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Who says sculpture has no business in business?

3/27/2015

"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.

Eggbeater 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:

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The power of fiber seen in the corridors of power

3/20/2015

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Rania El-Alloul says she a Quebec judge told her to remove her headscarf. (cbc.ca photo)

When I see the debate raging around women wearing the hajib (head scarf) or niqab (cloth covering the face) in Canada, I think about the male gaze.

The latest controversy surrounds the woman who was reportedly told to remove her hajib in a Quebec courtroom last month -- by a female judge, for the record -- but it's another example of denying women's personal boundaries.

The court order that she remove this square of fabric so connected to her identity and religion and expose herself in the public sphere reminds me of the long history of the male gaze evident throughout the corridors of the world's most prestigious art museums. It is there in the countless images of nude women created by white heterosexual male artist-geniuses, for the perspective of an implied white, heterosexual male audience. It is the why for the Guerrilla Girls protest movement that began with women donning gorilla masks in 1985 and taking on the Museum of Modern Art's status quo.

When the male gaze is reversed -- when a woman can watch, unwatched -- it is at the very least disconcerting in this culture that values women for their appearance. Whether she is covered by a gorilla mask or a niqab, she induces a quiet horror for the status quo, sparking debate. Our society is hardly the voice of reason when it comes to female oppression; not when a woman in a niqab shopping at Whole Foods may incite more controversy than any number of women in the same aisle who've altered their bodies through toxin injections or the surgeon's scalpel.

The issue, whether we're talking priceless portraits or shifting demographic landscapes, is freedom of choice.

While our male-dominated courts and all levels of government wrestle with appropriate women's garments, three women tell it like it is from their point of view -- under the veil or in defiance of it -- on CBC Radio's The Current here.

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One bit, two bits, green bits, black bits

3/13/2015

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Toybits (green) - made from broken toys (Carlyn Yandle photo)

This may be the third or fourth column/post I've written that could come under the headline, 'Overthinking will be the death of me.' There is definitely a book in there somewhere about the power of overthinking to sabotage the creative process.

My latest overthinking sabotage occurred as I was experimenting with binding up broken toy bits (consciously not overthinking why).

I was taking care of my sister's kids while idly binding one green toy remnant to another. At some point, the curious object appeared to be done. And it was good.

It's an intriguing object but when photographed is also a visually absorbing abstract. It has richness in its ability to conflate the second and third dimensions. It is heavy with cultural reference yet lightly humorous.

I was onto something.

Toybits (black) - final version (Carlyn Yandle photo)

After a couple of hours I quit because it clearly would have no logical endpoint. But if there's one thing I've learned about the creative process it's to let the failures hang around and stink up the joint for a while. In my experience, the only way to get to the source of the stench is to keep it in the periphery. And a couple of days later it came to me: I was so hell-bent on the outcome I had completely negated the making, which, when referring back to the green toy-bits cluster, was the essence of the thing: play.

I took it all apart, then started over, finding the fit between one bit to another bit, then adding one bit where it fit. (Maybe the book should be in Dr. Seuss language).

It had a beginning and an end, and the entire process was an adventure without a map. The result is a sculptural object with implied power that appears as part engine, part vehicle, part robot. It has composition, balance, architecture, intriguing sight lines and varying perspectives. It has something to tell me: Your instincts are good, keep going.

From the junk of life emerges new life.

You can see it in the above photo; it's a mess. Even as I was binding it I thought, This is not working, this is not working. Why is this not working? It has no balance, no composition. it is artless. And it was a chore from the get-go.

Toybits (black): first attempt (Carlyn Yandle photo)

So, like every creative I know, the ol' mental processor starting whirring away in the background, rolling over this concept. Friends and I talk about this slightly obsessive stage when developing a new work. You're still functional in your daily routine but that whirring puts you in a slightly distracted state. It's sort of like falling in love; there's always something there to remind you of that growing passion. And when I fall in love with an idea, I fall hard. I'm consumed by the topic like the Paul Rudd character in The 40-Year-Old Virgin who can't stop talking about Amy or The Big Lebowski's John Goodman character who links any conversation to his days in 'Nam.

I've been seeing toy-bits inspiration everywhere, including in a car column in the morning newspaper. The picture of an engine reminded me of the toy-bits clusters and suddenly I was shoving aside breakfast dishes and breakfasting people and dumping my hoard of broken toys onto the table.

I will make that engine-y thing, I said. And therein lies the fatal flaw.

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Laying doilies on devastated gardens: a bit of sublime madness?

3/6/2015

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When the white RCMP SUV was spotted cruising around the Maple Street section of the community gardens early Monday morning, it was clear that the chainsaws and earth-movers were next.

Placeholders for levelled gardens: Wrap I and Wrap II, 10' diameter each, crocheted Tyvek (Photo by Carlyn Yandle)

For the next three days all the gardeners of those little plots along the Arbutus rail corridor could do was ask that some of the uprooted shrubs be saved. But mostly those who had the stomach to watch the carnage were shaking their heads, hugging one another, trying not to cry.

The train used to come by here when there were gardens. Now there is no need for trains yet all but a fringe of the gardens must go.

It's the futility of the destruction of people's source of food, pleasure and community that hurts the most. CP has every right to their right of way, but it's a crying shame all the same.

Backhoe tracks and Wrap I, 10' diameter, crocheted Tyvek (Photo by Carlyn Yandle)

When all was left was the tracks of the backhoe, I thought that laying down some giant doilies seemed appropriate. Or at least it didn't seem any more ridiculous than levelling the gardens along a useless spur where the rails have long disappeared under the tarmac of some streets it used to cross.

There was no one around when I unfurled the two 10-foot-wide doilies on the bare dirt after the land-clearers left for the day - eerie for a time and place where there's usually all sorts of people tending their vegetables, walking dogs, riding bikes, pushing strollers or just surveying the spring coming on. But soon a few curious souls ventured in to ask what I was doing or snap some Instagram-destined pics. Conversations started up, mostly about Those Assholes but also about the grandmothers who loved their doilies, or the other things that these things reminded them of. A bit of absurdity in the face of absurdity, but it kick-started something.

When one's world seems unbearable "it is the sublime madness that makes one sing," Pulitzer-prize-winning war correspondent/author/minister Chris Hedges told the crowd at a packed downtown church two weeks ago. Acts of creative expression in the face of devastation are signs of a belief in a "divine justice." They are small acts of hope that say, 'We exist.'

Hedges rocks your world view here (talk begins at 16-minute mark):

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Who says sculpture has no business in business?

The power of fiber seen in the corridors of power

One bit, two bits, green bits, black bits

Laying doilies on devastated gardens: a bit of sublime madness?

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