Ashley Andel

N O T I C E

2011-06-06T15:39:00.000-07:00

Hello! Thanks for dropping by my blogspot. As you can see, I've begun a scrapping/reconfiguration of it in favor of posting on my Tumblr site:

http://ashleyandel.tumblr.com/

As well, my Flickr photostream has undergone a makeover, and is looking pretty swell:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ashleyandel

Please check out those sites in the meantime while I decide what to do with this page.

Thanks for your interest!

Ashley Andel

Mainly Vain.

2011-01-12T00:35:00.000-08:00

I've been featured in the last two issues of Mainly Main Magazine, a new publication that can be found free in many popular places about central Vancouver right now.

In the picture above, you can see a 43" x 37" card panel that you can obtain gratis if you send a photograph of yourself having a fun and unusual time in a typical Vancouver downpour to Mainly Main's Twitter page . If you don't have Twitter, feel free to email me your photo here at this blog.

In the very first issue of Mainly Main, my "Dirty Kunst" was featured as what I renamed "Public Displays of Infections"; spelled with X's beyond my control, but what the fux. In this upcoming issue, I've called for a fun little contest.

In other news this month, the Young Asian Canadian Twin Artist's Collective (Yac-Tac) will be hosting my "Brash Play" show. Yac-Tac is comprised of two sets of Asian twin sisters who have started an art collective, and recently I saw a rather accommodating art show they put on at their headquarters situated by Langara College. The photographs above and below are just two of many examples of creative sprit they not only showed but shared with many people that night.

(Above: what I'd call "Yac-Tac attacked children's books" and below, a great assemblage of yellow kitchen supplies)

The remarkable thing about the Yac-Tac collective is not some defiance of the artificial as you might expect, but their refusal to separate art from life; an attitude very much intrinsic to "Brash Play", but furthermore put on by the girls even by way of displaying (and selling) tiny scrolls displaying their diets over a period of time for one to mimic.

You can come and see the show's opening at the Yac-Tac Home Gallery space 7206 Ontario Street, Vancouver on January 28th from 8PM until late.

Otherwise, get your daffy rainy day pics out and that hammer and nail ready, everybody. And pick up Mainly Main magazine for a cool $0 at your favorite downtown haunt.

Two new panels.

2010-11-28T18:56:00.000-08:00

Two new wood panels, each 6" x 6", available at Blim Arts and Crafts this week. Priced at $75 each.

Blim is located at 115 East Pender Street, Vancouver, Canada. Telephone (604) 872-8180.

Collages with Anthony Easton.

2010-11-13T16:33:00.000-08:00

I was digging through my failing iPhoto cache over the past few days and rediscovered these ramshackle collages that Anthony Easton and I made about three years ago.

He would come over to my apartment with an armful of brand new magazines to cut up.

Blimpromptus.

2010-10-19T21:57:00.001-07:00

This week, I made two 12" x 12" gallery-thick wood panel impromptu collages for sale at Blim Arts and Crafts. They are specially priced at $150 each.

Blim is now located at 115 East Pender Street, Vancouver, Canada. Telephone (604) 872-8180.

Home theatre.

2010-09-14T20:46:00.000-07:00

The acquisition of both a pretty girl and a video projector has made quite the boon to my amusement lately, and judging by that pretty girl's expressions in these pictures taken over the weekend, the feeling is reciprocal.

Mayoko, though a little shy about most things stagy, got right into the mindset when I painted her face up a bright blue and outfitted her in a matching feather boa with appropriately clashing yellow sunglasses and lipstick. Being her very first foray into theatrics, I'm confident that by these initial photographic results I'll have a full-fledged Warholian extrovert in my midst sometime very soon.

Am I corrupting someone demure by way of lacquers, masquerade and spotlight? Might I preserve some of this bashfulness in hopes of portraying an exquisite tension between "bang" and "squish"? The "imploding plastic inevitable"?

A magnificent spectacle as experienced by an audience of two in their very own living room, shared with you by way of this obscure corner of the internet!

Whatever the case, not only television but the internet itself was pushed into irrelevance that night as I shadowed out the pixels to kiss off that yellow lipstick.

As long as I can renew the bulbs, we'll have no need to return to reality!

You die your way, I'll die mine.

2010-08-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

This is a 16" x 16" wood panel that I finished this month from the acetate of Erica, titled "You die your way, I'll die mine", which was something that Frank Sinatra used to say when confronted with accusations of self abuse in the form of cigarettes and alcohol.

Thematically, this has nothing to do with Erica's personality; if we can think of a wood panel or canvas in a proscenium-like fashion, she is merely an actress enlisted to portray something dramatic.

This piece is part of my "Visceral Frigidity" work, which includes the canvas "Public Surgery" displayed four posts below.

Louise.

2010-08-06T10:01:00.000-07:00

Here is a new portrait on canvas I made of my friend Louise. The dimensions are 8" x 10".

Erica is awesome.

2010-08-03T12:05:00.000-07:00

Displayed above is the first draft acetate for a portrait of my friend Erica that I'm working on.

In other news, I contributed eight photographs about my recent endeavors, interests and exploits to vancouverisawesome.com for use in their "Proof" segment.

You can read the article here.

Brashpack!

2010-07-13T18:51:00.000-07:00

Like a toymaker might be, I've been far too laborious with my "Brash Play" exhibit to actually sit down and play around with it. With the very last applications of paint, I sat down to do just that, all the while turning my living room into a tightly jumbled photographer's set, splitting the crotch of my trousers in the assembly process.

After devoting more than a year to fussing about with acrylics and drop sheets, it's disheartening to know that despite all finishing touches to the project, I have to spend further time constructing a submission package to drum up interest from potential venues; so, accompanying this photo set is a statement to be used in the final handoff; a "brashpack", if you like, complete with wordiness where wordiness seems relatively unwelcome.

BRASH PLAY

"Brash Play" is candied industry; the perverse reclamation of a warehouse's industrial waste made to suit a dandified laborer's flashy view of sublimity.

Defiant of lofty concept, this show is pure unapologetic revelry employing a humble decadence akin to Jeff Koons' silver plated Jim Beam boxcars; a show where dumpster bound cardboard packing-tape cylinders instead receive a lavish coating of acrylic colour; where masking tape generates paintings that scream with chaotic bliss.

Is this a papier-mâché disco or a plasticized depot? This is the intersection of work and whimsy, tradesman and trapeze artist. Aesthetics by way of magpie-eyed resourcefulness from a place sorely lacking in anything remotely eye-catching.

The work of play where pigment meets grey; if Edward Burtynsky's manufactory landscapes hold any allure, this show aims to make use of the idea as explosive pop art.

Eight to five, Monday to Friday, two days free and back to start; the cyclical beauty of the working-week, and what it causes an aesthetically motivated person to do amongst the doldrums, like trying to tie a weekly schedule into a loop from dusty starting-point to a carousing finish line.

Cyclical things are mesmerizing, as alcohol intoxication makes you loopy; is all of this the effect of mercenary exploitation amidst industrial chemicals or simply the confusions brought on from yet another gin tonic?

Gasoline in a puddle seen as beautifully iridescent as an oyster shell, the meeting of soft flesh with sheet metal as nearly sexual.

"Brash play" is a shipping-clerk's romanticization of his mind-numbingly dull atmosphere; a ridiculous parody of the laborious; an affirmation that the monotonous can ultimately achieve the monumental, and even perhaps a hilarious attempt at lifestyle balance. At core, however, this is a show all about the preservation of joy, and that no matter how mundane your life can be, you can always transform it into something more appealing.

(In addition, I've assembled a promotional video for "Brash Play", which I've posted on my YouTube page, featuring some original music I made about 7 years ago):

Public surgery.

2010-07-03T12:56:00.000-07:00

This is a new canvas that I started in the end of 2009, and finished last month. The dimensions are 12"x36".

You're beautiful....

2010-06-22T21:36:00.000-07:00

I've submitted this video of me torturing myself to the Guggenheim's YouTube channel, for use in it's biennial of creative video, fingers crossed.

This video considers torture as an art form.

Edited down from five hours of footage to a digestible seven minutes.

Sorry Mr. James Blunt.

Jewellery, Furniture, Meat and Guns.

2010-06-09T12:23:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's because I tidily dismissed music two entries ago I went rummaging through the Andel archives in search of some demo discs I recorded 10 years ago, figuring that I was a sort of "failed musician". Soon after feeding these old discs to the carousel, however, I realized this wasn't quite the case; although some of the tracks are rhythmically messy, I think they save themselves with their atmospheric qualities, sounding like electro-junkyard bop sessions recorded on scotch tape and rust.

One of these tracks, a metronomous strummer called "Jewellery, Furniture, Meat and Guns", struck me as sounding especially 'visual' (hilariously something I was bellyaching about in the first place), evoking raw brain images from in between where movies like "Deliverance" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" reside.

If it's true that people automatically play little movies in their heads while they listen to music, I saw something like a birth defected mongoloid greedily scarfing blood sausages while carving grooves into the ground with a frenetically rocking chair: very "middle America".

Whatever the case, the track had me rushing back home after work with a package of ground beef I had no intention of eating, to smear all over a picture of Evander Holyfield brandishing an axe I'd acquired through my father some years ago, for the purpose of making a music video (see below).

Musically, this track is a mutant, comprised of a broken guitar, an intercom system and a whistling kettle. My guess is that this is what country music might sound like if the Wild West had been inhabited by glue-addled post-Ceauşescu gypsies.

If the thought of a big black guy covered in hamburger holding an axe is simply too much to bear, for comparison sake, I've spliced in some shots of a fluffy, little white dog to bi-polarize your mind in the same fashion CNN has been doing since it's inception.

Good, ol' fashioned inbred fun.

Dirty kunst.

2010-04-24T02:10:00.000-07:00

Feeling bored one day, I took a trip around town with a gimmick.

Down with the volume: Surviving the Wagnerian flatus of the fattest muse.

2010-04-05T18:51:00.000-07:00

All too often in my dealings as a visual artist I've faced the music; whether I'm designing album covers, mounting an exhibition or self promoting, it seems inevitable that I share platforms with the audible. The frequency of this is prompting me to ask why; does the visibility of art sometimes require help from the minstrel camp, or is it just overhang from off the seventh muse?

"Information is not knowledge; Knowledge is not Wisdom; Wisdom is not truth; Truth is not beauty; Beauty is not love; Love is not music; Music is the best".

This oversized quote confirms Euterpe's fattening; it's attributed to rock music's late Frank Zappa, who has always perplexed me; I can take for granted what Zappa decrees only up to the closing statement, where it becomes problematic: "Music is the best", he arrogantly declares, leaving all other disciplines to the cold side of his disparaging smile.

Music is not the best, if you ask me; it's a plague of leg-grinding locusts, or fantastically, a swarm of airborne earwigs pouring out from cornucopian loudspeakers sorely lacking an 'off' switch. Whether you favor a load of heavy metal or a spoonful of sugar, it's all potential noise pollution, and furthermore, it's today's favoured vehicle for identity and association; "What sort of music do you listen to" has become as routinely asked a question as either "what's your name" or "where do you come from".

Music is the backbone of hipsterism, comprising boastful activism, 'vintage revisited' and raw food diets as vertebrae; undoubtedly, visual artists are just as guilty of 'wearing Wayfarers', so to speak, but we don't often hear public pissing contests about how Jules Olitski is a more pop enabled version of Mark Rothko, do we?

"My music at work" is a comically militant creed imposing your taste upon others; taste as proud as a flying banner, extolling your biases whilst condemning anyone else's half the time, remaining ignorant of any obvious similarities. Whistling while we work, most of us forget that no matter the preferred genre, an inherent beat goes on the same way the machinery that surrounds us does; I sometimes wonder if modern music is addled by endless repetition because of the industrial revolution.

