writings - carlyn yandle

Gritty beauty seen in foundations of this pretty city

2/28/2017

It feels like the Internet has killed the fun of taking snapshots of beautiful cities and people. So many times over the last four months in Mexico I've raised my camera (phone) to capture an impressive bronze sculpture or some baroque church facade then thought: This is pointless. A Google-image search with a few key words (Guanajuato, musicians, Don Quixote, Pipila) would produce hundreds of better-quality stock photos. We're saturated in instagrammable images. I miss those old pocket travel photo albums.

This might explain all the selfie sticks threatening to take your eye out in the crowded plazas on any given night here; putting yourself in the picture with all the famous stuff behind will guarantee a unique photo.

So I have very little in terms of a photographic record for my time here. Every view of the strolling musicians in the plazas, or the teenage girls decked in ballgowns for their quinceanera (debut) parties, the food vendors, the street singers dressed in Renaissance-style hose and puffed velvet jackets are already done. So done.

Then last week I finally started to see that the one signature-Guanajuato element that I've been captivated by is actually a worthy photo subject: the retaining walls that barely seem to be holding back the jumble of colourful, cubic houses clinging to the surrounding hills.

There's a compelling visual story in those layers of peeling paint on crumbling plaster on adobe bricks stacked on crudely cut limestone foundations. The traces of human activity in one section of wall speaks to the human habitation in this city that has its roots in the 1500s. It's quite a study in social history and handwork, an unplanned, almost invisible beauty, especially to a tourist whose port town of Vancouver has been replaced by a gleaming, pristine city of glass.

I'm seeing them as found abstracts, images of unintentional collages and mixed-media works by generations of people who work with their hands.

everyday video footage — with a conceptual twist

7/18/2014

Now that we're all carrying around the equivalent of movie cameras and photo-editing studios in our pockets and purses we are each potential blockbuster or documentary filmmakers, iMovie-ing and uploading all of life's activities that have become performative acts.

YouTube boasts 100 hours of video uploaded every minute but like digital photography devalued the actual, tactile photo album, the bombardment of everyday video footage has reduced the essential beauty of the captured moving image. What was once the miracle of the moving image is now a lot of space-hogging files we fail to manage well.

Shooting video is as easy as a screen swipe, but finding the art in what's being shot has created genres of filmmaking that surely has the Spielbergs, Lucases and Coppolas included in the one billion viewers glued to YouTube every month.

I'm addicted to capturing the cute moments of every kid in my life, but with everyone else filming countless hours of other moments of those same kids, I'm fully aware that my shots of kids at dinner, kids playing catch, kids dressing up, kids watching the World Cup, kids rolling out pizza dough, kids acting in skits, and kids with other kids may carry little value or interest in 20 years. More likely, we'll all be using some new interface model by then and all our .MOV and M4v files will be too obsolete to translate. Or iCloud and Google Cloud and all the other cloud-like storage systems will crash in a great grid-locking e-storm and I'll have nothing left to show for all my years of hunchy running around the perimeters of play.

8 Days, 2013, installation at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite. Photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery

What will remain is a new way of seeing, understanding and playing with moving images of the everyday. It's why the plastic-bag-in-the-wind scene from American Beauty still sticks in the head. It's why Mark Lewis' real-time videos of landmarks and laundromats resonated with the public when they were screened over the winter at the Vancouver Art Gallery's Offsite (top).

For me, it's a new kind of sketching (see above) that is not made for public viewing but for my own reference. For what remains to be seen. (YouTube vid, above)

Below, some other inspiring videos of the everyday seen with a fresh and critical eye:

Words are not enough to capture the seduction of distraction

6/6/2014

Distracts #1, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

To me, the easiest part about carving out a place in the visual arts world is writing something about it. Yet most of my artist colleagues don't know how I make myself do it on a weekly basis. Easy. It only took 20 years of deadline writing for newspapers.

'Easiest' isn't quite the right word; it's more like 'reliable.' I can rely on the fact that if I sit down at a blank screen, soon words will link into sentences, inspired and connected by images. It's really just a habit at this point. If I don't get the chance to try to make literal sense of the past week, things start to swirl up into a ball of confusion. But once it's out there, it's done and I can move on.

