writings - carlyn yandle

Street art saves us from a Pretty empty city

5/1/2015

This week the local news was full of the City of Vancouver's attempt to at least count empty homes, presumably as a baby step toward dealing with the housing crisis (ie. no one except the rich and heavily subsidized can afford to live here). But recently when we were dropping off a friend in his MacKenzie Heights neighbourhood on the Westside it was eerily clear that it may be too little, too late. It was twilight on a Sunday evening but most of the impressive homes with manicured lawns on his block were empty, he said, with the rare interior lights likely on timers.

It was at this moment that it hit me: that this disparity between the over-housed and the homeless is out of control. The popular Beautiful Empty Homes website can't keep up with the latest high-end residential property deals and the crisis is also plaguing the Eastside. The City may be mulling a wiki-registry of empty houses and condos but this tell-on-your-neighbours scheme may just add fuel to the fire.

A masked Spock commands attention at one of many houses slated for demolition outside the King Edward Canada Line station. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

The alienating effect of walking by blocks of empty homes is seen in the writing on the wall. It is there in the masked Spock and other super-hero mashups that adorn the boarded-up exteriors of several houses near the King Edward Canada Line station. Like graffiti art, the houses are here today, gone tomorrow. In two years this corner -- and every two-block stretches radiating from all of the city's rapid transit stations -- will be transformed into homes that are not rented out and that most people who use that transit couldn't afford anyway.

I don't mourn the loss of those sprawling old ranchers; they're an inefficient use of city land. I worry about losing the street art, when every last residential development has been exploited and the bland luxurious uniformity will deter diverse forms of artistic expression.

As if we need any evidence of the relevance, interest and proliferation of unauthorized street art, almost 9,000 images tagged 'vancouvergraffiti' have been uploaded to Instagram (at this writing). There's even an app for that, Curb, created by three former UBC students who envisioned an evolving street-art wiki-gallery. (Spot some local work in Curb's promotional video, below.)

Only when the art is sanctioned do we get a glimpse of some of the particularly artistic street murals, like in this time-lapse video of Ilya Viryachev, a rising star in Vancouver's animation industry. I'm holding out hope that the hundreds of digital artists moving into the new Microsoft and Imageworks headquarters (beside the Vancouver Art Gallery) this month will share some of their talent outside their new downtown digs.

Time is ripe for Occupy Neighbourhood movement

4/24/2015

One of a handful of Vancouver's 'country lanes' from a 2002 pilot projects. (Photo: Ben Nelms for National Post)

And yet.

And yet there is nothing like an untenable situation to spark a creative response. There is evidence of it in the spaces between, beyond, behind, or otherwise outside the scope of authority. You see it in neighbourhood back alleys and in the gaps between buildings all over the world: small, bold, personal gestures. It may start with a graffiti tag (I was here, The Man can stuff it) and evolve into jaw-dropping unauthorized artworks. It may start with that one condo-dweller with no outdoor space who drags a chair down to the street to do some sketching or practise guitar. Last year some folks down the block put out a table at the corner park and had a sit-down neighbours’ potluck dinner. Down another block is a Country Lane, one of just a handful of alleys transformed into a garden-like thoroughfare in a pilot project with the City back in 2002.

Day after destruction: Giant doily on the bulldozed community gardens in Kitsilano (Carlyn Yandle photo)

And so it has come to pass. Where bloom-perfumed weeknight evenings in spring normally draw out elderly food-growers, young adults on after-class dog walks, tots trying out their new walking legs and commuter-runners with backpacks now there is barely a soul. “It’s so futile,” a neighbour said, hands on hips and gazing around at the remnant plant-bits fighting for traction in the bulldozer tracks. “This is just big male egos at work.”

My community, like all Vancouver communities increasingly hemmed in by one glassy, luxury edifice after another, is under threat of becoming no place in particular.

Living directly across the street from a swath of rubble, I think about the Field of Dreams line, “If you build it they will come.” Except in the case of the formerly thriving community gardens obliterated by CP Rail last month, it’s more, “If you destroy it, they will vamoose.”