Chalked up on tally, music outweighs visual art: it floats on air, yet is potentially heavy; it doesn't necessarily require a venue, can be conglomerated thousands strong on mp3 files, ejected cheaply; it's repetition can be as infectious as the common cold; all of which are things that make music difficult to avoid, like second hand smoke; it gets in your eyes as well it does your ears, via t-shirts, television and magazines adverts, and to my dismay, some art galleries regularly opt to hire musical acts to up attendance at events, and when a band isn't available, a DJ works just as well to put out the vibrations, with the public instinctively drawn to the rhythm like snakes.

At last month's show of work at the Cobalt Hotel, a friend and I took off clutching our ears as featured bands took stage with their derivative racket; I spent most of my opening night out front listening to tires carving through the rain. It seems no matter if the tune or lyric is any good, the volume is always too high, while the gesticulations of interchangeable front men make you long to see those the moves were borrowed from, which brings me to wonder if the audience is gawking more than it's listening; is music brought in to drown out awkward silences or to eliminate pressures to be eloquent? Is it's audibility becoming almost irrelevant alongside it's social utilizations? "As long as the music is here, we're safe from being made a fool", it sounds like...

My Cobalt Hotel show, which was submitted to me, was by all consideration a safe experiment in 'club friendliness'; having had pieces stolen or severely damaged in clubs before, I opted for cardboard paneling instead of canvas this time, producing a collection of cartoon-like impromptus within a set two week time frame. The garish, almost 'dummy-like' quality of the featured series was done first to prevent more delicate work from pub display, second to appeal as affordable, sale wise (panels went for $150 each, fruitlessly), and third to compete with the darkness and inescapable loudness of the bar interior.

Admittedly, I resign myself from time to time to the realization that as it stands, music will always strong-arm the visual arts to the sidelines-- it's remarkable to note the typical locality of art work: usually seen up against the wall, apparently leaving 'presence' to a lead singer and his carnival bark.

Club venues aside, the 2010 Winter Olympics saw me making pictures in the rain out front an audience for the locally focused "Made in Vancouver" arts festival. Seated gypsy-like on a rug next to a DJ booth, it irritated me that if not for the blaring stereo adjacent, my audience would have been notably smaller; though the DJ was by no means doing a bad job, I still resented his presence. However, this time I was granted centre stage, my expressions and painted acetate holding what attention the music initially gathered, sometimes allowing irritation to take attention's hold as I violently threw failing canvases to the side in disgust, all the while recalling The Who demolishing their equipment; I even managed to draw applause despite the humidity that rendered prospective images useless.

Disappointingly, music continued to trump everything when I appeared as part of a discussion panel about the "secret language of the face" on CJSF Radio's Firething Habitat last week; 'Firething' is a multimedia effort led by the theatrically talented Katherine Krampol and Jozie Bennett, both of whom I share Edmonton expat status with, but also have real respect for. While I anticipated something in the talk show format, tunes took up much airtime when commercial time wasn't required; as well Erica Dee, the other featured guest, did some admirable freestyle rap, but on closing there appeared little feasible discussion, which bothered me; when Katherine asked us to plug our latest events, I felt so irritated as to be self deprecating.

So, down with the volume, already; there's a fat bulk of music out there, and even if we don't want to hear it, we can't find shelter from it; no matter if you're an audiophile cranking the klaviermusik of Nietzsche, a candy-pop gaga lady or trapped up in John Cage, your ear lobes could probably use a thinning out, because nationalism can become ideology, as apparent ideology can become music; as fun as a battle of the bands sounds, it might not be so much fun if it plays lead-out groove; we saw where Wagner led Hitler, and strangely enough, where Wagner led Phil Spector.

***** ***** ***** *****

* A sympathetic epilogue: Lately, one certain place where I can find love, music and art intersecting is on YouTube, in a rather narcissistic template making music videos to my favorite songs; posted here is a song called "Brioche" by Takako Minekawa starring Mayoko.

Pet names: "Call me Cuddlefish".

2010-03-12T01:32:00.000-08:00

Being accepted back into the euphoric fold of lovers comes with a rebranding, otherwise known as the 'pet name' to sweethearts and cynics alike. Aside from the drippy assortment of monikers like 'honey' or 'sugar', human beings like to associate themselves with animals, whether for self-expression, carnal juxtaposition or astrological reasons; the conventional zodiac likens me to two fish, the Chinese variety with the dog; I feel that neither of these conventions fully outfit my personality, so I choose to moil the choices out.

Of course, in all respect for implausibility, a pet name is objective; after all, I see my love interest Mayoko as something hyphenated, like a feline-sparrow, where she might perceive herself as something entirely different, even more remote from actuality.

Shuffling a biology textbook, I consider the male cuttlefish; chameleon of the sea, but actually a species of mollusk possessive of an extremely chromatophoric skin surface, used not only for camouflage, but social interaction at that. He's able to epidermally reproduce more than the full colour spectrum, but is, himself, colourblind; what could be a better allusion to my cross-cultural dressing habits, I wonder?

Our man, the mollusk can further employ this uniquely theatrical tool of deception, succeeding other males to a female during his frenzied mating season by masquerading as a female himself; a naturally occurring form of crossdress with a decidedly aquatic sociological function.

It might come off as folly, seeing it's debatable how the general human public might observe a hominid type of cuttlefish, but occasionally wearing make up and semi-feminine garb has proven to be my very own form of social filtration for years; if someone avoids my painted eyes, it's likely that person is close-minded, and probably not worth speaking to; if a desired girl shrugs me off as gay, she has far too solidified notions of gender, and could never be an adequate match.

My fanciful appearance seems to attract the type of female company I desire, and I know you could be asking "now, what type of company might that be, Mr. Fish?" "The company of a sexually confused, intoxicated pussyfish, perhaps?"

Well, if you really were to ask, she's a woman who can see beneath the show, for she may be running a show herself; she has a demand for playfulness, but also a sense of prissiness to truss it all up; she'll kiss your lipstick off until it's her own, but don't try undoing the tie from her hair so readily.

She's intuitive, but appreciates a helping hand. Her kindness is infinite, but terminable cross the hidden line.

She can show me the ocean and the sky both at once, but withdraw it quickly to her compact to keep me guessing.

The British tend to keep their affections dry under the brolly term of 'pet'; choosing not to identify with anything besides the notion of ownership, which might be for the better, considering that my ideal avatar is ultimately a bottom feeder destined to wind up in a bird cage to be nibbled by a molting parakeet. This generalization can be looked upon as something enmeshing; a tender trap in which the role of ownership continually shifts, or perhaps the hell that is Jean-Paul Sartre's 'other people'; "if you are my pet, will you do tricks for me?" " And if I am yours, what tricks shall I do for you?"

It's an entirely pessimistic way of looking at things, as people today incline, but what of faith and kowtow? I myself see not a tamed creature in Mayoko, but whatever is God, and phraseology is as abstract or irrelevant a term as 'the apple of my eye'.

In the end, the main characteristic this falsie wearing fish-boy has in common with our cephalopod in question is a tendency to eject voluminous tufts of ink, but by scribbling out a couple of 'd's from the set of 't's, our newly found 'cuddlefish' swims far through the depths of his ladies' dark eyes, holding his semantics in jest out front just like an underwater candle, far out into a hidden place where he'll grow a beard... and perhaps become a catfish in the end.

*** In other news, the 2001-2002 overview of artwork has been posted at ashleyandelartwork.blogspot.com.

New art at the Cobalt Hotel.

2010-03-07T23:26:00.000-08:00

I'll be showing some new art work at the refurbished Cobalt Hotel space at 917 Main street the duration of this month, if not longer.

An informal opening is to be held the evening of Thursday, March the 11th, and every gallery thick 37"x42" panel is priced at $150, promised to look swell on the wall of your choice. This is what some of them look like:

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Bands will be playing as well; some kids called Blank Cinema, as well as another group called The Shiny Diamonds. DJs will kill off the awkward silence.

I haven't heard the musical acts yet, but hopefully they won't make our ears puke.

I'm going against my disdain for pub/club showings again, I know, but here in Vancouver it seems you have little choice sometimes.

Come out and let's have some fun.

Kiss Kiss Kiss.

2010-03-02T11:01:00.000-08:00

Just before my 28th birthday, I met Mayoko.

Industrial orange and brown. (Brash Play revisited)

2010-02-11T13:39:00.000-08:00

Two specific colours have prompted me to work further on my 'Brash Play' show, which is a sort of loud installation dedicated to toy-like colours and unapologetic revelry. These two colours are adverse to the show's primary pallette, and yield the antithesis that will complete the show, which I hastily considered done some time ago.

Industrial orange and brown are two colours that define the interior of the warehouse I work in; two standardized colours that immediately conjure up images of forklifts, cardboard and sheet metal; three things that make up my weekdays, and also my income.

During the working week, I grow stubbly and wear coveralls. Cardboard gives me vicious paper cuts; sweaty dirt makes me shrink from view on bus rides where my veins swell. During the working week, it's all about some colourful light at the end of the tunnel: the weekend, when I shave, paint my face like a dandy and willingly misbehave a little.

It's a bipolar existence; many arty types find themselves earning money with jobs they're not suited for; in British Columbia, funding for the arts is being cut back about 80%, leaving slim pickings for anyone in the field wanting to obtain a decent job, let alone a grant.

Relying upon the government for arts funding is, in my opinion, a little silly because instead of watching television or playing 'Xbox' I make art. I spend money willingly on my art. Art is my entertainment; the production of art is my fun, or as Sir Joshua Reynolds put it, "the value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it, or the mental pleasure in producing it".

What makes up an artwork granted by governmental endorsement? Something with an official 'stamp of approval', maybe? Perhaps half of the creative juices are spent on gentrifying the proposal itself? A grant is a great thing if you're wanting to stage something really big, but otherwise why bother if you love what you do?

Call me 'old world', but being a starving artist isn't all that bad; poverty is very much a boon to inventiveness, and with my petty warehouse job, I play chief magpie as well as head financier.

The cardboard end of a tape roll isn't something to throw away, but a playful building block; something incrementally obtained via many hours of toil. Here is the funny permutation of hard labour; the 'work of play'.

So, with renewed love in the project (as always seems to happen), I'm revisiting 'Brash Play', eliminating unimportant notions of lost romance or ill-aimed art scene critique; this time 'round, it's going to pan the scope of what mechanization does to an abstract brain....

A decade in review: Ashley A. critiques Ashley A.

2010-01-14T20:51:00.000-08:00

One thing this blog has fallen short of during it's existence is provide a definitive overview of my output as an artist, so I've established ashleyandelartwork.blogspot.com to rectify that, and to leave this blog to it's usual current events, whims and commentary.

The new blogspot is a chronological look at nearly everything I've done over the past ten years, from my adolescent explorations right up to concurrent undergoings. Amusingly, this time it's myself I'll be putting under the microscope, and I'm not afraid to be astringent.

Often it is said that an artist can be their very worst critic, something I've kept in mind throughout the archival process. Whether this is true or not is to be determined, I suppose, by your feedback.

This is me in high school, 1999. Photo by Jennifer Saleik.

The first entry I've published is about the work created between the years of 1999 to 2001, looking over my last year of high school until I left home. In more severe terms, 'the formative years'.

Ten years isn't that long of a time, I've come to realize, but some of the work I've excavated is stuff I barely recall making. Virtual amnesia doesn't exactly make me feel less geriatric, but then neither does remembrance.

With effort to ward off the Alzheimer's, I present to you what I hope is a fair representation of 'who this Ashley Andel character is, anyway...'

Random encounters #3.