Distracts #2, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

If only my days at my shared studio were as reliable. I wish I could start the morning with the same confidence as I stare at the freshly gesso'd blank canvas, and have the same conversation I get from writing a column (okay, blog). The two sides of my brain do not dance together at the studio. I do not enjoy the small eureka moments of understanding, or any great leaps forward in concept. And unlike weekly writing, I can't see that I'm creating any history of my process/progress.

Distracts #3, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

Some days I feel like I'm just painting myself into corners, or cycling back to where I started months ago. I often need to call in the reinforcements — artist friends — for a studio visit, when I ask, "Am I flat-lining here?" or "Am I a one-trick pony?"

But words work for me. Letters soon coalesce into strands of ideas and at the moment of this writing I see one taking shape as I type, and drop in these images of my latest paintings.

Distracts #4, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

This much I know is true: This is the most distractive time in human history and I live in a neighbourhood that is arguably the nation's capital of everything yoga. As I ride to the studio, I'm generally pre-occupied with this idea of the swelling dedication to personal, meditative practice juxtaposed with the seduction of our screens and the growing realization that our personal identities can be stolen in a click of a button.

Distracts #5, 2014, acrylic on panel, 14"W x 16"H.

I think about how we crave peace of mind and heart but are captivated by the fantastic and unfathomable, packaged in high-def or in 3-D, with same-day shipping, something to Like, Share, Tweet, and post to Instagram/Tumblr/Pinterest.

Some days at the studio I just need to retreat, retrace past meditative practices, like lace-making. Other days I need to represent the fracturing of that focus.

If painting really is a conversation the painter has with the materials, surface, technique and image, I'm seeing that this is talking about mapping out an understanding of the here and now, where words fail.

Distracts #6, 2014, acrylic on panel, 16"W x 20"H.

It's somewhere in the uneasy spaces between the digital and the handmade, the personal craft expression and the art and decor industry.

Put into words, it's a little terrifying to be in unexplored territory with no obvious path ahead.

I'm just bush-wacking, looking for a clearing.

inspiration found at accountant's office

4/25/2014

With the same anticipation as a root canal I plopped down in a chair at the accountant's office. Then gasped and pointed, then tried not to point at the adjacent bookcase stuffed with client files.
The accountant flipped through my own paperwork. I flipped out my phone and hit the camera app while nodding vaguely.

Carlyn Yandle photo

You can have your heli-skiing, your chemically-enhanced club nights, your YouTubed jack-assery; my exhilaration comes from being confronted by these breathtaking visual moments. The effect is enhanced by the purity of the completely uncontrived art object or visual field in its incongruous environment.

Never mind this delicious chrome-y palette that is simply a coded filing system; the whole filing...uh, object radiates with the yearly summations of individuals' spending and earnings, losses and gains that mean everything and nothing. Each colour-bound bundle evokes the stress of tax filing, of legitimizing one's existence, of facing up to the obligation of submitting and committing and remitting, of coming clean or engaging in some white-collar-cheating — or of the quiet shame in not managing to do this whole filing thing on one's own. (That can't just be me.)

All that emotional intensity bundled and stacked and gridded is powerful stuff, but it also feels old timey, almost nostalgic now that we are squinting at the brightly-coded visual depictions in the dawn of big data. The non-object colour fields of information are persuasive and invasive, even in my own studio work. (Below: two paintings in the developing Fabrications series of acrylic on canvas.)

Digital imagery may boast sophisticated information (and limitless space) but the overstuffed file-pile at the accountant's resonates with heft, weight and compression. It's also heavy with 'the hand': the human activity of handling files, cases, persons.

Everything is awesome, as the kids insist on singing post-Lego Movie. But the relentless data-scene enhances other accidental art objects that are in opposition to lurid digital fields. I get the same visual slam when I see it in the concrete cracks between the glass condo towers, or, below, somehow blooming where they are not planted under an off-ramp and against a sub-station wall.

Carlyn Yandle photo

These filigree moments of respite also manage to infuse their way into my own work, quite unconsciously. It is only in hindsight that I see the impact of these accidental artworks. (See Grey Lace, below and a video documenting the making of this painting.)

Another lesson in the notion that art makes the artist.

Grey Lace, 2014, Carlyn Yandle, acrylic on canvas, 50" x 40"

QR button blanket: Epic fail or a larger reading?

3/21/2014

After three months of sewing one donated button after another into a giant QR code, the big moment arrived this week: time to stand back and scan that baby with a reader app, translating this quilt-thing to read, "The devil is in the details."

