writings - carlyn yandle

Packing it all in for the Toronto design fest

12/5/2014

It's getting close to a decade since I packed it all in: my needles and wool, my sewing machine and fabrics, my mid-level-management career. There was more to explore.

I've been mixing it up with a wide range of materials (and makers) ever since but even I'm surprised to find that my latest tools of choice for bushwacking new routes of making are the ol' crochet hooks, knitting needles, rug hooks and embroidery needles.

The line on the paper has always been too limiting to me; I need to pick up that line, play with it in my hands, turn it into area, then volume. I remain entranced by the possibilities of connecting something created by a silkworm or an industrial manufacturing plant to a mathematical model or a wearable with uncomfortable connotations.

The beauty of fiber is in its physical and metaphorical ability to connect the Art side to the Design side (not to mention the science side), weaving the two together until it's clear that playing with ideas cannot be put into separate boxes.

'Spore' (2011) serves as promo visual for the Vancouver design group.

Except if we're talking shipping boxes, for the Toronto Design Offsite (TO DO) Festival next month.

A few object-experiments from my ongoing Fuzzy Logic series will be packed in there, as part of the Vancouver group of makers, selected by the Dear Human creative studio.

It's all part of the ‘Outside the Box’ exhibits featuring works from three selected Canadian cities — Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver — and five from the U.S.: New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle.

It's a fine way to mine local design ideas and visions through an unexpected selection of objects that are shared in various locations via specific-sized shipping boxes.

The Vancouver contribution includes nine individuals and teams who live, design and make in the greater Vancouver area. The connecting thread is a pursuit of a design practice through material exploration, according to Dear Human. "Whether through common applications of unusual materials or transcending common materials through unusual applications, exploration is evident in each of the included objects."

Rounding out the Vancouver Outside the Box contingent are: Cathy Terepocki, Dahlhaus, Dina Gonzalez Mascaro, Hinterland Designs, Laura McKibbon, Rachael Ashe, and Studio Bup.

Playing with fiber optics (Photo by Carlyn Yandle)

Vancouver Outside the Box will take over the windows at 1082 Queen Street West, Toronto, from January 19-25, 2015.

TO DO is an annual city-wide not-for-profit week-long festival that celebrates and showcases the nation's design scene, providing exposure and cross-pollination of ideas and techniques. There are too many exhibits, installations, talks, parties and films to list here, so check out the full (and growing) schedule here as well as the fun promo video.

Detail of Fiber Optics (Photo by Carlyn Yandle)

Feeling the squeeze all part of the practice

10/17/2014

Janet Wang plays with the Madonna and Child mainstay.

I spent most of the day yesterday sitting with a very close friend in a hospital bed, waiting for the surgeon to slice into her gut and remove a large cyst and maybe an ovary or two. Or maybe all her lady parts. There was frank talk about the expected pooling blood and lingering pain and there were some last-minute tears as she was wheeled away.

It was hardly the time to go mingle at a gallery that night, but friends and family would be there for the opening of the Domestic Interventions show so it was the right thing to do. My sister exhibitors, Monique Motut-Firth and Janet Wang, had probably wrestled with attending too; they were both fending off whatever bad colds their little kids had brought home. But we all showed, and even managed to say a few words about the work.

Monique Motut-Firth: Portrait of the artist

I mention all this because this is what the work is about: trying to nurture an art practice when there is other, more pressing nurturing to be done, not to mention the cleaning and the making-a-living. Sometimes you just have to laugh over the lunacy of trying to paint or build or cut or even think amidst the domestic pressures; sometimes you’re ready to toss it all in, but don’t because you know this ability to express the predicament is what holds you together.

That’s why this show includes uneasy domestic objects, uncomfortable self-portraits and sculptures, paper dolls composed of the fictitious feminine form from women’s catalogues. We brought these works together to talk to one another, and to try to convey that dis-ease of the familiar with the strange. There’s something funny about a tiny mother-artist figurine gnawing through the telephone wire or a mannequin wrapped in 1950s ads of ecstatic home-makers or a long line of girdled paper dolls, but there’s a dark side too.

Body of Work, by Carlyn Yandle

We love our families and our home life but we need our art practices too. We may live in a corner of the world that respects cultural workers as much as welfare recipients but we can’t help ourselves. Our domestic world and our work as artists will continue to twist and intertwine and something will continue to emerge that will evoke the messy, conflicted, emotionally charged and banal everyday.