Vancouver's downtown alleys are typically sketchy, soulless spaces. (Photo: Jonathan Hayward , Canadian Press)

These small acts are claims on our community. There’s nothing like an obliterated cherished social space to make us rethink this expectation that city planners or developers or Translink or the provincial government will make our corners of the world livable. That’s up to us. It requires a little courage and some questioning of authority. It may involve a little risk and the understanding that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.

Livable Laneways has taken on the west alley on Main Street north of Broadway, with various temporary installations and community events.

This is how I came to move a couple of wrought iron chairs from my deck to the acres of dead dirt across the street. I wanted to see if they would be confiscated or destroyed. Instead, they’re being used, to rest for a spell, to soak up the rays, to down a beer. It’s a small act but even two empty chairs are an invitation, a potential conversation.

I’ve been researching creative ways to carve out social spaces in the face of the residential-investment spree that’s taken over Vancouver. Even in the tightest spaces -- or especially in the tightest spaces – humanity can grow and thrive. From the thinnest walkway container gardens in Kyoto to a laneway festival in one of our city’s dumpster-blighted back alley, there is potential in occupying a lost space.

Don’t just say something; sit there.

A laneway in Melbourne, Australia (Photo by Corbis via traveller.com.au)

Compelling art all part of the protest

11/28/2014

The war in the woods is heating up again. Except it's not the people against forestry giants MacMillan-Bloedel or Fletcher Challenge; on this day it's Kinder Morgan.

Yagis Eating an Oil Tanker by Ian Reid Nusi. (Photo by Christopher Glawe)

Oil-pipeline officials are doing their best to try to shape protestors at Burnaby Mountain these past weeks as a small group of environmentalist wackos. Meanwhile, the movement is growing. And so is the art.

Marshall McLuhan said, "Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it." And that's what I think about when I see this work by Ian Reid Nusi. Yup, that would be an oil tanker in that sea monster's mouth, carved in response to the prospect of the Northern Gateway oil pipeline moving tar sands diluted bitumen to the coast and onto tankers. (Artist interview clip below)

Environmental protests have shaped this province, and some important artworks have been a part of that.

Wallace's CP IV, 1993-95, 178 x 300 cm (from Canadian Art magazine)

It's in Ian Wallace's large-scale photo collage murals (reconfirmed as important works five years later in Canadian Art magazine).

His plywood patterns interrupt the protest images from the summer of 1993, the height of the fight to save Clayoquot Sound, the largest unlogged temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island. About 800 protestors were arrested and carted away, while Wallace created a whole new way of seeing art, protest and the role and position of the visual artist.

Wallace's artworks endure, and also serve as a reminder to those who view them in galleries that what multinational corporation spin-doctors would like to refer to as a green-y lunatic fringe is actually a large and diverse population of British Columbians who are willing to inconvenience themselves for the sake of protecting the oceans or the last of the great rainforests.

Headwaters of the Stein, B.C., August 1988 (from tonionley.com)

Toni Onley has been in there too. As part of the large protest to protect the Stein Valley from logging, he organized a plan to fly in well-established artists to the vital watershed area to paint their impressions, with sales going to help the campaign to save it from a plan for the Mitsubishi company to log the old growth for disposable chopsticks.

Onley, who died in 2004, recalled painting a watercolour in support of a Stein cultural centre while “Chief Perry Redon, the chairman of the Lilloet Tribal Council... beat his drum and sang to the four quarters. I was inspired and soon we had a watercolour for the Stein poster….”

Ken Wu photo by T.J. Watt (tjwatt.com)

Many paintings of the beauty of the protested areas of the Stein, the Carmanah Valley, Clayoquot Sound helped fund the continuing protest, and today form important collections and are captured in coffee table books like Carmanah: Artistic Visions of an Ancient Rainforest.

But there's nothing like a compelling photograph to bring the stark reality of the protest home.

T.J. Watt's photo of Ken Wu, the Ancient Forest Alliance’s executive director, sits atop a massive red cedar stump in the Upper Walbran Valley on Vancouver Island. The photo earns its place as an important visual of the struggle to retain a small portion of the natural environment, but its place is also determined by this image that is forceful in its subject of scale and a unique moment in time.