Except it didn't read. Don't panic!, I thought, then spent the entire next day working with a photo image of the QR Button Blanket, Photoshopping in more buttons and darker buttons and bigger buttons, trying to add the minimum amount of density for the software program to register the pattern and work its magic to produce the punchline. No luck; even a sliver of white in one button cluster puts a wrench in the wholecloth works. I filed this one under the category of Epic Fail, not worth finishing it as intended, framing it in black bias binding. I do not want to create something that is 'still' good; I want the thing to be good, full stop.

Failure demands confronting the why. Why conceive such a laborious, risky project in the first place? Why endure the painstaking process when half-way through it was becoming abundantly clear that this was not going to 'read'?

But there is another power here, and that's tied to the process beyond the product. The achievement may lie in the endurance (in an increasingly A.D.D. world) that is not necessarily attached to the product after all. It may be in seeing it through, without the promise of a sure result. The power may lie in the humble, everyday materials and the community of women who contributed all those bits of plastic saved from the waste stream. (There should really be a global ban on production of billions of plastic buttons. Plant-based plastic, bone, wood, and leather- or fabric-wrapped tin buttons eventually return to the earth.)

But what's really starting to click in for me is the cultural reference of this button-grid design. A decade ago, it might have been viewed as an oddly arranged colour field or an abstracted grid but we're so acclimatized to codes that the pattern begs to be 'read.' The fact that this is irresolvable might be annoying. And that's interesting.

Wavy Gravy, marker on synthetic velvet, 58" x 43"

The possible multiple references could be more engaging than the one answer provided by a QR reader app. There's something to be learned in the discomfort of the open-endedness.

Moments like these, I seek out the artists who have embraced what New York artist Polly Apfelbaum calls the 'tough beauty' of visually exciting works that incorporate everyday materials in surprising ways. Apfelbaum, who calls herself a bad crafter, articulates the process of hard work in this video.

"I work all the time," she says, without a schedule and in a highly experimental way. "You make the work and then you hope for the best."

"It's very important to get your fuck-you back."

I'm going with that.

when dress-up becomes an artform

10/18/2013

Thank god for The Walking Dead. It is the one force that has the power to kill off the overpopulation of pink princesses.

All that Pepto-Bismol-hued froth and glitter kicks in my gag reflex but I'm no censor; I've indulged in the princess fantasy of those little girls (and, shockingly, some grown women) for too many years to mention. But there is hope. Pink fatigue appears to have set in this year, at least for Halloween, due, no doubt, to the craze for the undead.

Next battle: the pink aisle.

Princesses and stupid Sexy costumes (popular YouTube clip at the end of this rant) are a waste of a great fantasy opportunity — and an art opportunity.

American photographer Cindy Sherman's long and rich career dedicated to using her body as a blank canvas on which to apply various female personas, makes her an artist of an ever-changing body-sculpture, earning her an important position in conceptual art, performance art, and gender studies.

There's a lot of concept to be mined when altering one's appearance, whether for art or undercover information. Former New York Times restaurant reviewer Ruth Reichl, who donned disguises to ensure she would be treated as a regular restaurant patron, discovered that her different range of personas garnered different reaction from the wait staff. That body effect became equally as interesting as her reviews, and even more so to many of her readers.

Buenos Aires photographer Irena Werning explores the persona of the past, recreating photos of subjects using their own childhood images. She not only recreates the pose and garments, but goes to great lengths to mimic the backdrops and particular photo quality of the original image. Werning insists she has no arching concept in mind in her two-part series, but the effect is there in black and white or colour: a riveting time-based visual study in changes in body and persona.

Above: Christoph 1990 and 2011, Berlin Wall.

From a five-year-old's paintbrush to my soul

9/20/2013

What movie first rocked your world?, someone asked during a recent dinner with friends. Easy: 2001: A Space Odyssey, said one. Looking for Mr. Goodbar, said another, clearly remembering her fear.

Mine was The Wizard of Oz. Never mind the munchkins and the flying monkeys; I was captivated by the black-and-white horror of the dustbowl twister, the gleaming-gold yellow brick road, the brilliant glassy cluster on the horizon that was the first glimpse of Emerald City.

So when my nearly-six nephew, also a bit of an obsessive Wizard of Oz movie fan, showed me his latest paintings, all I could think of is: I feel you.