And that’s important.

***

Domestic Interventions, curated by Jo Dunlop, runs from Oct. 17 to Nov. 15 at Cityscape Community Arts Space gallery, 335 Lonsdale Ave., North Vancouver (three blocks from Seabus terminal). Hours: Mon-Wed, Fri. – 9 am-5 pm, Thursdays 9 am–8 pm,  Saturday noon-5 pm.

Group exhibit dwells on the domestic

10/10/2014

My brief stint as a home organizer was an eye-opener — door opener, to be precise. I got a rare view of the reality behind the doors of some beautiful houses. Often I was the only outsider who had been invited inside for years, for many different reasons.

Home is where it all hangs out, for better or for worse.

Ostensibly it’s where the meals and love and traditions are shared but it’s also the backdrop to power struggles or social isolation (by choice or by circumstance) and other domestic dynamics that we don’t post or tweet or share or Like.

It’s why Monique Motut-Firth, Janet Wang and I decided that our group exhibit at Cityscape Community Art Space opening next week should include an opportunity for others to take a break from the relentless perfect-homelife-branding and share in the real, in our Dirty Laundry installation.

During the course of the month-long Domestic Interventions exhibit visitors to the North Vancouver gallery will have the option of anonymously adding one of their own pieces of domestic reality to the ‘laundry line’ set up in the Lonsdale Avenue space. It could reveal that our very private, personal problem might actually be a public issue that deserves an airing. Or it may be that no one will take on the option.

There’s power in negative space too.

***
Domestic Interventions, curated by Jo Dunlop, runs from Oct. 17 to Nov. 15 with an opening reception Thursday Oct. 16, 7–9 pm at 335 Lonsdale Ave., North Vancouver (three blocks from Seabus terminal). Hours: Mon-Wed, Fri. – 9 am-5 pm, Thursdays 9 am–8 pm,  Saturday noon-5 pm.

I was under the assumption I would mostly be making

9/12/2014

People say talking about one's work gets easier with practice. I don't know any of those people. (Glen Andersen photos)

I did not sign up for this.

Well, actually I did, in my exhibiting-artist contract with the Richmond Art Gallery for the current City as Site public-art survey show, but that's not my point. I believed that steering away from my career as a manager and devoting my working hours to the independent business of building a visual art practice would be chiefly about making stuff — not so much with the talking and the writing about the making. But if that maker wants to actually be a part of what they call in art school "the discourse", she must talk about the work. In front of people. Sometimes a lot of people, many of whom are not here to listen to me. I mean her.

Engaging an audience is not my forte. I usually start with a pre-emptive apology of some sort because I know how this is going to go down. I tend towards the tangential when I'm nervous, often resorting to wild hand gestures to make my point. My pace quickens as I go until I'm hyperventilating at which point I cut it short, usually with an unprofessional, "That's it" or, for variety, "That's pretty much it" (arms raised in resignation for emphasis).

You've got to stop apologizing, a friend said in a phone call the day after my five-excruciating-minute Artist Talk last Friday. It shows a lack of confidence. (Guess who just read The Confidence Code?)
Haven't you heard of self-deprecating humour?, I said.
It's not if you're not being funny, she said.
She had a point.

Then there is the dreaded video interview (at bottom). I believe the only reason that the artist interview is listed as a condition of the contract is that otherwise most artists would high-tail it in the opposite direction. The single-shot monologue creates the perfect condition for sudden eye twitches and facial tics. I spend so much time, um, trying, um, not to, um, say 'um' that my train of thought often jumps the rails and I end up serving up such pearls of wisdom as, "I also do re-upholstery."

Clockwise from left: Me, Nancy Chew, Jacqueline Metz, Glen Andersen, Nicole Dextras.

Even just being at one's own opening is akin to feeling naked on the street. After all, a lot of this making stuff originates in the privacy of the studio, involving private ideas. Sorry for making you all look at my privates.

But the smiles in this picture don't lie. Tough as it is, the talking is the audio part of the sharing that sheds more light on the subject, in this case, the behind-the-scenes look at Richmond's Public Art collection.

