carlyn yandle
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Inspiration from those who make it, through Crassmas

12/12/2014

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It's not too late to say, Nay! I will not be coerced into this coming two-week commercial frenzy. I will steer my little ship into calmer waters! 

Instead of joining the throngs of harried consumers grabbing up plastic chocolate-pooping reindeer and ironic acrylic Christmas sweaters it's possible to turn all this Excessmas into Makemas — not to make gifts necessarily but just to make for the sake of it.
PictureEriksson's home-baked sculpture earns her a TV interview on God Morgen Norge.
Seasonal materials — gingerbread, sugar, snow and ice, fir boughs, candy, lights — get makers going. What starts with a simple plan to make, say, a gingerbread house, can develop into astonishing works.

Norwegian maker Caroline Eriksson took it to new heights last year when she devoted a week and a half of full-time making to compose this Optimus Prime (which really should have been called Insulin Prime). There are 700-800 pieces in this Pepperkokemann — which sounds really funny when you say it out loud. (via gizmodo) It's nerdy but there's something in all that cookie dough that evokes a delicious back story about a sweet gingerbread house that breaks out to lead the Autobot rebellion.

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Jacking up this surrealist season is Toronto fashion shock-rockers Dean and Dan Caten(acci) of DSquared2, who created these spike-heel ice skates a couple of seasons back.

I remain captivated by this very-Canadian wearable sculpture that the makers had the nerve to put into a product line, further blurring the line between surrealism and consumption. The power it has to create so much scorn says something about a culture immersed in acquisition over contemplation of an object. Adding to the cultural weight of this object is in the potential for performance art by the user.

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Austen, Texas artist Emily Blincoe packs a weighty punch into the empty calories of her Color Coded: Sugar Series.

A surprising recategorization of common objects or materials invites a re-think about those objects. A glut of candy organized by colour draws the viewer's attention into issues like marketing, excess, presentation. consumption and value. This fetishistic display of tooth-rotting, diabetic-seizure-inducing "food" endures as long as the no-expiration dates.

But when it's all too much (as Glaswegian Granny used to declare, on surveying the freshly unwrapped loot), we makers head for the woods. Or the beach — anywhere you won't hear the Chipmunks or Michael Buble or Mariah Carey droning seasonal mall music.

PictureA snowball installation speaks the language of textile art. (from cecageorgieva.blogspot.ca)
Making is also meditative.

Textile artist Ceca Georgieva, of Sophia, Bulgaria, works in the natural world, creating time-intensive land art pieces. This snowball installation exudes quietude and fragility, created through a repetitive process that evokes the kind of attention and meditation involved in textile art.


The impermanence of the piece, the precarious balance makes it an intriguing moment in time. Soon it will all blow over and we can start anew.


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QR button blanket: Epic fail or a larger reading?

3/21/2014

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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.

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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. 

PictureWavy 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.

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The most powerful art might be made of garbage

11/22/2013

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PictureCarlyn Yandle photo
The astronomical private art-investor feeding frenzy at prestigious auction houses is light years away from art. It's a greedy need for prestige, worlds apart from the hand of Picasso or Andy Warhol and, most recently, Francis Bacon and the other Important Artists who conceived those coveted works.

Art is outside the billions of dollars sloshing around the world's art investors; it's in the streets, provoking those who hold the purse strings and the power. You can see it in humble objects, like the garbage monster that prowled around the anti-pipeline rally last weekend at the end of False Creek, towering over the thick crowd, snapping its messy maw at excited kids.  It's not pretty, and it certainly has no retail value, as it's made of the usual stuff that ends up in the Pacific Gyre, but it functions as art has and always will. It provokes us to think differently, to re-consider, step out of our complacency and see the world for what it is and where it is headed or could be. This is the power of the visual object.

The makers (presumably the two operators) of the garbage monster were compelled to express themselves through their creativity and labour, with no profit or prestige motives in mind. The object serves to contest the ways and means and plans of those in power, in this place, at a time when the news broke that Canada is dead last in climate change policy in the developed world. It may be a small gesture, but when combined with other creative forms of expression, can turn the tide.