I look at the thick column of furious grey strokes going in all directions and immediately zone into his own fearful recollections of that part in the movie as he attacked the paper. That ability to connect the intensity of feeling by the maker to the viewer is the basis of successful art. Wow, I said. I can really feel that.

I was thinking how great it would be to feel the twister myself, using ink on hand-pressed paper and maybe actual dust, while he trotted back to the kitchen and retrieved Yellow Brick Road. The field was filled entirely with almost mechanical vertical strokes in different shades of orange, yellow and gold, with intersecting strokes to form a grid that ran off the paper, suggesting an endlessness.

Wow, I said again, thinking already how it might look actual road-size, using rollers on stretched canvas.

Back he went, returning with Emerald City, and by then I knew this kid was really onto something. Unlike his drawings, which are these days more narratives involving figures and recalled landscapes, or — my current favourite: a bird's eye view of a baseball game — this series was expressed feeling-first. Not so much on telling the story but recalling the feeling, through colour and stroke.

Kids have so much to tell us about what not to do when staring at a blank canvas. Maybe not so much with the analysis, the second-guessing, the pre-planning, the systemization.

Just attack. Jump right in. Look at each stroke as it's going down and do not bother yourself with committing to spending more than a few minutes on it. You may not feel the urge to let a puppet take over the paintbrush or let your inner Scurvy Pirate out for a song but it's good to wrap it all up in play. Like another friend, a modest but gifted artist likes to say, "I'm just playing."

My nephew's paintings remind me not to be so precious about the results. It's about the making, not the amassing. Only the adults care about keeping them.

I can see some auntie-nephew collaborations down the yellow brick road.

American illustrator and graphic artist Mica Angela Hendricks writes about the world that opened up for her with she began collaborating with her four-year-old.

Her blog updates her creative process that is challenged by her daughter with her own ideas.

Getting ready to scream 'Woo!' with the rest of you

9/13/2013

You can thank Europeans’ dwindling Christian faith for a sensory bombardment that's taking over Europe. The poor attendance at all the churches and cathedrals has been a boon to a new totally immersive art-architecture experience of sound and image, artist-architect Francois Wunschel said in a lecture at Emily Carr University Wednesday night, while fellow Frenchman musician Fernando Favier manipulated the audio.

From left: Pierre Schneider, in front of a scaffolding support; Fernando Favier and Francois Wunschel.

All these old, underused stone edifices became opportunities to develop new forms of public engagement, said Wunschel. Pierre Schneider, his colleague at the Paris-based 1024 Architecture firm, shared with the audience some video examples: building facades visually distort and morph into faces; public squares transform into pulsating spaces of light and sound, all controlled by simple devices like a public microphone or a joystick.

Using MadMapping — AutoCad-like building-design software that overlays the spaces on actual architecture — Wunschel and Schneider are innovators in the growing artform that turns hard surfaces into an embodied experience that has become a signature European urban festival experience.

Tonight Vancouverites will get a (free) taste of all that at 10 p.m., behind Emily Carr’s digital media building on Great Northern Way, when the Paris team joins forces with some local artists as they premiere Live/Work, a 10-metre cube of scaffolding that promises to be a “manifestation of interdisciplinarity, collaboration and an exploration of the contemporary landscape in relation to changing cultural and economic conditions.” Gotta love that artspeak. (Translation: A bombardment of lights and sound that will have the locals yelling, “Woooooo!”)

Hypercube is all part of the New Forms Festival 13.

Below: Two videos of distinctive, immersive physical experience of sound, light: A voice-activated setup allows the public to animate a building in Lyons, France. At bottom: Transporting a dance club crowd through light and sound.

Stumped again by basic rules of composition

6/14/2013

It's funny how some learning moments can be instantly locked into your hard drive forever while others will keep smacking you in the face, like Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes.

I look forward to the day when basic rules of composition come naturally, but until then I will continue to waste a lot of time and materials creating visual fields that are uncomfortable, underwhelming and just... wrong, somehow.

Take this photo I took a couple of weeks ago. (Please!) Why do I insist on hacking up the space with a dead-centre subject? I literally can't see the forest for the trees here. It takes this special kind of inability to reduce this giant 500-year-old living Sitka spruce to just another stump.

But the bigger problem here is lack of scale. I may have felt insignificant beside this ancient giant organism, but it sure doesn't show it. I'd like to blame my basic lack of compositional abilities on my focus on patterns over subjects, but that's pretty much a cop-out.