2010-01-06T23:03:00.000-08:00

As sad as I am to see the iron whale carcass removed from the corner of Denman and Davie overlooking English Bay, it's an amusing and welcome diversion to come across the site's new sculptural installation of a crowd of towering, chuckling figures by artist Yue Minjun, all in differing poses.

I remember a day in about August that I and a crowd of other delighted people swarmed the figures, the squares of grass still overlapping their bases. Infectious as the silent laughter emanating from the statues, every one of us took turns posing in front of them, taking snapshots and splitting our sides.

However, on the polar opposite side of favor, the City of Vancouver, in time for both the biennale and the Winter Olympics have installed what resembles a mass of crumpled tinfoil at the intersection of Granville and West Georgia. Titled "Artificial Rock #143" by artist Zhan Wang, this shining lump of nothing might have been more at home (read: aesthetically redeeming) if situated in a less conspicuous place, say, somewhere in Stanley Park where it could be a pleasant eye-catch among a cluster of real rocks.

Instead, this shameless meteorite stands poised like a superstar, and indeed it even garners a lot of telephoto lenses despite it's unsightly sort of ambiguity. I can't help but imagine looking down at it from one of the office tower windows, thinking it a bit of cigarette foil dropped on a model.

Flash bulbs and face paint!

2009-12-28T11:13:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday, I caught up with my friend Riley Broderick who just moved to Vancouver from a long stay in Japan, where he kept wind in his sails by working various modeling jobs.

At his housewarming party, leafing through a pile of his photographs, I suggested we get together for a photo shoot sometime. Riley's photos often feature him in elaborate face paint, and being no stranger to face paint myself I pondered the potential outcome of a shoot; how crazy could it get?

Eventually we made good on the idea, and along with his friend Imi, some of my leftover houndstooth paper (and a little tipple), we set some flashbulbs off.

Painting each other's faces was terribly fun, as was rendering Riley's real beard practically fake. Topping it all off, I slapped my wig on him, leading me to imagine a shoot in which we could dress up like twins.

Shots went on late into the night; so late, in fact that I didn't have the time to wash Riley's work from my face before I scampered off to catch the last train home!

Although I've not yet been shown the photos I posed for (stay tuned), you can see the rest of the photos I took of Riley on my Flickr page here.

Honest perplexities.

2009-12-13T13:00:00.000-08:00

An unusual phenomenon has entered my universe over the past while; I've been getting other people to make art more than I've been making it myself. First, it occurred in October at Blim, and this week I held a collage workshop with a North Vancouver elementary school under the theme of 'asymmetric aesthetics'.

The workshop took place over the course of two and a half hours in the early morning with about thirty students ages 5 to 8 approximately, materials provided both by the school and myself. Not unlike the Blim workshop, my materials appeared pale and delicate in comparison to the loud and busy scraps otherwise supplied, which needlessly concerned me at first.

Children possess optimal intuition and risk, which makes for some truly daring experimentation that usually tempers and tames itself with age; think children's illustrators like Eric Carle, whose work is child-like, but merely that. Only children can come up with honest perplexities, unlike the surrealists and such, can ask questions like 'what does perplexity mean, anyways' or 'why are horse's eyes on their brains'?

I walked into the classroom, and all of the students were sitting before me in a semi-circle, and I doubt I'd ever felt as nervous in my life. Three of my pieces were passed around as we chatted about using fun, resourceful methods to create something. In more simplified terms I answer their questions, basically letting them know that I 'believe in thematic ambiguity' and that 'the viewer's point of view or interpretation should always be considered as valid as the artist's in the grand scheme of things'.

Gradually, I became more comfortable as it became clear that the kids were excited to have me, telling me how the pieces being passed around looked like 'birds, carriages, sea life, fountains and spiders'.

We soon got down to task. In three groups of about ten, we sat cutting and pasting away at newsprint lined tables. In the flash of only a half hour, a girl just aside practically plagiarizes me (above), and uniquely, a boy makes a three dimensional face out of graph paper that resembles the reaper (below).

It's absolutely astounding how precise their compositional skills are. For instance, in the picture below, one girl knew exactly where she wanted everything, as determined by her very trilateral placement of the pink and blue. The polka dots augment it all like little bows.

The sensitivity to thin dispersal is apparent, many children opting for clusters of things in space.

There's a wink of graphic design about the lavender eye motif below.

A collection began to accumulate on and around the window sill. I was starting to get suspicious that the placement of everything was done on purpose, as the pictures with a lot of white were back-dropped by frost, as the earthier tones rested against the potted plants.

For some reason, it took a while before the children realized that they were allowed to use the Letraset I had placed on the table, and when they did I didn't have to insist the abstract use of it, and when certain letters weren't available, they altered existing ones accordingly.

Letters and numbers were used as noses, mouths and eyes. A boy tugged my shirt, showed me a scattered cloud of them and said it was a picture of 'a person who didn't know what to say' (above).

Inexplicably, other texts found their way into the visual soup, as cut-up accounts of famous composers encircled this camouflaged crab (below), and some of the language arts assignments were gleefully torn apart (above).

Art Linkletter and Bill Cosby probably made it most explicit on the TV show 'Kids Say The Darndest Things' that kids can throw some real curve balls; here is what they introduced to me as a 'wheelchair dancer' and a 'Chinese Mexican'.

One doesn't have to teach a child to be instinctive when they make a picture, because that's all it is to them: the making of a picture. Children don't call it modern or postmodern, nor cerebral or satire; without adulthood's brackets yet in firm hold, these adorable images dehumanized as child's play are far too oftentimes relegated to the toy box.

As for me, unlike everyone else had the luxury of working on this picture of an 'underwater rose garden' for an hour and a half (above in detail, and at top of entry), and right now I don't find it half as interesting. Granted, it is very charming in all it's restraint, but what sort of validity does something like 'restraint' constitute anyway?

The love of rule and order is an acquired taste, and it's something not to be without, but more often than not it's a humbling thing to look over at what the kids have been up to. It would be all 'Aesop' of me to end off here with some sort of moral, but it is pretty irresistible: you can teach an old dog new tricks so long as the said dog doesn't belittle the puppies.

Whimsical Blim. Or, Blimsical whim.

2009-11-09T18:48:00.000-08:00

A month-long artist's residency at the creative space known as Blim is offered up with some stipulations: first, you have your initial art show, but also you have to make a window display (seen above). Third, you have to curate a film of your choice, fourth you must host a workshop and fifth, they have to make T shirts of your art to commemorate the time you spent in the space.

If you're a shameless self-promotionist, a dreamy magpie minded art case, or in my case both of these things, the demands that Blim imposes to a simple showing of canvas is hardly absorbed with a blow, in fact the delivery of these offerings was so initially apologetic that I wondered who or what sort of beast came and took terrible advantage of them beforehand.

October is the harvest month, a time savored by people in the same way a dying hornet seems more ready with it's sting. Pagan, gluttonous, supposedly thankful, a last hurrah before the coming of All Saint's Day; and consequently November's bow to the lackluster. In a sense, I spent my Thanksgiving at Blim, only not on Thanksgiving Day, but at the show's casual opening over a whimsical assortment of red wine, sumptuous maki rolls, Earl Grey tea and Jelly Bellies shared by a desirably calm shuffle of about 25 visitors.

One of those visitors was Liza J. Lee (above), who wrote an article about the show for her site artistrun.org (see end of entry for link).

Eventually, the Blimited edition Ashley Andel T shirts were brought out by Yuriko (Blim's proprietor), and to my dismay the image had been printed upside down!

Questioning Yuriko on the matter, she felt the design augmented one's breasts too much when screened right-side-up, which I believe was unanimously felt as preposterous by the end of the evening.

With note on the penchant of miniature delicacies my shows of late seem to be acquiring, I bring a baker's dozen tiny cheesecakes to the collage workshop, which garnered a mere two participants despite a lot of interest; though considering the $60 head charge Blim charged for materials and cover, attendance was expectedly thin, and much cheesecake was gorged.

Modestly, I entitled the evening an "Obsessive-constructive introspection", in which participants should "anticipate making their very own 'fake Ashley Andel' piece utilizing materials either from or very much like the ones used in the show of canvases". My preposterous write up continues: "as a congregation, we might sift through the chaotic depths that make up our insurmountable reservations in attempt to make brashness out of bashfulness. What might be a 'journey to the interior', tongue-in-cheek, of course".

Two ladies by the name of Sioux and Michelle came to make some pictures with me for four hours time, and where I brought a fair amount of my own material along, Yuriko provided just as much or more of her own, which was hilarious because of how pale my stuff was in comparison to how bright and ridiculous her stuff was. Here was a toyish 'clash of the Titans' over Lilliputian pastries and 'Mod Podge' (a newly acquired finish I found recently) with two strangers and their paid $60 for 'day care'!

I say 'money for day care' precariously because I don't want to come off patronizing, but it's always fascinating to sit down with other adults to forget the more complicated devices we all use and get back to basics, if not even in my 'make a fake' regime, poised like a meek dagger over Blim's brasher tidbits; oh no! Could it be possible that the maker of a show called 'Brash Play' could be overcome with someone else's colours?

One clear advantage Yuriko has over me here is her contribution of wood panel boxes, which I'm ashamed to say I've never worked with before. We take to these like food, only strangely enough from where we're sitting, the very same place the 'would-be Thanksgiving' took place only two weeks before, we're almost taking on an act of mental excretion at the table, which is funny.

The Blim experience thus far has been a consumption of the cute, which my 'Reticent Work' feels very much at home with. This workshop is, as I recall it to be, a very unique and direct sort of visual response from a visitor's personal point of view.

Here's what Sioux, Michelle and I made:

"J-girl" by Michelle.

Something writhing and scary by Sioux.

Another one by Sioux. Note the interplay of my green graph paper with Yuriko's holographic and animal print origami paper!

"Be Me Moe Woo", by Michelle. This one's on a wood panel, as well as the one above.

Another one by Sioux, also on wood panel.

These two are the one's I did. I was very pleased with how the 'Mod Podge' bonds paper to wood, making it indelible even to harsh scratchings with an implement. I'll be using these again in the very near future.

This was the first workshop I've ever hosted, and it was actually more like an afternoon tea that favored potted glues and pretty tissues just as well as the confections I'm happy to report. In fact, this whimsical cache of 'kawaii' on/off Main Street provides more than enough confection all in all, if you'll include all the spectacle, adornment and cross-over that Blim caters to. It's like a magical broom-closet in an old brick building that you can step in to play with all manner of brashness and craft.

And what further woeful manifestations have all the trial and tribulations of this abducting, arresting establishment to which I applied to burdened me with? What nightmares ensue from the kindergartening of thirtysomethings, the upside-downing of a ballerina? Well, after I screened Takagi Masakatsu's 'Journal for People' for the film night, I was handed three right-side-up T shirts and $50 for hosting the workshop. Woe is me.

Hospitality to a hostile degree? The firing squad before November that pelts you with mini marshmallows? I'm at rest in a field of leaky poppies if that's the case this Remembrance day! God Bless Blim.

You can read Liza J. Lee's article about the show here.

Year one.

2009-10-01T11:10:00.000-07:00

Today marks precisely my first year of life as a Vancouverite, and is also the kick-off for my first two official shows in residence, subsequently my first shows outside of Edmonton. The first of which I'll talk about is set up at Blim, a compact, flamboyantly utilitarian arts and crafts space located at Main and East 17th avenue.

It comes as a great privilege to set up at Blim, as I remember first happening upon it vacationing here five years ago, back when Blim was located on Pender street, just adjacent the infamous Pigeon Park. I saw a set of bands play in a gigantic whitewashed cubby hole set in the middle of a room lined down one side with windows. Brightly coloured staplers and florescent extension cords were strewn about everywhere, and I never forgot about the space.