***
City as Site continues at Richmond Art Gallery (five minutes' walk from Canada Line's Brighouse Station) to Oct. 26. Artist workshop: How to Apply for Public Art Calls, Sept. 13, 1-4 pm with Elisa Yon, public art project coordinator with the City of Richmond. Public Art Bus Tour: Sept. 27, 1:15-3:30 pm, with public art specialist Dr. Cameron Cartiere and special guest artist Andrea Sirois. RSVP required: ktycholis@richmond.ca or 604-247-8313.

public art exposed: a peek behind the scenes at new show

8/29/2014

It's one thing to dream up an idea for the back end of the elevated Canada Line track and quite another to see that dream come together in a mammoth aluminum sculpture.

Metal fabrication at the Select Steel shop, Delta. Carlyn Yandle photo

So when I got my first glimpse of the progress of Cluster at the metal fabricators this week, the piercing clang and whine of the shop suddenly seemed to give way to the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Whoa.

It was exactly as I had imagined it, except for the immensity. That something so voluminous could come out of a bundle of bubble tea straws was sort of short-circuiting my brain.

Well?, their faces seemed to ask.

"It's... very... big," I said, immediately thankful their earplugs spared them from hearing the bleeding obvious.

Cluster concept sketch (image by Carlyn Yandle)

Of course, no one sees these moments of shock, nor all the anxiety, revelation, frustration, obsession typical of the emotional swings that go into the creation of public artwork. When Cluster is hoisted into position next month, its narrative will be in the eye of the beholder, its entirety read in an instant.

But a new Richmond Art Gallery exhibit (opening next Friday evening, Sept. 5) is pulling back the curtain on the process behind five public artworks that dot the city, in its City As Site show, curated by RAG director Rachel Lafo. Here is where visitors will see evidence of the beginning of the ideas that were pitched, developed, reworked, and finally translated into forms for public placement. Combined with that focus is a survey of all artwork in the local public sphere that is defining Richmond as not just another clutter of condos but a specific space in a particular time.

Metal fabricator Jordan Thys at work. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

For me, laying bare some of my half-baked early concepts and awkward sketches that led to the development of Cluster (as well as the Crossover crosswalk design) is slightly uncomfortable but this is a warts-and-all display. Not shown is the high level of trust that must exist for any collaborative project to succeed: trust in one's own ideas, the physical properties of the materials, the skill and temperment of fabricators, the foresight of structural engineers, and the patience of the commissioning bodies. Public art projects come with the headache-y package of issues of insurance, permits, budgets, timelines and many unforseeables. In short, it's much more than a good idea.

Embedded in those physical projects is the intangible quality of faith. Cluster isn't done yet, but I have faith that it will soon be a thing in the manufactured landscape that will spark conversation, which will connect people and by extension contribute toward a unique, vibrant community and cultural hub.

Fingers crossed anyway.

Learning to play, to learn

5/29/2014

I would rather watch the little kids in my life play than watch the best TV. But it's tricky because they don't like to be observed and if they feel I'm too interested, they are on to me and it all comes to a halt.

I have to refrain from the urge to referee, guide, demonstrate or facilitate. Because it's only when they're sure the adults are not interested that the seriously unstructured play comes on, with all its small power struggles and shared moments of joy. (See legendary Lynda Barry talk about play at the end of this post.)

I'm fascinated by the ability of kids to spontaneously engage in creative collaboration (a.k.a. 'play') with other kids they didn't know 10 minutes before. It's a lesson in the power of putting ourselves out there creatively, to let go of control and all expectations.

Playing with toy bits after hours at the VAG. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

In the past week, I took my inner kid out to play with strangers in two distinct venues: the Vancouver Art Gallery, in preparation for the opening of Douglas Coupland's major solo show, and at the first Arts & Crafts Social at a small Mount Pleasant neighbourhood gallery.

After-hours at the Vancouver Art Gallery, we were all quickly introduced before we were invited to attack and stack Coupland's priceless/useless toy bits to assemble his imposing 'Brick Wall' at the entrance of the exhibit, under the artist's direction. We were just playing but in retrospect we were problem-solving issues of density, colour, weight, communication, and give-and-take. We were just talking but on reflection we were wrangling with issues of value, object-images, collections, consumption, globalization and categorization.