PictureCarlyn Yandle photo
The prevailing discourse was there in the form of an image-object of an actual SUV receiving a giant lethal injection, during  Car-free Day on Commercial Drive this past June. The only motive behind this gesture was a need to comment. The high visual impact is art in its purest form and the makers are indisputably artists. And those artists are probably not getting rich if they're spending much of their creative effort on an expression outside of the system of capitalism. 

That pretty much has been the history of artists. Their work may have no cash value, but their value to society is priceless.

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when dress-up becomes an artform

10/18/2013

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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.

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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.

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Above: Christoph 1990 and 2011, Berlin Wall.

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A potent show of Fabric unfolds at the Vancouver Art Gallery

10/11/2013

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PictureKimsooja with curator Daina Augaitis
Internationally renowned artist Kimsooja was verklempt at the opening reception for her show, Unfolding, at the Vancouver Art Gallery Thursday. 

Her audience would soon feel that emotion unfolding as the soft-spoken artist led a tour of the new exhibit that runs to Jan. 26.

Revisiting some 30 years of her deeply personal works, with her son and other close family and friends in attendance, was clearly overwhelming for the Korean-born New York artist , who recently wrapped up another wrapping at the Venice Biennale. 

'Overwhelming' is a good descriptor for the show, too. 

Bright, satiny boulder-like mounds presented in the Bottari tradition of wrapping gifts in colourful fabrics contain material scraps the artist retrieved from the Tsunami-struck region of Japan. 

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Visitors feel the unfolding of a singular vulnerability in a cavernous room as simultaneous video screenings reveal the artist standing still in a crowded street in various urban corners of the Earth. 


PictureThe mix of rusty, worn mechanical objects and brilliant satin fabrics is a visual feast.
Another room featuring truck overloaded with a heap of colours evokes displacement or an unwieldy migration.

This retrospective is a reminder of the potency of found fabric, a culturally embedded material that can be a medium for painting or sculpture, often at the same time, as Kimsooja does so powerfully.

The artist raises those stakes by making material a metaphor for the wrapping and unwrapping, the enfolding, the unfolding, the concealing and exposing that resonates long after leaving the gallery.

A performance of Kimsooja's A Beggar Woman (see video clip, below) is set for Nov. 29 as part of Fuse.

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Power of art is as plain as Putin's drag face

10/4/2013

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Whenever I'm hit with another CBC countdown promo of its exclusive Canadian coverage of the Winter Olympics in Sochi that viral image of Putin in drag makeup pops into my head.

That one cheeky act packs a political wallop and reminds me that while the pen is mightier than the sword, there's the same power in the paintbrush. And Photoshop.

That image (which I'm still searching for in the form of a legal-fundraising T-shirt) has me dreaming of an Olympics that has athletes wearing rainbow scarves on the podium. More likely it will be the very real nightmare of the military dragging away brave individuals in the stands and the streets who are demanding justice in the face of a homophobic president and its national political policy of hate.

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A taste of things to come was most recently seen when Russian artist Konstantin Altunin fled to Paris to seek asylum after his painting of Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in lingerie was seized along with three other paintings in his August show. The crime is unclear. It may be promoting homosexuality to minors. Or hooliganism, which sounds funny but landed the members of Pussy Riot with two years' hard time for performing a  "punk prayer" in Moscow's main Orthodox cathedral last year after Putin was reinstated as president.

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So 'performance', even if it's a sloppy dance in homemade hoods, is mightier than the sword. The heavy hand of Putin's policies may be winning the battle — Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova ended her nine-day hunger strike last week to protest working conditions in the women's prison, to no avail, apparently — but the war for social justice is just beginning.

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It's unclear whether these unlikely political terrorists (the three convicted seen here pose with their verdict) see it that way.

Taking on the U.S. President or his policies through art has none of that threat of individual freedom of expression.  True, there may be a sort of White House Down going on there at the moment, in the form of a government shutdown over a glacial move toward universal health care, but you don't go to jail for performing or painting or Photoshopping your president in a political artwork. 