"Blim was an imaginary land I had when I was young", I recall proprietor Yuriko Iga saying to me back then, and with the hanging of 'Reticent Work', which is a showcase of my lighter, more delicate stuff, I get a chance to explore this tweeish sort of place more closely in it's since transplanted new location as October's wallflower; a resident reticent!

As this month's resident artist, in addition to having a show of work, I get to silkscreen some Blimited edition A.A. T shirts, which will be up for sale (I'll keep you updated on the prices once we start churning 'em out). Yuriko really liked my Schlemmer/Rodchenko bobbin lace ballerina drawing, and that's the image that's been chosen. Stay tuned.

In addition to that, I'll have Blim's window display at my disposal. Over the past two weeks I've really been playing around, painting almost anything that strikes my whim. Blue paint found it's way on to a toy bobby cap and pair of aviators to produce the 'promo shot' that starts this entry off, a store-fixture torso, and not to mention countless cardboard rings and especially some chunkily checkered lace curtain, both in blue and greenish-gold.

All of this stuff (excluding the policeman!) will be featured out front as props for the window, though I worry I might have gone overboard with it all to make fanfare for feathers. Oh well; what's to argue if it's pleasant to look at?

I almost forgot to mention that Blim invited me to host a film night, for which I've chosen an album of short videos by Takagi Masakatsu called 'Journal for People'. Takagi's work is unique because not only does it remind you of painting, it blurs the boundaries between sound and vision in a way that MTV could never conceive of. The film night, or 'Flim night', will take place on Friday, October 30th. Admission is a $5 to $10 donation.

Here's a video Takagi did called 'Salida Del Sol', which is one of the videos to be featured that evening. It's one of the most moving things I've ever seen.

The second show I've put up is the portrait show "It isn't easy to admit that you're lonely", which you can see at Tattoo Collective, 1015 Granville Street. Having pieces up in a tattoo parlour is a definite first for me, and probably not a venture I'd normally seek out, but having a friend involved with the endeavour changes things a little, and having this show up in such a place is fitting, because it's not so much a show of girls, but a show of the trace of girls. It's as if all of the subjects have suddenly been rendered into parlour-walled clip art, which I somehow enjoy.

How admirable tattoo artists are, despite my lack of care for their overall aesthetic; their nerve of keeping so confidant, almost defiant of how indelible and consequential a mistake could be. How miraculous that someone could dare to use living skin as their medium, and yet how horrible! What if someone was actually impulsive enough to get one of the girls inked up on their biceps? The thought of someone having my art work on their skin is enough to make my flesh crawl in more ways than one.

Oh, and while we're on the topic of flesh, here's a first draft acetate drawing I made of some muscles for a canvas in progress.

To shamelessly recap here, my first year in Vancouver was set with the initial goal of having some new canvases made in a stable apartment suite, and perhaps one show to warm the locals up to my particular brand of idiocy, but looking back upon it now, it seems my goals have been supplanted.

Blim events "Reticent work":

Opening: Friday October 9th, 8-11 free admission.
Flim night, "Journal for People" by Takagi Masakatsu Friday October 30th, 8pm $5-$10 donation.
Gallery also open during 'The Drift'.
Hours of operation: Monday to Thursday 2-10pm, Friday-Saturday 12-6, Sunday 12-4.
(604) 872-8180

Tattoo Collective "It isn't easy to admit that you're lonely":
Business hours Sunday-Tuesday 11am to 7pm, Wednesday-Saturday 10 am to 10pm.
1015 Granville street, (604) 568-5757

* Also, not mentioned in this post is the appearance of 'Pachinko dilemma' (shown above) at PacificThorn's space at 110 East Hastings for the post-Olio Festival showcase. Viewings of this and many other works by other artists can be arranged by appointment by calling (604) 839 3670.

Shows up for the duration of October. Prices listed at venues.

Sex after death.

2009-09-14T18:37:00.000-07:00

En route to work this morning, a tiny headline in today's issue of '24 Hours' caught my attention, proclaiming that the controversial (and charismatic) anatomist Dr. Gunther von Hagens, famous for his traveling 'Body Worlds' show of postured human cadavers, is creating an exhibit of plasticized bodies in the act of coitus. Further online research into this unearthed all the expected outrage, with phrases like 'cadaver porn' being tossed about and, intriguingly, a report that the King of Pop himself was to be plastinated by the infamous Dr. Gunther.

One thing is apparent: two bodies, male and female, were recently displayed in a 'reverse cowgirl' position for von Hagens' "Cycle of Life" exhibit in Berlin to many crowds of gnashing teeth, once again opening up those same old moral debates in a fresh new suit. Personally, I can't help but fence-sit on the topic like a wary lifeguard (imagine a lifeguard watching over a bunch of rubberized corpses!), but what interests me are all the brittle tethers a display like this rips through; all the raw truth and harsh realities that deter people away from both sex and death are artfully displayed by someone who, in his grim fedora, almost resembles Joseph Beuys.

It comes as no surprise that the tiny article caught my eye, considering this rather morbid assortment of source material accumulating on my living room floor (above), and that my next batch of work is to be made up of sexually charged death imagery. So far, I've used myself as the model both to re-examine who I am (the artist as art) and to theatrically illustrate a sort of danse macabre that beautifully contemplates the ugly sides of love and sex. All tongue in cheek, of course.

Another thing I'm automatically reminded of when I see von Hagens' work is Joel-Peter Witkin's photography (above), and how it has irked but nonetheless moved me with it's overtly liberal arrangement, how in death could the two old men know that they'd be two decapitated heads kissing for art? The key word that's made obvious by it's absence is 'consent', and somehow I doubt that Witkin had consent from the deceased to be placed this way. Which is fascinating in itself.

Dr. Gunther von Hagens does have written consent from his stiffs, he boasts, but his suspicious sort of celebrity renders that fact nearly moot, his public as taut as the nerves that he preserves. It's the wonky morals that make this stuff interesting, and despite von Hagens' claims that his displays are purely instructional, they also inadvertently conjure up a musk of salacity.

I suppose that the subjects of love, sex and death are as tired and tried as an old camel, but how else am I supposed to alleviate myself from nine months of painting brightly coloured squares? With the coming of the season, it's time to try on my Francis Bacon shoes.

A pane of glass away, a 'man behind the curtain'.

2009-09-09T23:37:00.000-07:00

Three drunken tarts board the SkyTrain at Granvile station giggling, oblivious to the deflated looking middle ager only a pane of glass away.

Staring at my feet as the train departs, my gaze drifts over to the feet of others.

As the girls start to topple and writhe, the old man scratches his ear.

Every time I ride the SkyTrain, I can't help but notice how each passenger occupies their space, and the airs that they give off. I'm also fascinated with the near intimate proximities we can get with strangers. An old Chinese woman with a bag full of bottles nestles up beside a girl with white knee highs and a tennis racquet, or a boy with acne and earbuds can be staring face to face with an old man sucking on a chicken bone.

The SkyTrain is full of conflicting stories all rubbing up against each other, subjecting me to the same emotional acrobatics rapid fire news reports put me through. When my inner Walter Mitty crops up, I look out for the scant evidence of fantasy that others might involuntarily reveal in their manners; bittersweet ponderings of who they are and who they'd like to be. It's sort of voyeuristic to always be on the lookout for other people's innermost, to be sure, but no matter if it's superhuman or superficial, I always find it ever so entertaining to plumb.

It reminds me that the unreal self is just as real as the actual self inasmuch as the unreal self is always that 'man behind the curtain' pulling the strings.

Also, and I'm not sure if this is detouring from my point too much, when reality and fantasy blur as it does in these new 'realistic' super hero movies being pumped out (in a world where superheroes exist), who or what occupies the pages of a comic book?

"Looking forward to this fall".

2009-08-24T23:00:00.000-07:00

Horrifically, this new drawing in progress not only looks cadaverous, it depicts the artist himself in the nude!

This is basically what my next series is going to look like, only on a near life size scale and with my typically ambiguous colouration.

I don't want it to be a series of self portraits if I can help it, either. So, if you'd like to be a subject or commission me to do your portrait please let me know through this blog. And no, you don't have to be naked if you don't want to be.

Paper disco.

2009-08-20T00:03:00.000-07:00

Here is a string of pictures from the premiere of some of my "Brash Play" work at the Astoria Hotel for Olio Festival.

Above is how the installation looked at the beginning of the evening. It's a diorama made out of a large packing box from my shipping department.

This is Sarena, who helped me with the set up. We didn't get black paint or glue anywhere, except possibly on our hands.

Of course, who knew that setting art up in a pub would ultimately degrade into something that looks like a Russian constructivist "Girls Gone Wild" video?

She was the little paper disco that could. It all turned out sort of like that disastrous restaurant scene at the end of Jacques Tati's "Playtime", where the ramshackled side of the fashionable bistro garners it's own exclusive crowd.

Or, more accurately in my case, I had a rather brightly coloured photo booth for tens of club goers to come take advantage of...

... like this leering stork of a guy who immodestly asks that his crotch 'keep dry' for the duration of the night!

Girls came to dance...

...laugh and pose like popstars.

It was a great amalgam of pub and playground, two of the most dominant meeting places in many young people's lives, and while carefully edging the art out of harm's way, I played along as the relentless shutterbug.

This was an extravagantly tragic sort of event. It was simultaneously fun and terrible to be there, like having a chess set open in the middle of the dance floor. I had to be on my toes at all times to watch for stray light bulbs.

Mild raucousness did occur in the form of a red rose, a red bra and a pitcher of Rickard's Red.

The evening ended with the crossword puzzle moved to centre dance floor, where I smiled at this tiny dance floor being used atop a larger one.

Although I have previously voiced a dislike for pub shows, I decided to let this one slide in favor of some initial exposure, and Olio Festival seemed to pull in some decent throngs.

It was a lot of fun and hard work for one night, but secretly I hope never to have to show in a pub again!

Visceral frigidity.

2009-08-04T14:04:00.000-07:00

Upon closing the angry toy box of my latest endeavors, I remembered all of those translucent figurative works I made about three or four years ago, and realizing that the dangers of too much revision could prove tedious to both viewer and myself alike, it's merely my own sense of schooling that causes this; I have to keep my methods updated in order to grow enticingly. I made the picture above (titled "I feel so at home with you now", 15" x 15") in 2005 with a forecast of chill anticipated, and by gum, I was right.

Naturally, after so much impertinent patchwork, I'll be turning back to this style for future work. Raw, sinewy and writhing with bone and gristle, I'm curious to see how my current melancholia will shape out.

Though I'm usually shockproof, a recent encounter at a house party with a group of young hedonists left me feeling sexually frigid; the lot of them were on some sort of festive drug when they all decided to cram themselves into a shower stall to grope, squeeze and suckle each other silly while I retreated in disgust to an airing television set. All the going's on left me feeling almost bored with sex in a Warholian fashion, (albeit without the veneer of colour planes and silkscreen). I would have fallen asleep if it wasn't for the slight nausea induced by this flesh crew. Herein, a shift to the lascivious wouldn't be so ill a road to retrace right about now.

Once upon a time, I was combining this ugly kind of wriggling with some sharp, electric coloration. I was listening to a lot of laptop pop like DAT Politics, Momus and Secret Mommy at the time, undoubtedly inspiring the piece above called "Piercing Eros" (2003, 14" x 18"). At a time when I was a lot more shy and without the internet at my immediate disposal, it was fun to mimic the trashy graphic design that was coming out from labels like SKI-PP and Chicks on Speed Records with basic acetate and acrylics. Sadly, I think a lot of that drive disappeared both with the ebb of electroclash (plus it's better tributaries) and my acquisition of an iMac; and looking back, I think I really was on to something that wasn't entirely derivative.