A few days later, I hauled out one of my portable projects and headed to the inaugural Arts & Crafts Social (#HAWCsocial) at Hot Art Wet City Gallery hosted by Rachael Ashe and Kim Werker.

The beauty of a drop-in, BYOP (project) event is that if you're feeling a little shy, at least you have your work to focus until you're comfortable enough to mingle. The tables soon filled up with conversation-starters beyond the beer and wine: stabby felt needles, crochet and rug hooks, Thai take-out, Sharpies on canvas, a digital drawing pad and an old manual typewriter.

You play, you learn — about other methods, applications, directions. And you get to hang with people not typical of your usual social circle. To me it was worth the admission-by-donation just to get a glimpse of the unrestrained mind of Billy Patko (below, left). Which got me thinking: what would Patko's prolific doodles look like in a large-scale format? (See Photoshop'd sketch, below.)

Just playing.

Coupland's show, Everywhere is Anywhere is Anything is Everything runs May 31 to Sept.1. The next Arts & Crafts Social at Hot Art Wet City is June 25, 7:30 - 11pm.

How not to crash at the big art shows

5/9/2014

The mammoth art museum experience is like an all-inclusive resort for the mind: there's so much coming at you the brain binges 'til it can't party anymore.

Unless you're an art history major, what's hanging on those soaring walls and placed on those marble floors at the big art palaces like the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum and The Met is filled with cranial-clanging mystery, intrigue, obscurity, beauty and repulsion that can crash the whole neural system in something approaching Stendhal Syndrome. There's only so much visual field one garden-variety brain can take in. You need to pace yourself, preferably over several days.

Alison Woodward's emblematic, multi-layered drawings suggest carcasses.

Same goes for big education-institution shows so this is the how I tackle the annual Emily Carr University Grad Show, now open daily until May 18 on Vancouver's Granville Island.

With hundreds of final works in media arts, sculpture, industrial design, ceramics, illustration and visual arts packed into two buildings I take the cavernous rooms of randomness in small bursts over a few days, usually with one friend at a time — a sort of playdate. But the only thing organized about this date is the area of creative work we're going to linger in. It's the difference between sports on a school field and free play in the forest.

The real play is in the conversation that is sparked just by being in the milieu of this cacophonous visual field. It might start off as first impressions of an individual piece but often ends up in a whole different kind of thinking, and that's where the exhilaration lies. It's all just as important in the creative process as working in the studio.

The beauty of online column-writing is infinite space, so, in the spirit of the gargantuan art museum and its daunting theme-free collections, as well as the need to let the brain out to play, I present here a few of my own pics of emerging visual artists at this year's Emily Carr grad show whose works contest the two-dimensional tradition.

A detail from Jessica Probyn's large gestural painting reveals a threaded leaf-shaped garland.

The ethereal effect of Colette Stubbings' large 'Channeling Dreams' is enhanced by a ground of creased, ripped and crumpled paper.

Rose Fior's 'Ominous I' is an off-square panel that includes areas of gouging, thin washed and dimensional globs of paint.

The visceral subject of Sarah Erica Berman Goble's work moves from two grounds of paper to the wall itself.

A detail of Scott Lewis' inked, ripped paper on canvas evokes both disputed public spaces and stark landscapes.

Maya Gulin explores the pattern effects of acrylic in this detail of her deftly layered mixed media painting.

cultural community under threat in sparkling city

5/2/2014

My daily work corner is one-third of a shared 800-square-foot studio of a mouldering building in the shadow of numerous condo-tower cranes in Mount Pleasant, with a combined rent of more than $1,000 per month. In the four years that I've managed to hold onto this little space I've watched Development Permit Application signs go up on one decrepit building after another. The signs go up, then all the resident independent visual artists, industrial designers, musicians, film industry workers, writers and performers get packing.

But where to go is a serious problem. A healthy city has a rich culture but the places to actually do that hard work are rare or too costly to consider in this town. Everyone knows someone who has given up trying and moved to Toronto. It's getting to the point where some artist friends have decided to remain in Vancouver — at least for the moment — because they just can't abandon the struggling cultural community.

It's an odd feeling, working in adverse conditions to ensure a vibrant cultural life in the milieu of the city's glassy wealth. Surely some of those speculative development dollars could actually help stem the tide that threatens to replace every last independent bookstore, gallery cafe and theatre into one long avenue of Shoppers Drug Marts, bank branches and Starbucks.

