writings - carlyn yandle

A beautiful craftivism in a flowery part of the world

11/8/2017

MORE THAN DECORATION: Flower images carry deep cultural significance for the Maya. Left: A figure dating from 600-900bc nestled in a lily. Centre: Needlepoint detail from a huipil (top), part of a traditional everyday dress. Right: Jesus emerging from a lily in an oil painting of the Immaculate Conception. Carlyn Yandle photos

I've made it my mission to shake things up by injecting the handmade domestic — doilies, quilts, sweaters and rugs — into austere, authoritative spaces and places, from pristine galleries to sketchy undersides of my city, pushing back on everyday misogynistic descriptors like 'girly' or 'old-lady' or the slightly derogatory 'frou-frou' and 'flowery.'

Then I landed in Merida, Mexico, last week where there is no fight against things flowery and archetypical feminine. Here in the capital of the Yucatan state and the ancient Maya culture (not dead but flourishing against all odds, by the way, like Canada's indigenous people) the streets are a flowery visual field of richly needleworked garments and handmade decorative traditions woven throughout the city, from tiled floors to architectural details and murals.

Above and far right: Carpet-like ceramic tile floor artworks are more than decorative. At left, a four-petal flower signifies universal realms; Centre: Merida's impressive El Gran Museo Del Mundo Maya pays tribute to the importance of the handmade floral motif in one of its exhibit salons. Carlyn Yandle photos

Flowers are so sacred and symbolic in the highly complex Maya culture that the Franciscan missionaries, in service of the Catholic Church, appropriated specific flower designs in their battle for their souls, in a cultural war of the roses (and lilies and other healing, spiritually-weighty blooms).

Left: This rare depiction in oil of Fray Francisco de Santa Ana appeals to the Mayan sense of the sacred. At right, typical religious imagry is embellished with rich floral motifs in a visual appropriation of Mayan culture. Carlyn Yandle photos

Coming from the land of yoga pants, I'm fascinated by this idea that an acceptable form of everyday dress is one's own hand-stitched art piece in the form of brightly-coloured cultural patterns of flowers on white cotton or linen tops and tunics, over an underskirt edged in a thick band of white lace.

No made-in-China. No apologies, no fading away.

Nature shows us that after devastation comes renewal

4/26/2017

Foxglove, the flowering tower that rises out of the ashes of forest fires, bursts up from bare earth. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

The 91-year-old CEO of the Commonwealth did not deem 2016 another annus horribilis but it was one for the political history books.

It seems only fitting that these dark days broken up by unfathomable acts of insanity have unfolded in this part of the watery world against the backdrop of a record-breaking dark, bitter-cold West Coast winter and freak snowstorms followed by the soggiest spring in memory.

We need to get out from under the sky booming with construction cranes, beyond the billboards promising freedom through technological mobility, away from the toys that hold what American social critic Chris Hedges calls the mind-numbing pop-culture “spectacle” that distracts us from understanding the pretty heavy political reality in his country and the world at large.

What we need now is to get outside and breathe in all the evidence that shows that from destruction and turmoil inevitably sprouts new life, new understandings and revelations. It’s there in the cracks of the sidewalk or the muddy tracks of machinery, and in our own devastated hearts: renewal.

The natural world gives us hope. After a long winter of discomfort and disbelief we are no longer asleep at the wheel, no longer assuming, reacting or over-reacting. We are thawing out and waking up.

We are becoming.

A dead tree limb is grounds for a pale green patch of lichen. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

A baby huckleberry erupts from a massive stump, remnant from an old clear-cut. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

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.

Painting to Capture the rapture in the everyday

10/16/2015

Gotta love Salvation Army and the staff's peculiar display choices. Every other store would break up all the retail items so each one looks unique, but at my local Salarmy they sort by colour, making finding your size sort of a crapshoot. But oh, that visual field! Those collections make my eyes feel like they're turning into those cartoon black-and-white hypnotizing wheel things.

Same thing at the MAC counter or the Shoppers Drug Mart cosmetics aisle. I don't have much use for all the lipsticks and nail polishes but I will go out of my way to pass those vibrating, too-exciting colour grids of reds, oranges, pinks, purples, golds. Rosy rows that that set the soul a-glow!

I am inspired. I take photos, I go to the studio. I try to find that colour-field rapture.

Distracts: Big Red, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 72" X 36"

It's all too exciting, too exhilarating and just the thing for stopping my useless 'what if' and 'if only' thinking — or the screen-peering and pecking.