Hell, the goldfish I am, I was of mind to be making pictures more like 'singles' rather than 'albums' back then, only making my shows in Edmonton rather like hodge-podge with little care for group cohesion, and this is, I suppose, where a lot of "Brash Play" came from: a desire to make something like pedantic stage design in a gallery space.

("Bird", 10" x 14", 2005 shown above)

"Piercing Eros" aside (and only mentioned for transitional sake, really), I feel it's appropriate to pluck these tendons of the past for my newfound sexual criticism. Sex is both beautiful and ugly, as an anatomy student might find a corpse to be. So soon after finding old soiled panties in my closet and the recent witnessing of an orgy, I'm going to title my future collection of work "Visceral frigidity", and just as Tracey Emin or Egon Schiele might do, I won't be denying honesty from the project (with the exception of identities).

("Constructive criticism", 15" x 30", 2004 shown above)

John Torrington will never have looked more sultry, just you wait and see...

The everyday brashness of Chad Murray.

2009-08-03T23:25:00.000-07:00

Something I've been trying to suggest with my show 'Brash Play' is the way that many fine artists have trouble finding themselves in a playful state while worrying about coming off as puerile.

The area in which my take on playfulness might falter lies is in it's lack of subtlety; it's shameless and drunken, an obsessive enfant terrible wearing make up and wigs long suppressed by layered tones of cloudy pastel, angered by incestuous art scenes, even jilted by love. I'm not about to cut my new body of work down completely, though; the confrontations within such loudness were required to bridge over the median between the poker-faced and those reckless things I've grappled with in the company of fellow aesthetes; an aftertaste to some lotus eating, perhaps.

As luck would have it, someone by the name of Chad Murray was scheduled to show alongside myself at the Astoria Hotel for Olio Festival the night of August 14th, and peering in on his work via Facebook I saw a world not unlike what Björk suggested in her song 'The Modern Things'; a world where the mechanized stuff of late can fit comfortably next to what is more naturally occurring.

This is a world where pigeons and redwood trees steadily exist while laser beams dart and eddy about; Chad's painterly approach is carefully orchestrated to include your iPod and your satellite dish without making a poor environmental mark. It's extremely fun, yet also subtle. Ambiguously, it might also incorporate what I'd like to call the 'theatre of the everyday', a world where pretentiousness is naturally occurring without worry of presumption, a perfect mesh of the brash and accustomed, the real and the fake; a perfect world I can only dream of living in.

In the picture above, it's as if Balthus the painter had abandoned his little girls for the infrared. Now, how can any painter execute a task like that without deplorable failure? How can it be that the cosmos could educate me with such coincidental deployment?

Stay tuned to see what this old bone rack has to respond with next as 'Brash Play' makes it's fold.

A sublime timeline.

2009-07-23T01:33:00.001-07:00

I feel a lot more relaxed lately, as this picture by photographer Ola Cholewa suggests. Ola found me in a thrift shop on Main Street and we met up a few weeks later to hold a photo session; her inquisitiveness brought her, an old Rolleiflex camera and an accomplice carrying a silver umbrella to my apartment door. Feeling very posh indeed with the circumstance, I simply reclined and didn't bother to get theatrical or strike any poses. As languid a shot it is, it's all about forgetting past heartbreaks and finding a new home not nearly as lonely as I initially took it, seeing a great deal many of those darling acquaintances I knew in Edmonton out here in Vancouver anew.

My timeline for the next while is particularly exciting, I'm happy to report, after about nine months of hermitous composition. During the month of October, I'll be the artist in residence at BLIM, a multi purpose space/cutesy Japanesey boutique located in a great brick building on Main and 17th. Planned for the showing are my more reticent paper works last seen at ArtsHab, as well as some newer takes on that same theme. Yuriko Iga, BLIM's proprietor, informed me with seemingly cautious cadence that I would be required to make a BLIMited edition t-shirt for the event, as well as hold a workshop and movie night, somehow thinking I'd be dissatisfied with this very generous helping of presence. Poor me...

September will be holding an encounter with yet another of my favorite musical acts as the Pet Shop Boys take stage at the Vancouver Centre for the Performing Arts with their 'Pandemonium' tour. Pinching myself isn't enough, so I made this fan video to their latest single 'Did You See Me Coming?' instead.

Serendipitously, Friday August 14th will see me installing a truncated display of 'Brash Play' work for the Olio Festival (my first official appearance in town) at the Astoria Hotel on East Hastings street with none other than the heart-throbbish band Makeout Videotape, who is made up of Edmonton alumni Mac DeMarco and Alex Calder, not to mention another artist by the name of Chad Murray, who I'm having trouble finding more info on. I saw Makeout Videotape perform last Friday at BLIM to a throng of teenage girls who strongly wafted the scent of bubblegum and urine about the room. This should be a fun night; pity the girls won't be old enough to get in!

Here's a preliminary illustration I made of them in response to their fun set.

I suppose it's been a worthwhile nine months of solitude. Now, it's time to feel sublime...

Kaleidocrash!

2009-07-09T11:04:00.000-07:00

Here are four new 16" x 20" canvases for "Brash Play", a series called "Kaleidocrash".

Using masking tape to paint might seem elementary for some, but I find it restrictive in the same way a rhyming scheme turns free verse into a game.

Compositionally, it's a bit swatchy, but integrational. If the inside of a kaleidoscope contained an imperfect prism and statically charged confetti, you'd probably see something a lot like this.

Much of new pop culture refers to old video game systems for inspiration; these canvases look like those wonderful glitch patterns that appear onscreen when a cartridge malfunctions.

"Brash Play" is, after eight months, finally coming to a close with mostly retouching and incidental prop work left to finish. While I'm still in talks with a gallery to hold the show, I'm planning on premiering a truncated installation of it for the Olio Festival, an art, music and comedy festival taking place around Vancouver from August 13 to 16.

The Olio Festival will be a great opportunity to meet some local creative types in some of the city's coolest places. If the art or comedy doesn't grab you, then most certainly the long list of musical acts will.

Check out oliofestival.com for more details.

Father and thumb.

2009-06-09T11:05:00.000-07:00

This is a new picture (36"x36") of my father Anthony Andel, the uttermost of the nuttermost presented here in a 'stylized representation of his madness'. I would not be as creative without his influences, good or bad.

If Allen Ginsberg had his mother Naomi, I had my dad Tony. He passed away in November of 2007.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

One might automatically assume that part and parcel with a larger city comes more dominant grafitti, which is true to a degree, but in between the seams I've come across a lot of curio art outside. In fact, pictured above is a Liliputian city block (literally a wooden block) somebody stuck to the unassuming side of a storefront on Commercial.

It's evocative to come across so many intimately placed objects in such public places, indicative of a sense of home that goes beyond the brick and drywall for locals. Maybe it's a solution to homelessness: to bring about an end to homelessness, why not bring home to the street?

Chiefly egged on by how appealing intimacy in public is, I put up a whole bunch of tiny thumbnail posters...

...and though she's bigger than a thumb, the scrumptious Kathy K. is now hanging out on Water street.

Flirting with poster art has tickled the situationist in me, creating a sort of psychogeography out of my misadventures, but it's a lot of hard work lugging those pots of glue around, so I think I'll be taking more interest in further studio work this summer. That is, when I'm not on the beach trying to rinse sand from off my strawberries with the mineral water.

Keeping up with the tulips.

2009-06-03T23:17:00.000-07:00

Work continues with the brashest of play; this yet to be titled canvas (36"x36") gets back to where "Purolator pinball" left off and fits comfortably next to the "Traffic jam" piece, albeit with a cold shoulder.

The collection of 'to be painted' tape cylinders is piling up in the corner as I ration out the paint for three new pictures, my slacks and drop sheet almost worthy of display by themselves. I'm concerned about my legs though, which really need some sun.

Such toiling! Even getting out into the sunshine is the basis of a project. This new, more decorous picture of Kathy K. will be posted on the Vancouver streets very soon, otherwise I'm at mind to hit the beach.

Poster boaster.

2009-05-11T11:03:00.000-07:00

What a beautiful day to go postering! Clearing out my inventory of curling, brittle paper works make the city streets more familiar, and affords me some space to make some new material. It might also be interesting for the people portrayed to see their faces take on a life of their own.

This is Megan, and she's at Pigeon Park, East Hastings Street.

One of my 'apple girls' made it's way to the back alley of the Lamplighter, on Water and Abbott, Gastown.

Keeping with my plans to campaign this silly off-hander, the annoyingly obvious 'Keep Dry' symbol reminds passersby to never forget their umbrella, no matter what the meteorologists say.

This is Jillian, under the overpass at Union and Main, just down from the Cobalt Hotel.

This is Tish, on a temporary facade at Pacific Centre, Granville and Dunsmuir.

A ham fisted ransom note.

2009-05-08T13:33:00.000-07:00

As yet more reports of a possible flu pandemic threaten mass hysteria, I've gone and locked myself up in my apartment where like some mad cow I've been stumbling about the place for three days blasting mucus all over the walls. Not only am I sick, but seeing as I spent my last $60 on groceries I'm also broke.

I turn on the TV, but with one glimpse of Nancy Grace on CNN I turn it right back off. What is this thing called 'convalescence' to a person who actually feels guilty about just getting some basic sleep, anyway? I decide to keep constructive, but in between paycheques my art kit has little to offer up but black paint and some thickened glue from the bottom of the pot. So, working from odds and ends with a head full of spongiform has ultimately produced what looks like some ham fisted ransom note from a drug addled tourette's case.

Walking around, I've seen so many great attempts at street art it's hard to reference it all at once, but I think I try to rub a little stink into my hair because of it. The rain makes everything all sticky and moldy, and though I can't promise you sandals and dreadlocks any time soon, perhaps I can hope to do something as random as this one day:

This is a photograph I took at Commercial Station. Apparently, someone thought it'd be funny to hang a bunch of hand painted web pages in the ravine.

Finishing touches.

2009-05-07T08:33:00.001-07:00

The other night, I finally got around to making the last three pictures for the 'Lonely' show. Above is a smirky little one of Caitlin Richards, which, like the others pictured in this entry, is a scan of the first draft acetate. This means that I've not completed the canvases themselves quite yet, and though I feel a bit shy with showing these portraits in their earliest state, I find it irresistible to report that I now have the show at a rap.

Here's a portrait of a certain Jenny, just above. Her picture reminds me of an Asian bubble gum wrapper. This one's going to be put on a larger horizontal stretch, and I'm toying with the idea of colour. Any ideas?

Below is a picture of Marissa. I don't believe I've done her much justice in previous drawings, but this one seems to nail something. She looks like a puppy!

Her eyes look a little crossed here, but that'll come out in the wash.

Post industrial playthings, etc.

2009-04-30T23:07:00.000-07:00

As the springtime gets underway, I make wheat paste. Pictured above is a 24" x 45" hand drawn poster limited to a hand full that may or may not survive the streets for long. The image is a regurgitation from the 'Make It Not Suck' campaign, but viable enough to reconsider, I think. A little girl (actually the body of Jenna Bush from a Dover paper doll book) with a head of flowers and some apples could be eye catching, but of course who knows what piques interest anymore...

I've been trying to escape my self imposed exile with bicycle rides to alleviate mental stagnation, but I can't stay artistically idle for long, not even at my day job. Working as a shipping clerk in auto parts means you encounter a lot of industrial waste, namely spent cardboard tape rolls, which I've been collecting.

These nearly discarded bits make for a wonderful plaything. Acrylic paints applied, they're irresistible; providing a sculptural link to the canvases I've been making for 'Brash Play'.

When stacked, the cylinders become a tangible timeline. Each tape roll is equivalent to about ten shipped parcels, and I gather about 54 of these rolls weekly.