Shawn Hunt's Untitled, 2013

The Kinder Morgan survey crew has to be out of Burnaby Mountain in a few days, but the protests against the transport of a dirty, risky diluted bitumen in lieu of real government investment in clean energy sources has just begun.

It's there on the faces of the growing protestors, and in the art that's growing along with it. And sometimes, as in this surrealist portrait by Shawn Hunt, it's in the faces in the art.

This is the history of environmental struggle in this corner of the world, and part of the history of art, too.

Down on your drawing? break out at Vancouver Draw Down

6/13/2014

Remember when you were a kid you knew you could give a drawing as a present to any adult and that adult would love it, even though you would definitely not like a drawing-present yourself?

It's one of those things that separates the kids from the adults. You know you're a fully formed adult when you understand that the piece of paper a kid hands up to you is not a cheap excuse for a real gift but carries the priceless traces of free-spirited play.

Consider this drawing of some figures in hats and gloves on a baseball diamond. The scribbles reveal that this five-year-old artist was fully engaged in the parameters of the game. But the happiness radiating from this drawing is not in the smiles on those figures' faces as in the engagement in the act of drawing. This is not a picture of felt pen marks on a piece of paper but a kid fully immersed in the idea, working out the positions, the scale, the action. He clearly started by filling the space with a diamond then plotting in his players, revising as he went, probably singing or making voices of the players as he drew.

Now consider this unhappy drawing of, ironically, a McHappy Meal. This was a still-life school assignment, not a whim. I laboured over every drop of condensation on the takeout cup. The fries resemble lumber. Every layer in the cheeseburger and crack in the bun is accounted for. This drawing reveals the opposite of the free hand; it is the hand imprisoned by adult expectations of what constitutes a proper Drawing.

Now sketching, I do that all the time, but that's just for figuring stuff out, just for me. Kind of like the baseball drawing.

Getting into or getting back into drawing for the fun of it is the whole point of the annual Vancouver Draw Down, culminating this Saturday all over town. This is not a competition, there are no grades; this is a chance to play with mark-making and be inspired by the creative ways drawing can happen. The fifth annual event takes its cue from the world's biggest drawing event, The Big Draw in the UK, part of the Campaign for Drawing, "a charity that raises the profile of drawing as a tool for thought, creativity, social, and cultural engagement," according to its website. (See YouTube video at bottom on why drawing matters.)

A few of the many ways to play Saturday, for all ages and experience, and with no registration required:

• Seabus Intervention (9 am - 5 pm): For the price of a ticket for the seabus, passengers are invited to use a Vancouver transit map to "create their own lines, routes and configurations."

• Costume Design Illustration (10 am - 2 pm): Head to the Arts Club Granville Island Stage rehearsal hall for a free four-hour session that explores illustration techniques, lead by pro costume designer Sheila White.

A detail from Marian Penner Bancroft's newly installed Boulevard.

• Time/Line Artstarts (10 am - 4 pm): Downtown at Artstarts Gallery ("the first in Canada devoted exclusively to young people's art") it's all about time-based collaborative drawing experiments.

• Boulevard Station, Yaletown-Roundhouse Station (noon - 4 pm): Trace the winter tree patterns of artist Marian Penner Bancroft's newly commissioned installation Boulevard and be a part of a collective drawing collage.

Download this file to print out a passport, get it stamped from at least two events, for chances at art-related prizes.

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.

***
Richard Tetrault's murals can be seen in the flesh with the help of the interactive maps in this self-guided Eastside Mural Tour.

Art trumps ads by just a whisper

11/1/2013

They say if you want someone's attention, whisper. Or maybe that was just a line from a Whisper pantyhose commercial back in the '70s.

Whispering to get attention isn't easy in an image-packed urban landscape where slick marketing messages infiltrate our entire field of vision, from pop-up ads on our screens to the clutter of billboards.

There's so much of it that we subconsciously absorb, dismiss then ignore each image as we move through the visual bombardment. And we wonder why we're mentally exhausted at the end of the day.

That's what makes the experience of public artwork in the city landscape so compelling. No call to buy or to back a product or political organization or private enterprise. With no aspirational words (Believe! Passion! Simplify!) or branded images, logos, phrases or text of any kind to cue our automatic-piloted brain to overlook the visual image, a slight confusion sets in. Whoa. What the hell is that?

