Category: Network

Public art is not decoration; it's a thoughtful disruptor

12/16/2015

'Lighthouse', commissioned by the Burrard Arts Foundation for Lumiere Festival 2015. Carlyn Yandle photo

As I was wrapping bolts of fabric around the Haywood Bandstand across from English Bay last Friday, a few intrepid dog-walkers approached me, shouting over the gale-force winds and all basically asking the same question: Why?

As much as I wanted to reply, 'Why not?' that's a bit glib. There's no why involved; it came about by asking the question, "What if?" Instead I told the dog-walkers, "It's for the Lumiere Festival." Some seemed relieved to learn that I wasn't mothballing the bandstand forever.

By the end of the day, and despite the hot colours and textures created in that dark park, I could detect some distrust in this project. Public art raises more questions than answers, and in this corner of the world, that can lead to some unease.

The 'why' response to public art always interests me. People need reasons, answers.

Cluster, for the City of Richmond, 2014. Carlyn Yandle photo

When I designed Cluster, the bright aluminum tubes that seem to extrude from the last guideway of the Canada Line in downtown Richmond, there was a lot of 'why's. There was even a chorus of 'why's' following the installation of the Network social-engagement project (below) at the Vancouver Art Gallery earlier this month.

I have to pick my replies carefully. Answers like, "Because it made you look", "Because it made you feel different" or "Because it made you ask questions" are greeted with annoyance. But that's the truth of the matter. These are not decorations or marketing tools but objects that hopefully lead to new ideas, new conversations.

We are a young city in the middle of a growing spurt and we're not comfortable with all the changes. But already we are beginning to shed our adolescent awkwardness and at some point we will mature into a great, well-rounded metropolis that embraces our ever-changing, diverse cultural landscape and points of view.

What if I was part of it?

'Network', created with Debbie Tuepah, at the Vancouver Art Gallery, December 2015. Carlyn Yandle photo

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Mammoth social sculpture going up at Draw Down event

6/5/2015

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I'm not knocking social media. Hitting 'Like' to one posted act of injustice after another is nothing like joining a sit-in at your MP's office or marching in protest. But I also get that there is power in those tweets and online petitions. We saw it this week when Tim Hortons decided it had had enough bad press and was breaking its ad deal with Enbridge.

Still, there's a lot we lose by going through life connecting with one another mostly via screen-pecking 'like' or tweeting or 'gramming. We are, after all, a social species; our well-being is dependent on sharing space in the actual physical world. Consider this: If someone took away your ability to connect on social media you might get seriously miffed. If you were allowed unlimited social media access but had to connect in physical isolation from all other humans, you might get seriously unhinged.

Early days of the Network. Photo by Debbie Tuepah

There is something profoundly healthy about being around the energy of other people. It's the why for clubs and associations, parties and gatherings. And it's the why behind the Network sculpture/social engagement project.

Artist Debbie Tuepah and I came up with the idea just a few years after the birth of Twitter and Facebook, and within a year of the debut of Instagram and Pinterest. We felt a need to create a physical alternative to all this virtual social networking — some low-barrier, small-footprint way to bring people together. Something that would be collaborative but less skill-based than, say, a quilting bee, but offering similar tactile engagement.

This thread of an idea soon joined other threads: the materials should be found/donated and should be the stuff that ordinarily ends up in a landfill. Synthetic, petroleum-based fabrics and sheeting would do the trick. (No one knows what to do with those lurid-coloured Fortrel bedspreads and vinyl shower curtains.)

The more people work on it, the more visually interesting it becomes.

We cleared the decks and hung several strands from a hook in the studio ceiling, like I did as a kid when making those macrame plant hangers. We added one strand to another by simple knotting. We held parties and invited friends to bring their friends to tie one on. Kids got knotty and businessmen who thought the whole thing a little weird at first were soon weaving free-style.

We knew we were onto something. A year later it made its public debut at the Mini Maker Faire at the PNE, where it grew into the gargantuan piece it is today.

The Network is too big for any studio parties now. This mammoth collaborative sculpture demands the kind of space like the Atrium of the Mount Pleasant community centre, where it will be suspended on Saturday, June 20, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. as part of the city-wide Draw Down event.

Come on down, tie one on, grab a thread and take part in this social medium in the actual, physical world.

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Next stop on writers' blog tour is this space

9/26/2014

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Arleigh Wood

A few weeks back, Vancouver artist-blogger Arleigh Wood asked me if I would be willing to catch the baton on an ongoing, international writers' blog tour. I'm bullish on all collaborative, non-monetizing projects involving social media so I agreed to devote one column to answering the four questions, then passing the baton myself.

Dispensing with the urge to apologize for making this all about My Process, here goes:

What are you working on?

I’ve just finished up a public artwork in Richmond, and finished writing about it, too, so I’m looking forward to re-joining the world beyond this all-consuming project. On my good days I see this as the ‘fallow’ period, when I can absorb, research, reflect, rest and socialize. Other days I see this as my ‘unemployed’ period. What I’m really working on is this idea that ‘working’ is not synonymous with ‘getting paid.’ The weekly blog — I still call this thing a column — provides structure and requires that I get out there and get informed and involved. My journalism career conditioned me to write, on deadline, and regularly. Now it’s become an unconditional part of my creative process.

Why do you do what you do?

A couple of days ago I heard a radio interview in which the guest musician said something to the effect of: “Artists can’t help themselves. They do what they have to do.” I relate to that strongly. I will do just the bare minimum of cooking, cleaning, visiting, caretaking, or travelling to buy myself more time to make. I was the kid in the classroom whose only question about the in-class assignment was, “After we do this can we go to the arts and crafts corner?” The leopard really does not change its spots.