This is why, despite a general wariness about any artisan-party-backed events, I and a couple of friends hit the Fox theatre last Thursday for a Vision Vancouver-backed community forum on protecting the city's cultural spaces. When you want to be part of the conversation on this critical topic you go where there are ears.

Everyone from young street performers to retired folks bent on protecting threatened venues packed the revamped former porno theatre last Thursday evening — the perfect venue for showcasing what is possible with a council that is increasingly promoting the value of city culture of all kinds.

The entrepreneur behind the Fox, Ernesto Gomez (Waldorf, Nuba, etc.) was there on stage as part of a panel led by city councillor Heather Deal that included fellow councillor Geoff Meggs; Kate Armstrong, director of Emily Carr University's Director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre; and Esther Rausenberg, head of the Eastside Culture Crawl. The vibe was one of simmering frustration but there was also warmth generated by the obvious show that we are all in this together.

From left: Coun. Geoff Meggs, Kate Armstrong, Ernesto Gomez, Esther Rausenberg, Coun. Heather Deal. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Deal dealt her summation the next day, based on notes she was taking during the roving-mike portion of the evening:
"Development needs to deliver more for local culture. Arts and culture needs to be treated as a public good. That we need zoning to enable independent businesses and cultural groups to succeed, not push them out. And that it's not just about creating studio space, it's the need for rehearsal and production space too."

But things are getting better, as many noted at the forum. The relatively new food truck program and more reasonable liquor licensing laws are both driving audiences and sales at local festivals and venues; car-free events like the city's biggest free music and art fest, Khatsalano and Car Free Day on the Drive have turned radical notions into much-loved draws.

Miniature portraits by artists of the Phantoms in the Front Yard Collective

And the squeeze on work and show space has resulted in some fresh, unconventional art shows in opportunistic spaces, like shipping containers or urban alleys. Last Friday it was a pop-up show, Everyone I've Never Known, in three units of the retro Burrard hotel. Only in one of the most expensive cities in the world will you find serious collectors crowding into tiny hotel rooms to snap up the miniature graphite and pencil portraits — proof that artists will continue to create, even if at a scale that doesn't demand studio space.

The unfathomable drives next generation of artists

4/17/2014

Detail from Emily Carr Masters student Duobaitis' ink on board work, '(re) formatting', 2014.

How we're feeling about our place in an uncertain world is evident on art school walls.

This is where the next generation of emerging artists grapples with the shape-shifting natural and built environment, consciously or subconsciously.

The increasingly puzzling, distracted, technically fraught visual field reflects students' reactions and responses to the relentless and devastating images of catastrophe and the bombardment of data-graphics, encompassing everything from micro-surgical robots to data-graphics on global human migration patterns.

It's all enough to make a person retreat to a quiet corner to knit or knot. Or draw. Or collage. Or build.

Dallas Duobaitis' recent work in his first year Masters program deals with some of those topics — maybe. That's the beauty of abstracted images; they engage the ideas and thoughts of the viewer who is also negotiating this particular, uncertain time and space. This artwork resonates because it is of our time.

Detail from Motut-Firth's installation (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Monique Motut-Firth (disclosure: friend) also grapples with those themes in her first-year Masters installation, part of the It's Not You, It's Me show at the Concourse Gallery. Her found print images of largely domestic objects (including pictures of women) are meticulously constructed into robot-esque clusters that hover on the gallery wall, in conversation with Duobaitis' work that includes a motion-sensor-activated oculus/dream-catcher contraption (see below).

This emerging genre of work is not created in a Vancouver vacuum but is in conversation with creatives all over the world, in reaction to innovations that provide answers to problems but also more questions, as seen in this documentary from Japan on the future of robots in our daily lives and this one on the horrifying/banal reality of surveillance in the UK.

Duobaitis and his latest installation at Emily Carr University.

***
The Emily Carr University gallery walls have since been transformed for the annual Foundation Show, often the very first showing of work from the university's first year students as young as 18 and from all over the world. The Foundation Show continues to April 26.

Motion sensors activate Duobaitis' chilling/thrilling installation of metal and threads. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

Granville Island needs an injection of innovation

3/7/2014

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.)