This latest painting might be better titled, Stop Sign, a visually loud/silent call to "Don't just say something, stand there."

But I will stick to Big Red, part of my ongoing Distracts series. Part meditation, part endurance test, part quilting, part painting, as fractured and distracting as our accelerated world.

Hope springs forth from lush, haunting images

6/12/2015

I really want to believe our Prime Minister’s — what, pledge? Hope? Prediction? — that we will be a fossil-fuel-free nation by the year 2100, as he told the rest of the Gang of 7 at their Bavarian get-together last week.

But any hope I have for a truly green-fueled nation is drying up like a California swimming hole. My bet is not on political will but epic disaster as the catalyst for truly altering our course — a perfect storm of events that will push us thisclose to the collapse of the very (and varied) ecosystems that spawned our species.

But I still find faith in the forces of nature, which may be why I am attracted to any images of the natural takeover of our failed or abandoned constructions.

The sparkle of that emerald gem of hope lies in this now-famous image of the executive offices of the Henry Ford executive offices at the Model T headquarters in Detroit.

I first saw this image by American artist Andrew Moore in a New York Times Magazine photo essay following the economic collapse of Detroit’s all-consuming auto industry. Where once business titans swaggered now was a thick carpet of moss.

The entire industrial complex may have caved in but as long as the moss still grows, well, I guess we have a chance. (Detroit is now shrinking, with derelict houses returning to forest.)

I was reminded of that image again this week when big-league newspapers such as the Independent and the UK Mirror picked up on the social-trending images of an abandoned fishing village being reclaimed by nature, by Shanghai photographer Jane Qing.

I could find nothing in those Google pages of links that would explain what happened to the inhabitants of this island community, part of a large archipelago at the mouth of the Yangtze river. The particular circumstances are shrouded in vines, absorbed back into the lush island hillside, but local economic collapse is likely the culprit.

It is the moss, the vines in these images that reveal human folly and frailty.

They are the green shoots of hope that cool the creeping drought — and doubt.

Abandoned car in Dordogne, France

Shab-fab granny squares cover it all

1/16/2015

Maybe it's the chilly monochromatic climate at work here, but I'm suddenly wrapping myself up granny squares. The more I think about them, the more potential I see.

There's a lot of culture woven into those fuzzy little colour grids. They're there in the background of popular culture, infusing irony and cozy home-yness, nostalgia and disdain. One graces the couches of neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler's nerdy apartment and Roseanne's working-class house. Jemaine sleeps under one (badly).

Sure, they achieve that soupçon of shabbiness or tastelessness essential to the story but those set decorators are no idiots; granny squares inject hits of high colour and pattern to the visual field. They are trippy, decorative non-decor objects. Their form is used because of their assumed function over form.

They are the throws that are thrown around, their colourful geometry reflected and refracted so that they radiate western domestic culture, love it or hate it.

Cate Blanchett adorned a designer version on the red carpet, to a chorus of derision by the fashion police, which secured the actress more publicity.

There's something delicious in the mix between haute couture and the easy, scrappy crochet method that results in over 13,000 Etsy items under the search term, "granny squares".

I've loved/hated granny squares ever since my cousin and I were given matching shrink vests at age 10, from our moms. I would have been wearing that single, large purple granny square at a time when the Italian dads in the neighbourhood were setting up that granny-square pattern in concrete breeze walls around their brand new Vancouver Specials.

One breeze wall in a photo essay by the author of joy-n-wonder.blogspot.ca

Like the blankets, the breeze walls evoke utility and thrift but are visually interesting enough to warrant new consideration. The modularity of granny squares and breeze-wall blocks ooze with potential, especially as a mash-up.

Granny squares command attention. The Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum took on new dimensions when it was covered in thousands of donated granny squares as part of its CAFAM Granny Squared installation a couple of years ago.

Suddenly, a city that is generally at odds with notions of the handmade, the domestic and the artisanal was attracting mainstream media attention for its collaborative crocheted culture jam.

A couple of years before that, in 2011, members of many Finnish women's organizations and the craft teachers' union blanketed Helsinki Cathedral's steps in 3,800 granny square tilkkupeitosta (Finnish for 'quilt').

The modular motif marries beautifully to existing architecture, as the granny squares take on a Tetris effect, cascading down to the giant public square in this domestic intervention.

But what about the granny square as a building block itself? What if a building appeared to rise out of a giant crocheted coverlet? How could concretized crocheted granny squares be utilized as sculpture?

It's a fuzzy concept worth building on.

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.

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"

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.

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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)

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.

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