How does your creative process work?

I used to write for a living, then make on my off hours, which sustained me for many years but at some point I knew that when it was financially possible I would have to flip the priorities. I loved the community-building that happens through reporting and writing but I was so creatively spent at the end of the day the best I could do was follow directions by Martha Stewart. I started resenting the fact that I was basically selling all my creative energy. Now I make first, write later. I still need the writing, though, because it leads to more making. That really begins with a compulsion, a need to quell my anxiety. Repetitive, often laborious work is a kind of meditation. With my muscles and motor skills engaged in a pattern of movement or a set of gestures, my brain is free to roam. Often I don’t know at the onset what I’m making but it reveals itself, the way fiction writers often talk about how they will introduce a character then watch that character develop. My making opens up possibilities for new explorations and ideas.

What makes your work/blog unique?

Charting the blogoshphere (from datamining.typepad.com)

I have trouble with the concept of uniqueness. I see my work as a small act of participation indicative of our unique social species, one buzzy speck in the hive. I blog to take full advantage of the free opportunity (for now) to participate in the larger conversation, by sharing visually and through the written word. I am not driven by a need to amass followers or accumulate hits but more by a compulsion to create a personal record of developing creative process and culture. It may just dissolve into the ether, or maybe it will be added to the social record but at least no trees were sacrificed in the process.

Who would you like to pass the blogging baton to?

Leanne Prain is another Vancouver-based maker/writer combo and the author of the newly published Strange Material: Storytelling Through Textiles; Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti (co-authored with Mandy Moore) and Hoopla: The Art of Unexpected Embroidery. She blogs about crafts (especially textiles) and the people who make them, design, art, urbanism, publishing, and her writing life. She also does public speaking and leads workshops.

Meet Ms. Prain in person at  Hot Wet Art City gallery on Tuesday, Oct. 7, 7:30 p.m. when she and fellow authors Betsy Greer and Kim Piper Werker tackle “The Intersection of Craft, Creativity, & Activism.”

Linking over to you, Leanne.

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Makers get respect they deserve at Mini Maker Faire

6/26/2012

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Artist friend and Maker Faire participant Rachael Ashe

In his speech to graduates of Toronto’s York University this month, one of my favourite journalists, CBC Radio’s Michael Enright, advised the next working generation to “learn how to fix something. Or make something using your hands.” Three years earlier, in his inaugural address, U.S. President Obama noted that it’s “the doers, the makers of things” who have contributed to a functional society, not “those that prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.”

It’s a refreshing, recurring theme, after decades of popular thought that “making” lives in the shadow of that all-important exception of making money, or is relegated to the realm of hobby.

We life-long makers often find we have to defend the attention we spend on learning our craft, acquiring our skills. These things take time, and in the absence of any formal training we will carve out space wherever we can. For me, it was about escaping the classroom to papier-mache a bottle (or cut out giant tissue-paper flowers or silkscreen T-shirts or turn clay bowls) then escaping the office to stitch bed quilts (or build chests or reupholster furniture or braid rugs) until I finally allowed myself to make space for full-time making.

This is why I was in my element as part of Vancouver’s second annual Mini Maker Faire last weekend, a convergence of maker-geeks at the Forum building in Hastings Park in East Van. From weaving to robotics, this is my kind of place. Part market, part installation, part classroom, the real value is in what you know or can learn, not what you have or can buy.

This was the perfect spot to install our Network, a chaotic, collaborative, ongoing public artwork that is simple enough for anyone to add to it. For two days, people tied/braided/knotted/wove/wound strips of synthetic fabrics to the web/maze/forest/snarl, and in the process got the opportunity to connect with others who are naturally drawn to working with their hands. Little boys escaped into imaginary worlds under the sculpture. Bigger girls braided and chatted in groups of twos and threes. We thought we would be spending the two days coaxing visitors to participate by explaining the purpose and function of this random, ongoing fibre sculpture, but it clearly wasn’t necessary. Making is quite enough for anyone drawn to an event like this.

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'The Thing' is bigger than our original idea

12/28/2011

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It's alive — and threatening to take over. Since one of my studio-mates and I started our own Social Network (working title) a couple of months back the thing has become The Thing that won't be ignored. It hangs heavily on a few ceiling hooks, on the verge of consuming what little space the three of us share. All those strands of plastic and poly stretch and strain with the weight of the project — and we're only in month 3.

The Network has been the focus of more than a few get-togethers and parties, as people pick up strands that have been left hanging by others, work them in with other strands, or back into the core, or leave them to dangle like unfinished sentences. The bits worked up by Boomer businessmen are re-incorporated by tweener girls or pulled in new directions by musicians and grandmothers, bankers and artists. And as the thing grows, conversations are born, moving as randomly as the twists and braids that move the Network in new, knotty directions.

Soon we will have no choice but to move the behemoth, hopefully to one of the many empty nearby retail storefronts for our next Social Networking open house. With more people creating tangents upon tangents, the initial concept is becoming a many tentacled movement. There is some debate on whether we should find some unified core idea, or let chaos reign.

It's a fitting project for 2012, which happens to be the United Nations Year of the Co-operatives. The Thing is morphing into a manifestation of all the waste and the excess of global competition that lies in the wake of a new wave of co-operation and collaboration, mobilized by necessity. The Thing, this Network, takes up room, gathers up scraps, and presents the possibility that something good can come of all the wreckage when we hang together for a while.

Maybe the Thing should be called Octupy.

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Public art is not decoration; it's a thoughtful disruptor

Mammoth social sculpture going up at Draw Down event

Next stop on writers' blog tour is this space

Makers get respect they deserve at Mini Maker Faire

'The Thing' is bigger than our original idea

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