to create bags — Poha — to preserve and cook their harvests of muttonbird, an oily shorebird. Or they cut slits in the bags, filled them with shellfish, starfish and abalone, then tossed them in the water to seed coastal areas. Or they attached two inflated pohas and used them as water-wings in strong currents. Or lined woven reed hulls to make super-buoyant Zodiac-type vessels. The first nations in these parts transported oolichan oil.

That's all before listing all the nutritional attributes, and there was plenty of play in that bull kelp too. The high concentration of alginate makes the material a natural rubber ball.

A high concentration of the chemical alginate creates elasticity — perfect for a ball.

California maker Geri Swanson's kelp rattles are part of her nature-crafty product line.

If you image-search "use for kelp" you're hit with a barrage of ideas for thick rings of pickle recipes and a lot of crafty ways with kelp.

Among the fascinating findings are the Seattle area sound performance artist Suzie Kozawa, who makes wind instruments from bull kelp; and Everett, Washington fiber artist Jan Hopkins who combines bull kelp with sturgeon skin and other materials in her conceptual vessels.

When a craft belies its materials the inherent beauty of that material is lost.

Whistler, BC maker Cheryl Massey celebrates the reducing diameter of the entire length of one bull kelp stem.

But the beauty of the google-search is finding what you're not looking for, the unintended learning. That happened when I came across American artist/designer/maker Scott Constable and his manifesto-in-the-making of ‘exuberant frugality’ (fine video in that link) that defines what he calls Deep Craft, based on the principles of deep ecology. Like Constable, I am intrigued by the inherent qualities of bull kelp and am still playing with how to make the most of those characteristics. He is thinking about bronze-casting the bulb and thick stem portions as furniture legs. I will stick to the meditative motions that will grow the kelp skein while keeping me thinking.

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A visual antidote for this flatulent football weekend

Defending the doily in 20 images, 20 seconds each

Shab-fab granny squares cover it all

Oh the irony: freedom of expression in a corporate media world

Winter storms lead to brainstorms

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