I've been collecting them for only about the past four weeks, which has been the down time of business unlike winter time when harvest would have been far more bountiful. A particularly morbid thought, considering that each shipment I make is indicative of a collision somewhere out there. A large invoice of Honda Civic parts, for instance, might just mean a real nasty crash.

So, each tape roll is a strange multi-incremental measurement that tallies time and money, recreation and mechanization. Oil, gas, metal and blood.

Not to mention acrylic paint, mind you. I often wonder about the toxic effects of the art supplies that I use, which comply to ASTM D-4236, some vague number with abstract descriptions listed on Google.

Toxicity can be pretty, mind you, and made explicitly gorgeous on the working class level, which is why I don't always mind working a labour job. The collection of material is highly fruitful, the exercise is good and the experience is rather humbling.

One might look to the photos of Edward Burtynsky for higher validation.

From one industrial wasteland to another, above is the current state of the 'Disco Panels' I mentioned some time ago. The panning rhythms have continued in a large central panel, resembling something of a synthetic music chart.

There's also the effect that all this showiness has had on my body. The contrast between the made up 'me' and the warehouse 'me' is so harsh it's whiplash.

It's the theatre of the every day, the love of plasticity that brought Karly Paranich to my door again.

Karly was the first guest I've had in about eight months, and being sympathetic to the realms of fantasy she made me up again. Transformation wasn't easy this time around due to rediscovered shyness, but slipping me a pair of fake eyelashes did butter me up a little.

"They'll feel like butterflies sitting on your eyelids", she said.

This is a little video I made to Pizzicato Five's 'Boy Meets Girl' that evening.

Bicycle ride (Random encounters #2).

2009-04-15T22:26:00.000-07:00

As daylight gains a head start on us, as the weather gets better, I'm all the more inclined to ride my bicycle.

Rain or shine, there's a lot outside to explore.

The scenery envelops me.

My pedals defy the concrete, my head is always dodging the glass. It's a city of transparency.

I can see figures both overhead and at street level thinking the very same thoughts, some loftier set than others. Sometimes, it's all topsy- turvy.

Sometimes, it's a stony facade with a doorway... but then just a few paces away, it perforates...

...and it all seems so free and possible. Everything is in it's place for a very good reason, even when in transit.

Atop a bicycle, I'm a citizen of the world.

In traffic, I'm an ambiguous mix of pedestrian and vehicle, much to the dismay of many a motorist out there. To them, I might as well be a witch on a dripping squeegee asking for change in a traffic circle.

I don't care. Vancouver is supposed to be a green city, right? The only oil product I use is WD-40.

Climbing with tires atop Mt. Pleasant from a B line across the Cambie bridge, I'm face to face with the Little Mountain Co-Op, now facing reconstruction in what should hopefully be as successful a project as what was originally planned onsite in the 1950's.

A ride through the deserted area shows an abundance of protest art. I see a group of linked paper dolls on the outer walls and assume a pose.

The perimeter of the area is decked out in creative murals posted by the socially active locals.

Inside, off the frontal facade and on the abandoned trails inside, you come across a ghost town of plywooded windows.

Looking behind my shoulder here, I realize that this scanty place is at the gracious foot of Queen Elizabeth Park. My prayers hold tight that this redevelopment actually lives up to it's original mandate in the future.

Night time approaches, but I'm still criss-crossing bridges and disrupting the traffic. It's so much fun to see new places.

Creatively, I'm excited as well. Stay tuned; I've been holding back...

Dear Edmonton: WHY ARE YOU STILL SO BORING?

2009-04-02T20:08:00.000-07:00

My flight in from Vancouver landed about an hour ago , and I'm sitting in the restroom of 'Milestones' at South Edmonton Common listening to music that Martha Stewart probably rejected from Keb' Mo'. This might as well be Commerce Place on a Saturday afternoon.

After washing my hands, I enter the restaurant marveling at the sea of noggins. The place is packed and all of the hairstyles are either grey or too small for the heads they occupy. The family of Tommy Banks is in a booth having wine and cheese for brunch; it's a yuppie's IHOP for Christ's sake and in convenient proximity to the bustle of suburbia.

With food consumed, the drive into town reveals a new frontal facade on Southgate Mall together with the makings of that subway expansion the city started about four years ago. My sister Alyssa turns to me from the driver's seat and says 'It's crazy that the LRT is going to come out this far'. We drive across the forbidding but splendid High Level Bridge into the heart of downtown so I can see my old stomping grounds. The old 1912 funeral pyre I used to live in is still standing, thank God, but the most different thing I can note on Jasper Avenue is either the relocation of the 'Funky Pickle' pizza joint or the renaming of 'The Globe' pub to 'Rock Stars'.

No wonder the opening of a grocery store on Jasper providing use of an oyster bar made the front page of the Edmonton Journal; you need that sort of stuff to displace a headline like 'NATIVE GIRL FOUND STABBED IN THE FACE 26 TIMES'. It's cringing when you're spoiled by a seriously metropolitan area I suppose, but I feel Edmonton has no excuse but carelessness.

Maybe it's the weather and topography that causes this. Edmonton doesn't hold anybody close to a warm breast; it's the people that grow up and stay in this cabin feverish place that get under your skin, but the flat land and the big sky can scream out that there's more to life than just the river valley and West Edmonton Mall once in a while.

You'll have your diversions here, but will they ever extend past landlocked pussy or the rim of a beer at the Black Dog? Call me crazy, but with all these good memories of growing up here I can't see why with all this oil money and Mayor Stephen Mandel's new boosterism the city can't escape the mundane.

Sometimes, Edmonton attempts to do just that. After two nights with my sister, her love Dustin and my newborn niece Vanna, I'm content with the house I hold bed in, but as always the outside world calls and I'm off to a gala benefit for Edmonton's Fringe Theatre festival held at the TransAlta Arts Barns off Whyte Avenue. Apparently, I'm to make a canvas live in person for auction. It tickles me pink that I've been considered for the task, and have brought with me some found materials from the warehouse I work in, chiefly old barcodes and those previously discussed offensive bathroom icons.

Arriving a little early, the personnel guide me from the front door to this dark performance space outfitted with purple and silver drapes and empty candlelit tables. A cheerleading squad is in rehearsal in the central area as I'm ushered to the sidelines to a dimly lit table where I eventually ask stagehands for light.

A bit incensed, but patient, I start work on a canvas from out my briefcase. The room is thankfully dead for the next little while permitting me to plumb something out of this industrial bunch I've brought. As I start to paste down the barcodes to my canvas I'm distressed to see them start to fade in the glue! To my surprise, some fade more than others, causing this variety of black and white tones to bleed and subside at random. I'm petrified-- is this going to last out the door?! My confidence picks up as the glue dries; everything seems okay. I add in the bathroom icons, and as I'm mixing up the paints the front doors open to another bevy of shrunken haircuts and silver foxes. It's showtime...

Distressed as the lights dim and the theatre squad appears at centre stage, it's up to my blind eye to try and figure something out. Occasional upward glances reveal to me some very devoted local actors in pantomime and brandishing handheld industrial lanterns in unison, which is all very wonderful if only I could see what I'm up to. Frantically, I gently apply my masking tape to soggy paper hoping that the applied surfaces won't peel away with it. Luck has it that I repair the tears with some ease as blue, grey and yellow affix to my tiny picture. It's bleak; I call it 'Edmonton Transit' with tongue in cheek (shown incomplete at top of blog).

Hors d'oeuvres are passed about, and I'm mostly ignored and a bit peckish. This room of ancient patrons is getting a mass rim job, as I understand is the task. House lights swell a little more while I'm putting the finishing touches on, then three blokes dressed as farmhands take centre stage to call out auction, and I'm first on the block. Fuck.

A tragic brown ten gallon hat rushes up to me, whispering off mic "what's your initial asking price"? Without hardly a moment to even know if I'm finished I hastily say "fifty bucks, I dunno". As this rodeo clown sprints about the room with the piece literally dripping down his arm, he nets with cattle call three times that, which is fortunate because it's hardly visible to anyone.

A piece from one of the other invited artists, a larger ramshackle one I wouldn't hang in a garage later nets five times my top dollar, leading me to believe that nobody actually cares about what is being purchased. No matter; it's all about the cause.

Straying from the milieu and walking down Whyte Avenue, I look about longing for those desirable persons I used to see. The walk is crowded with hooded cronies all with looks to beat my fey little ass into the pavement; I've never felt more unsafe, even at the junction of Main and Hastings. Everyone's not only a rock star, but a disgruntled one at that. Did I actually walk in drag about this place at one time?!

Roads are waterlogged in springtime; I make it back to my bed with soggy feet in time to hear my niece Vanna crying out for a nip.

I never thought I'd say this, but GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. Besides the love for my family and friends, I have little care or hope for this place anymore. To quote a Pet Shop Boys song, 'This must be the place I've waited years to leave'.

(epilogue)

The most beautiful thing I remember in all of Edmonton is the tinsel that floats above a car lot on Whyte Avenue and like everything else, it's still there.

Well, not to be too cheeky, but coming back to Vancouver made me realize how much more at home I am out here despite my seemingly immeasurable loneliness. March 31st sees me manhandling the best pop band in the world Stereo Total with an apelike grin on my face...

Vanity insanity.

2009-03-30T20:03:00.000-07:00

This is a video of my sister Alyssa brushing her hair in a mirror. I visited her and my newborn niece Vanna over the weekend.

a'a

VANITYVISION!

2009-03-22T23:44:00.000-07:00

Press the 'play' icon on the both of these windows simultaneously to see my face being made up before your very eyes!

I have a YouTube channel. It shows off my neurotic tendencies quite effectively.

... and as a delightful bit on the tail end, a short film cheerfully entitled 'My Alcoholism'....

http://www.youtube.com/ashleyandel

One big mother of a ham.

Comic Strip Kathy K.

2009-03-19T20:38:00.000-07:00

This is a canvas I made of Ms. Kathy K., a lovely dark skinned twig with a good knack for posture. It comes from a series of photographs I took of her in my old basement for a 'zine like pinup calendar she put out last year. I can only think of one reason why she didn't choose this picture, and it's right smack in our central gaze...

I tried to call up the souls of Dan DeCarlo and Hergé with this one. Green makes it's first appearance here as it was the colour of the skirt she was wearing for the original photo, which in my opinion is far more arresting.

Cartooning her image was something I hesitated to do, having a knack for wiping out almost all ethnicity with my drawings, and her skin is by contrast stark white in this. She almost looks Japanese!

What's more, I've yet to set up a photo show where this and other shutter-snappers should feature. The comic feel of it came as irresistible when I made the initial trace; Betty and Veronica scream out here, harking back to many early sexual thoughts. That's what Archie comics were all about-- who gave a rat's ring piece about Jughead anyways? It was all about the Lichtensteinian tits and ass. I wanted to fuck Veronica far more than I wanted 'Mortal Kombat 2' when I was younger.

On the louder front, black markers have found their way back into my hand for the work of 'Brash Play' which mostly has neglected black (and green) as an aid, but having some real disdain for the way that the 'Traffic Jam' piece turned out, I brought myself to use them on it with help from a few more diagonal lines on the left side. The result is a lot more palatable...

Yes, to answer some questions about my melan(alco)holic tendencies, I am indeed still painting like a madman and about ready to hit the pillow with it for a while, but next week should find me back home at an Edmonton Fringe Theatre benefit to make some impromptu art live in person. That aside, I'll also be visiting my newborn niece Vanna for the first time ever, and I can't tell you how excited I am to see home after six rather solitary months.

Stay tuned!

"It isn't easy to admit that you're lonely".