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You can march on Washington, carrying your homemade sign depicting your president's head on a Pez dispenser spouting one Lie after another, or you can even tattoo his face on the sole of your foot so you can stomp on his image with every step (below) but you can't mess with individuals. And in these parts that includes private companies, as we learned in viewing The Corporation (written by Vancouver's own Joel Bakan, UBC law professor).

You want a taste of the kind of trouble you can bring upon yourself via the paintbrush or Photoshop or performance, take on some of those individual-companies. You might not land in the gulag but you may find yourself paying through the pocketbook in legal defence fees for violating their 'individual' rights.

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Over-thinking will be the death of me

3/22/2013

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My biggest obstacle is over-thinking — not to be confused with big thinking. Over-thinking is my umbrella term for all the second-guessing, the predicting, the analyzing and the re-thinking that can turn my mind into a maelstrom. It's unproductive and it's exhausting and it's why I and many of my maker friends are involved in repetitive, obsessive (I prefer the term "devotional") artwork methods. The focus required is just the ticket to get out of the rabbit's hole of circular thinking. Less mental chatter, more mindfulness.

Making is the key to learning for me. As the work takes shape I try to make out what it's saying, where it's situated in the whole art discourse thingy. It's clear that I have to be clear about my intentions, where I'm going with all this, and why. Some thought is necessary.

But over-thinking is a form of self-sabotage and it has threatened the existence of my latest project, Monumental Doily. As I hook into those strands I find myself grasping at threads from my art history and cultural theory classes, trying to work in ideas of power struggles and psychoanalysis. Next thing you know I'm assuming the posture of German artist-shaman/renegade educator/former Nazi militiaman Joseph Beuys, in some sort of feminist response to his famous 1974 performance art piece, I Like America and America Likes Me (below, left) until my Inner Victorian Grandlady cries, "Enough nonsense!" (She would never say, "I call bullshit!")
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This is usually the point where I have to fight the urge to scrap the whole project and herein lies the conflict. 

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I have to be able to speak about my work but I have a pretty low tolerance for too much artspeak. I like artwork that has me at Hello, that hooks me in to investigate further and is not just some in-joke designed for the rarified few who have had the benefit of art-historical education. 

It should evoke a wide range of responses from a wide range of viewers — 'multiple points of entry', as they say. It should resonate in different ways and over time, and not rely on an instruction manual disguised as an artist statement full of exclusionary academic language (unless the point of the artwork is to create a feeling of alienation). Yet if it's too definitive, it's over quickly, like a trick, and I'm done. Next!
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Elitism is ugly and I really do agree with Beuys' belief that everyone is an artist, or at least can be if she would just shut out the rational jibber-jabber already and hook into the emotional/spiritual, the unquantifiable, even the unreasonable. (Beuys' beautiful mind is behind his urban intervention project, 7000 Oaks)

Sometimes a giant doily is just a giant doily, material evidence of one person's attempt to connect in an increasingly chaotic, hectic, overly-quantified and unrationally rationalized world. 

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Of mice and mentalities

4/21/2011

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I fail to see much of a distinction between art and design. There is a lot of design in a painting, while a design item like a chair or a hooked rug can be a nonfunctional piece of art. 

The distinction has been about ‘use.' That pretty much precludes any traditional domestic arts from being Art because the work might have — god forbid — use value. But the rarified air of the art world is being infiltrated by industrial designers.

I challenge the distinction by creating visual work in which the traditional function is removed from different methods and materials: quilts and doilies made of construction materials; paintings created by crochet and rug-hooking methods.

Another way to challenge the art-design boundary is to play with the whole premise of 'use.'

Which brings me to Roel de Boer, a Dutch artist/designer. His Speelkist — "play traveling box" according to the instant translation website Babelfish.com — turns the problem of household vermin into a performance art, as featured in the design Salone di Milano last weekend.

Is it useful? How do we view the rodents when they're in performance? More importantly, could you use a Speelkist around your place?

(See pests in performance below.)
 

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Roel de Boer's pretty flat-packed Speelkist (roughly translated as play travel box). Lifted from www.roeldeboer.com
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