First comes the double-take, then out comes the smart-phone camera. The proof of the attention-grabbing power of commercial-free artwork on the city environment can be measured by the number of similar google images. You'd be hard pressed to find that Telus panda ad on a Flicker photo stream, but you'll run across multiple images of a single public artwork, like this giant macrame-esque installation created by Jasminka Miletic-Prelovac, at the only tall building (for now) at Main and Broadway. Or Edward Burtynsky's images on Pattison billboards (spotted along West 4th Avenue, below).

These message-free images that appropriate buildings and billboards are enough to compel viewers to investigate further. Turns out Miletic-Prelovac's work was this year's commission to highlight the livable laneways movement. And Burtynsky's images are from his latest book and new documentary, Watermark.

No logos. No brands. No text. These are whispers that can create a small roar.

More strange bedfellows: quilts and graffiti

8/16/2013

This is my new favourite colour box, a delicious array of cans of Montana spraypaint. All packed up to take to my largest quilt project to date.

Now I finally get my chance to do what I've been dreaming of for years: blanketing a big, blank white concrete wall with a colourful quilt of triangles — with permission and for the long term, for a change. (My previous secret adventures in unauthorized craft-tagging in the public sphere were painted out within weeks.)

How a quilt will read when spraypainted on a concrete wall I have no idea. I've googled images using 'quilt' and 'graffiti' and 'mural' and haven't found any spraypainted quilts — at least, none that were created specifically with quilts in mind.

Quilts composed of freeform blocks and vibrant colours inspire.

My main challenge, besides enduring working under a respirator for about the same number of hours it takes me to make a queen-sized quilt, is ensuring that the field of bright colours and simple geometry doesn't scream 'daycare centre. ' The colour and pattern choices make all the difference between creating a one-dimensional jumble of happy triangles with what I'm really trying to achieve here: a three-dimensional appearance and a vibrating, discordant colourway, some element of surprise, a reason for the eye to take a lingering second look.

I'll get the 'why' part overwith here: This media mash-up of the visual of tactile, comforting quilts and the harsh process of spraypainting concrete infrastructure stems from my compulsion to visually link the personal with the public, the domestic with the industrial, the feminine with the masculine. Enough said.

One risk in translating quilts into spraypaint is losing textural and pattern details.

But the excitement (mixed with a little fear) about this undertaking is in the risk involved.

Unlike putting together a quilt, which is pretty much pre-planned (all the fun is in choosing the colour and pattern and the rest is pretty much mechanical, which is why so many quilts are started but abandoned), the spraypaint process is additive and more open-ended. It could all go sideways. Or it could emerge as something entirely unexpected and new.

One of several of my early painting sketches for the project.

Hopefully this will turn out to be the best of both distinct worlds: the pleasing geometry and colour-play of quilts and all their cozy references mixed with the hard-surface, large-scale properties of murals made by spraypaint-wielding graffiti artists.

I'm in the thick of it now, relying heavily on my experience making complex quilts to reduce the intimidating scale of the job. It's all about focusing in, taking it on one block at a time, trying not to think about the work ahead. Eating that elephant one bite at a time.

Day 1: Facing the fear of the unknown, in full respirator.

Things that make me go ahhhhhh....

5/9/2011

I was walking out of a Seattle Value Village, defeated (damn you Capitol Hill hipsters) on just another steel-grey Wet Coast day when I was hit by shards of colour on concrete.

Instead of simply preserving the old painted signage from Days of Yore, art interrupts, giving this warehouse-turned-lofts surface something else to say.

I’m sure the combo of individuals and business owners who funded the Monique Mural was encouraged by the graffiti-deterrent factor, especially given that the guys who tackled the wall in the fall of 2008 are local veterans of that medium.

It’s the attractive, disruptive, stimulating, irreverent, pretty and pretty disturbing patterning that had me at hello. Laying it all over the ghost markings of an antiquated economy heightens the hyper-accelerated world viewed in flashes and fragments.

I'd like to see a little more of that kind of fresh, bold reflection here in the Most Livable City in the Universe.