2009-03-18T19:51:00.000-07:00

The so called 'Edmonton Girls' show has undergone a reshuffling, breaking out of a uniform state of continuous 14" x 18" verticals into something a little more encompassing. The airs of melancholy are impossible to detour due to the sense of loneliness I continue to have in my new city, especially after a rather sociable, flirtatious year and a difficult break up I went through.

The "Donate Your Face" portrait project was meant to be a fodder sweep from the get-go, with intentions to mount something more serious with the material later on. It was also meant to be a social mechanism to get me out of my shell and into the faces of some interesting people, and as it turned out the only people who seemed to push for a portrait were an array of pretty girls...

Lucky me! Well, not entirely as the story goes because one of those girls proceeded to break my heart. She would say that it was due to my increasingly strange behavior and alcohol intake and she wouldn't be wrong; 2008 in Edmonton was simultaneously a great and terrible year for me, a usually timid boy trying to learn how to dance like the cool kids in a playground where the grown ups play.

She is her own social butterfly, and not anything near mine.

That one girl aside, I met a lot of other people female and otherwise whom I miss dearly due to distance. Vancouver is still a city in which I can't always find someone familiar to wave at, and it can be very discouraging. Sometimes I down a bottle of gin, buy a bunch of flowers and hand them out at random to experience something that might amount to the happiness I felt when I was in love. It works for a little while, but then delirium tremens sets in and I shake in bed like I'm about to feel a chilly downpour overtop my sheets.

Thus, the memory of love, the figure of a woman, the black and white traces of many girls all over my walls staring me into a corner where I too am dressed with catty slinkiness and plucked eyebrows hoping that one day the complicated nightmares of mass sociability might end and I could find that one who might say 'hey it's okay... I'll be here. I'll stay here'.

Like Hans Bellmer, I've gone and filled my life with dolls and the shells of young women. Riding the SkyTrain a few months ago I read a paragraph from over somebody's shoulder that said that 'admitting you're lonely could be the hardest thing for somebody to do', which was reinforced when I saw that fake pistol by Dean Drever in my last blog for such an obscene price. The cold, triggerless piece spelled it out for me that this can be a world where warmth and romanticism is indeed dead and where even a rich fuck with the pocket change to drop could find it hard to stay buoyant.

The show has more cohesiveness now in the grand scheme of things. I crave feminine love at all times, but no matter how much I put the ritz on, what I crave stays statued it seems. At the warehouse, the bathroom insignias are incongruent inasmuch as the man is shown as debonair and holding a cigarette where the woman is stuck in boxy shoulders and equilateral skirt. This might come off misogynistic, but it's an entirely found circumstance that effectively suggests these ghosts that haunt me. I WANT her to have expression, but she's only a rough figure and, try as I might she's INTANGIBLE.

Which brings me to my cross dressing. Almost like the play "I Am My Own Wife" by Doug Wright, I too have tried to find comfort in hard times by dressing like a lady. My mother, who I'm now on friendlier terms with, wasn't always a warm person and consequently estranged herself from my younger sister and I as we entered adolescence. As time grew on, I grew 'prettier', and eventually felt some peace in it.

A decision to include myself in the 'girl' series came after much hesitation, not out of shyness but out of respect for the actual girls. This isn't cabaret, and what I thought was 'show' in my vanity has come to be realized for what it is as a lonely and desperate attempt to have femininity with me like a talisman at all times.

Not to deny the playful aspects of the cross dressing, though. The main thing I've hated about being a man is that other men are... insecure and mostly boneheaded! I'm not that man; I'm a sometimes erratic but never violent being who might just need a little help from a woman with tough chops who could afford the patience to lift me out of a real blue funk that has been lasting ever since I started to know what most adults are all about; a woman who's still a girl and yet just a bit boyish enough to twist the key and free me from my spooky predicaments.

Maybe that's pathetic of me, but I know what I'm lacking and what I need. I need unconditional love from a woman to complete my existence, otherwise it's all about going through this life like the romantic Quasimodo that Brigitte Bardot described Serge Gainsbourg as.

I'm so very terrified of that. But, I also know that my neurotic nature can't mess with a woman's life enough to bring her down. If there was a lesson my break up taught me, that would be it.

I have reason, but some of it is admittedly fogged. I have faith that my problems will dwindle because I believe in beauty and peace, and I personally believe that God is a woman. I just want Her to step out from the shadows.

Questionable values.

2009-02-25T23:59:00.000-08:00

Walking aimlessly around town, even if not especially through the back alleys, you can always come across something unusual to gawk at, like this Louis Vuitton print dumpster I saw off Broadway; it's discreet, mostly meaningless and unassuming position in the world is a mark of someone's great humor and true effort toward detail.

Dumpsters are all fair game for a good splattering as most train cars are, but next to the typical graffiti is an abundance of large scale full colour wheat pasting at that. If you look at the peeling corners of the mural above, you can see that people have tucked in some glossy card stock notices for gallery shows, which goes to show you that people use their eyes in every nook and crevice around here. Perhaps that's why everyone seems so paranoid!

So, having left the alleyway walking a little further down the street I came across the chain Douglas Udell Gallery, which is immediately recognizable for it's tacky statues loitering the entranceway. I decide to step inside, and I see this heavy pink pistol resting on a pedestal engraved with the words 'I didn't want to do it, but I got too lonely' by artist Dean Drever. As I lift it, and just as I'm amazed at how heavy it is, I'm floored by it's asking price of $5600.00.

What a lofty bauble. I ask the attendant how many have been sold and she tells me 'four, I think'. Oh, and they also happen to be painted by Ferrari and come with a case.

I can't help but wonder about who would purchase such a nonsensical thing; what sort of mad aesthetic jack off or clinical bourgeois twit would bother to drop that sort of cash? Either way, the vanities of the circumstance are infuriatingly close to home, lingering like a stink in my head due to the fact that in a different pocketbook I'd be mad enough to buy such an object, downing Stolichnaya like Patsy from 'Absolutely Fabulous' and pointing it at all the other made up mummies in Holt Renfrew like Patty Hearst...

... or fetishizing it on a beige mantle in some empty penthouse maybe?

I head for Commercial Drive where fellow Edmonton expat Jessica Joan Delorme has her first show of paintings hung at 'Bump and Grind' cafe. I'm immensely pleased with the focus she's acquired to produce these, having had some uneasiness with the less structured approach she was up to for her Cafe Mosaics show. It was really comforting to see a familiar artist have her first show in Vancouver, however discomforting it was to sip espresso while staring at a massive fishtail protruding from underneath a woman's skirt.

"These paintings are all from my dreams, and one time I dreamt I was giving birth to a fish", she told me at her opening.

Jessica's 'dreams' are modestly priced between $200 and $400; they don't come with a case, but she did paint them herself.

This weekend's jaunt out made me think yet again about the business of art and how fickle it is. What justifies a gun shaped piece of metal to be so expensive and yet so impersonal? How is it that the dreams of a bright young woman go for such a fraction less? It's not like we've ever heared of Dean Drever or Jessica Joan Delorme before, but if Ferrari painted Dean's art for him, he must be good; like a Jimmy Choo pair of shoes, right?

Drever's ideas are good, I won't dispute that, but what sort of a world is it where the bare-handed and raw imagination be sold for a pittance? Is it a measure of how cold we've become?

You have to wonder about what some people hold dear sometimes.

KEEP DRY!

2009-02-19T18:34:00.000-08:00

'Brash Play' is a really taxing sort of show. It takes a lot out of me because to even hope to match the vast energy around me artistically is exhaustive. At a time in my life where I'm trying to maintain stability as best I can, the bat-spinning dizziness about the project is almost incomprehensible. These are not the colours I normally use. This is not the typical way I act, and for the sake of schooling myself I'm throwing my more refined abilities out the window here.

The umbrella has become a recurrent motif in the work, undoubtedly a response to Vancouver's rainy weather but also due to the standardized symbols that label the cargo I receive at work everyday. I see pictures of broken wine glasses, rainy umbrellas and strangely upward pointing arrows in my shipping clerk position all the time. They read 'fragile, keep dry and this way up'. It's cold, but schematically romantic.

The use of the 'Keep Dry' symbol as street art is irresistible to reflect the broken umbrellas and constant downpour that mar the streets, and also something of a taunting myna bird to passersby if I go through with campaigning this image as a poster in the spring.

Otherwise, I have been buying umbrella hats from this great craft store on Hastings Street called 'Dressew'. At $3.00 a pop, you can't go wrong they're so cute. What's more, painting them comes natural, and with them I now have either an installation or a bloody performance. Wouldn't it be great to see a bunch of people in a space wearing umbrella hats, especially if they matched the art?

Am I turning into a glorified set designer? Aren't the canvases I'm making in any case something to look good with the chesterfield?

Sure, why not.

The new picture I'm working on is a hybrid one, in fact I don't know how to fit it into 'Brash Play' at all because it's so pastel. Thematically it works, but wanting to remain cohesive with appearance I might leave this one off to the side as a study. It's so ridiculous it might as well be a sad clown; it's to be a picture of a lady wearing an umbrella hat carrying balloons in the rain!

Oh my, how poetic. No, really! This is what it feels like living in Vancouver for a lot of people, a ridiculous situation sustaining itself in a never ending downpour, how can I veer away from this image?

'Brash Play' is closing in on three specific themes right now: transit, shelter and shamelessness. The elements of a great night out, and sometimes you need an umbrella to keep your hair and makeup in place. The umbrella is representative of that thin threshold between you and the elements; what keeps you going, like a job in a warehouse or a lovely benefactor for that matter.

It's 'mad cap', pardon the pun.

Random encounters.

2009-02-17T00:07:00.000-08:00

The Vancouver Art Gallery has a whole bunch of mannequins in it's windows, which initially isn't anything more than mundane considering the fact that the gallery is only just adjacent to shop windows that look similar. However, when you look again at the cold, impatient way the figures are set you can't help but get uneasy.

It's plainly the Vancouver Art Gallery, made obvious by the large show banner hanging from the entranceways, this motionless dollhouse of stylishly menacing characters staring out into the night. Art galleries are typically thought of as intimidating, particularly due to the people who attend them, and seeing all these lost looking posers all locked up in this rather judicial looking building makes me snicker.

On Valentines Day, I met some interesting people and tagged along to this secret set of shows that were put on by some local musicians in a string of different ATM vestibules up and down East Hastings Street. It was a very surreal feeling to see a crowd pack itself inside these tiny places to see some rather pressured musicians play for but a short while, then get up and leave to crowd the next bank across the way.

Regrettably, I didn't catch the names of the bands, but it's hilarious to see the way everyone takes the ridiculous nature of the situation on the chin. Some acts had never even played an acoustic set before, and it was all a bit self congratulating, but all good fun in the end. I made these videos only moments before the police showed up.

Later on that evening, we stumbled into two of these odd sculptures parked like cars in the residential streets off Main. The metal cast exterior of these objects was designed to look like stretched tarp, and there were no entranceways of any kind, which leads me to wonder if they move by remote control.

I really don't know what to make of them; like boulders with license plates on them.

An art initiative called 'Instant Coffee' put a series of false metal sandwich boards up along Main Street with statements like "We're sorry, we're open" written on them. To a tourist, the signs are perplexing, but undoubtedly tedious for the locals who have to see them every day.

Apparently, some people don't like the efforts of 'Instant Coffee', or of 'hipsterism' in art for that matter. The funny thing is that a lot of the backlash comes from hipsters themselves; for instance I saw a rather fashionably dressed drunk guy kick in a store front window the other night because he thought the store was run by a bunch of 'hipster scum'. The lame brained graffiti on this sandwich board is of the same mentality.

This is a great wheat pasting on the Granville Bridge above False Creek. It really made me laugh.