Meanwhile, Mr. I Don't Take The Photos managed to capture all the scale and detail in one take, and was clearly not fixated on including the whole trunk in the view-finder.

Scale can be critical in an art practice. It's everything to Ontario photographer and artist Edward Burtynsky, who captured China's massive scale in Manufactured Landscapes (Burtynsky talks about the Canadian landscape inspired him, in this Ted Talk.)

I have to remind myself that scale is not about size, but size differential. This 20-year old table-top spruce bonsai "developed" by a German bonsai master (below) possesses its own tiny might. But here again I'm a little lost. Would including the hand of the grower (stunter?) emphasize the scale or reduce the potency of the image?

As an exercise, I've been wrestling with scale using four-inch acrylic cubes. In this one, a toy airplane gives a mass of orange wool gains scale — and narrative.

Does understanding scale take some innate way of seeing the world, as in Burtynsky's work? Or is it just about learning to avoid the usual mistakes, like getting sucked into iPhone's panorama camera feature?

Or scribbling 18" instead of 18' on the back of napkin that resulted in an underwhelming Stonehenge prop:

Out of analysis and into the mystic

2/8/2013

I do so love a shit-disturber, whether it’s fearless Middle-East reporter/author Robert Fisk ripping apart mainstream media last Saturday night downtown or the venerable art critic Jan Verwoert at UBC Wednesday night, talking about “irreconcilable ape-shittedness.”

Robert Fisk

An estimated 1,100 people crowded into St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church to hear Fisk call it as he sees it when it comes to how the West views — and intrudes — on Middle East conflict. Reporting what authority spokesthingies are saying is really no reporting at all, he says. The task at hand is to be witness to the atrocities, whether that’s a busload of Israeli children blown up by a suicide bomber, or Palestinians’ entire communities decimated by Israeli missiles.
Fisk gets plenty of heat for bearing witness, for allowing readers to be witness to the unfathomable, without including the other side of the story, without complying with the required format of including official reaction.

Jan Verwoert

Then on Wednesday night at UBC, at another packed lecture hall, the Berlin art critic/writer Verwoert also argued against prevailing constructs but in the case of visual art it’s the great, grinding academic/analytical machine that surrounds art production.

The rational, scientific view has partially failed us, Verwoert told the audience. The real power is not in representation but in the artist’s success in channeling the essence of the work. The artist is at the existential threshold between spaces, wiring some of those energies together, creating an energy circuit that holds an unquantifiable power.

He gives the example of Gustav Corbet’s The Painter's Studio (1855, above), in which the artist is at work on the threshold between the poor population he relates to, and his privileged patrons who provide his livelihood. The scene raises more questions than answers, with the only conclusion being that the discomfort of those two spaces in one painting creates enduring energy.

“Bearing witness goes beyond making meaning,” he says in his essay, You Make Me Feel Mighty Real. “It’s an avowal of that which may be inexpressible or even impossible to share when what one feels is also felt by the other. Beyond meaning lies feeling. And feeling someone feel what you feel makes all the difference.”

It’s a risky business, thumbing one’s nose at the rational or economic power forces that shape the prevailing structures, or refusing to take a side in a binary view of the world. But assuming the position of witness carries the possibility of new understandings, new discourse, whether the witnessing is expressed in the written word or visually.

This power of the irresolvable, the inconclusive non-statement can be seen in this work (left) by graffiti legend Banksy: Why does the graffiti punk appear to be looking for instruction from a banal global giant? Is Bansky with the anarchist or against him? The power in this work comes from the position of the artist, at the counter between spaces that each contain their own energy, acting as a transference agent, neither healer nor romantic transgressor.

That same irresolvable power is there in this image of a contemporary silkscreen artwork from an unknown Havana artist (right), Cuba PostCastro, circa 2008. The energy lies in the fact that it’s unclear whether the work is an assurance or a warning. The power is in both the formal elements — the geometry, colour and media that composes the image — as well as the history of political art posters, and the artist as witness, at the counter between political and art spaces. It is a powerful art object with no conclusion, no punchline.

At the very least, the irresolvable is awkward. At most, mystical or even magical.

Fisk and Verwoert would probably agree that if everyone’s slightly uncomfortable in the unknowing, you’re probably onto something.