More random encounters in the future. Stay tuned!

a'a

Sentimental.

2009-02-13T18:44:00.000-08:00

A fresh, removed truck ride out west. A shifting time and place...

The remnants of orgasm, perhaps? Strange, curious things that have built up over the years in old net-bags as reminder to sexual events, or perhaps just dirty laundry?

Tufts of old clothing from my closet. I unravel a roll of powder blue cotton sheets and come across a melon sized polka dot of menstrual blood.

A few years ago I had about four flings that proceeded to bleed on me during sex, some of whom have left their undergarments with me in closet-space.

My initial reaction is that of revolt, but then some groundless, reptilian part of me elevates everything to an animated level.

These soiled works of underclothes are as eligible for artistic merit just as a patchwork quilt or an acetate cel are: an imprint of a significant event. A storyteller's hallmark.

Do I nuzzle them or do I toss them away? Should I really be that sentimental?

It isn't easy to admit that you're lonely.

a'a

Impromptu romp.

2009-02-06T21:59:00.000-08:00

Not meaning to get my fingers into too many pies at once, but I've just made some new impromptu collages in my usual pale, wispy fashion. These 12" x 12" canvases always seem to get attention, and not willing to reveal too much at this point will feature heavily in a project coming October of this year.

My apartment has become a hodgepodge of images. It's sometimes hard to tell that the same artist did it all, which is the highest compliment I would ever give my own work. Frankly, it'll be great to finally get it all out of the house...

... so I can make more, of course...

Naughty nursing.

2009-02-01T21:39:00.000-08:00

Rummaging through some old photographs the other day, I came across some mysterious snapshots of a very lovely woman breast feeding a baby in a rather coy sort of way. I have absolutely no idea who she is or how my family obtained these pictures, but they make me tingle all over with curiosity.

I made some drawings and this 30"x 30" canvas from them, taking a breathing detour from all the harshly tinted contraptions of 'Brash Play'.

The look on her face is unsettlingly sexual.

Panels at the disco.

2009-01-29T22:57:00.000-08:00

The use of black and red is explicit in this new study, and the absence of the warm yellow is apparent. It's a nocturnal one, and somewhat sticky. Like a flooded disco.

So far, all of the pieces for 'Brash Play' look as if they were made for a nightclub, which doesn't surprise me because I'm pushing thirty and decidedly seeing the last of my wilder days. It's as if I'm picking up my youth and reexamining it; trying to find some relevance to all of that crazy drunkenness, the overemotional dance parties, the dress up...

A nightclub is a remarkably aesthetic type of setting, though I don't want to go the route that Jesse Sherburne went with his 'ArtBar' installation for the AGA. There was something dreadful about quaffing beer for 'art's sake', let alone being videotaped doing it around a bunch of ultramodern stools and light boxes.

I suppose what I'm trying to do with 'Brash Play' is simulate a manic atmosphere in a clean and soundly fashion; an intricate and composed sort of chaos, like a sober second thought of a hedonistic past.

The study has prompted me to start these 'Disco Panels', which are to be considerably less concentrated than their predecessor. I might continue the pattern with more panels depending on how these first two turn out, to act as a wallpaper border or something.

They remind me of a show I had of my early stuff at the Backroom Vodka Bar on Whyte Avenue. Someone had carried away one of the larger pieces right past the bouncer, and the others were taken home covered in liquor.

Traffic Jam!

2009-01-27T22:12:00.000-08:00

Carrying on with the same colours I used in the 'Pinball' series brought about this great mess of masking tape.

It's active; it's a landscape that doesn't want to be a landscape.

It's an image that leaves little if any comfort to a viewer, never letting the eye rest in one place for too long.

If 'Brash Play' is to have definite undertones of transit and movement throughout it's development, this is most definitely a 'traffic jam' of a piece. It measures 36" x 36", and is probably one of the most confrontational things I've ever done.

But, that's not all I want to talk about today. I want to introduce you to my new favorite store, which I found wandering about downtown on my last day off. It's called 'Book Off'.

'Book Off' is a vast and magical clearing house of imported Asian media, and Vancouver has the only Canadian location. You'll find that an impulse buy isn't so damaging to the pocketbook here either; prices are extremely fair, and sometimes left me hyperventilating.

This Mandarin FHM features girls that look fresh and approachable for a change, and even someone daunted by the language barrier can appreciate that.

The dollar singles bin is full of discs I'd want to frame. The kissing dogs above are from the cover of '100億のLove Story' by Japanese group 'The Alfee'. The song is an unpalatable power ballad, and the accompanying DVD features a lead singer whose glam factor is probably reflective of how Michael Jackson is bigger than air out there.

For another dollar I discover Gorie, who is apparently a children's entertainer in Japan. He dresses up as a schoolgirl and performs elaborate dance routines with tweens, yet he doesn't even shave his arms. My Gorie disc also features a DVD, and a fold out sheet with all the dance moves in detail.

Two dollars for these discs by Stephanie. She looks like one of those Asian girls who had surgery done to her eyelids to look westernized. She's really adorable, but unfortunately her songs are avoidable.

Moving on to things other than pretty girls and superfreaks, I come to find that both the YMO and Pizzicato Five racks are about a foot and a half long with imports and rarities. I am in Heaven, and I haven't even seen one aisle way.

Book Off has a mind blowing amount of manga and also video games, but I imagine you'd have to have some pretty specific systems to play them on. In order to watch the DVDs that came with my singles I had to change the disc zone on my computer, so you should always keep compatibility in mind.

The lady at the till is bright and happy as she sucks all the disposable cash from out of my pockets, and I'm still smiling as she gives me a one dollar discount ticket packaged with Kleenex on the way out.

Book Off

636 Hornby Street, Vancouver

Brash Play: PUROLATOR PINBALL

2009-01-16T20:04:00.000-08:00

Purolator is the freight company we ship with at the warehouse I work my day job in, and judging from the way the packages arrive they must play rugby with them. Inspired by the company colours (and more), I made this triptych of something resembling a pinball machine.

Moving is never a pleasant experience. Arriving in town, I stayed in my aunt Valerie's basement with all my towering boxes and a futon, which felt like living in my shipping department. Once I found an apartment I feverishly set to work on these canvases, and I tried to give them an air of transit or movement to echo that feeling of excitement (or uncertainty?) you get from being transported.

Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian playing foozeball on a Nintendo might seem monotonous, but I soon found that Bauhaus and De Stijl motifs seemed practically inescapable during the course of composition. A part of that gnawed away at me as the canvases neared their completion, then I saw this video and almost felt like hanging up the hat!

Regardless of my slight disdain for their rather dated appearance, I do feel they succeed in their own intuitive sort of way, and I'm excited to see what they lead on to.

a'a

'The Healers'.

2009-01-15T22:17:00.000-08:00

Above is a drawing by Caitlin Richards in which she strokes my back called 'The Healers'. I'm wounded from a fall on my bicycle.

She surprised me the other day by forwarding it to my email. It's based on a photo taken by Anthony Easton.

It was a warm late summer night on my balcony, and the three of us had just come back from the fairgrounds. That night, she stroked my wounded back. I had taken a scramble on the High Level Bridge a few nights before.

a'a

Snowbound and spellbound.

2009-01-05T20:05:00.000-08:00

Moving to Vancouver, I expected a lot of rain. This I received, and I lost a few very nice umbrellas in the process of my misty romps through downtown.

Nothing warned me about the snow that's fallen this winter, however, and I'm sick to bloody death of it. It's slushy and thick, and worst of all, Vancouverites aren't used to it so they don't shovel, thinking it'll melt away soon as it apparently always does.

People tease me, saying things like 'Well, whose from Edmonton now? Aren't you used to this'? I always reply that in the last eight years or so, Edmonton hasn't really had as much snow as previously observed, and Holy Moly, this is the most snow I've seen since I was little.

I spent four snowbound Christmas days at my aunt Maria's in White Rock (a town on the US border, a cabin just right of the Duty Free), and found myself either staring at the embers in the wood stove or out the frosted window while tucking into the endless turkey and beer. Eventually, I was employed to, well, rake the snow off of the roof. The picture I've posted above should give you an idea of how much fun that was!

When I finally made it back home, with the SkyTrain stalling from icy rails, I found myself in my own habitual version of cabin fever. Stuck inside with free television isn't good enough, so tossing off the afghans I set to work on some of the stuff I was working on before I left home.

Namely, I got back to work on my portrait of Helen Engelbert (seen at top), a canvas that has lived incomplete with me for about a year now. It's not been an easy task making this one-- with respect to Helen, I don't really like it. It's grey and dour despite her lovely and demure expression. Looking out the window once more-- nope, I can't go eating chicken curry in English Bay today!

So, toiling away at this stubborn plane made my keep in between bottles of wine and frozen spanakopita.

Sifting through acetates and paper, I couldn't help but come across all those kind faces that 'donated their faces' to my work last year. Like Helen's painting, I intended to elaborate on their black and white starkness, decorate them with immaculate tassels in the same way, but hardlining the project I decided to mount another show-in-works, keeping them virginal in their contrasting splendor.

Anthony Easton wanted to mount an Edmonton erotica show some time ago, and he wanted my portraits included. I didn't think they were necessarily 'erotic', but he believed they were. In retrospect, I suppose they are, not only because I was sexually involved with some of the subjects (oops!), but because of the way their vivacity is so disclosed in black and white. It's sort of strict; sort of kinky.

So, not only is 'Brash Play' on the go, a show tentatively called 'Edmonton Girls' is as well.

Some of these girls, the ones I've finished in the past week or so, make up the backdrop behind my parked bicycle right now. I can't tell you how much I want to ride it. My new neighborhood is alien to me because of this accursed snow.

But, no matter the snow. It's isolated me enough to remain super-productive, even in my first month here in my new apartment. The snow is almost comforting. Almost.

I miss you, Edmonton.

Tweevil Diorama.

2008-12-22T23:04:00.000-08:00

The initial undertakings of 'Brash Play' have struck me in a very theatrical sense, so I've set up a diorama around the developing canvases.

It all reminds me of Mondrian's 'Broadway Boogie-Woogie', but especially festive and tremulous, like an old carnival ride.

Space-ports, aerobeds and anti-gravity chambers, hyperpost mail and Legocentrics...

...nutrition through colour stream cables... Great nights, ever-good mornings...

..but why won't the carousel ever stop?

Brash from the past.

2008-12-19T19:43:00.000-08:00

My new project, 'Brash Play', is essentially a reaffirmation of the things I was doing before I turned to the more fine collage work I've made recently, and even before I turned to more public works and social circles, like the Make It Not Suck initiatives.

Looking back to a time when I wasn't so concerned about getting to know people, not yet having even one art show under my belt with folded legs on the floor of my first apartment, I was fresh out of high school working with the paint I stole from art class, all ill-manicured thumbs and scared to make that first mark on a canvas. Without much dexterity or courage, I picked up a roll of masking tape and developed a fetish for bold successional stripes.

I took to gluing acetates of my photographs next to these stripes, which looked to me like a mimicry of commercial design. Text eventually worked it's way into these mock advertisements, which gave way to it's discontinue because of an awareness of it seeming too dictatorial. So, the stripes just kept on going, and the letraset consequently used far more sparingly.

Soon after the text, the photos themselves started to disappear.

Things were starting to shape from these rigid methods, and then I learned how to draw by tracing photographs onto the acetate. I used to love watching my schoolteachers illustrate their lessons in class on the overhead projector with those red and blue Staedtler pens, so it was just a convenient borrowing of method that led me to a different sort of discourse.

Soon, overtop the masked off colour fields came these erratic and spindly drawings that I'd blend by tracing sections of different photographs. The permutations flowed endlessly; the stripes becoming obsolete, like varicoloured training wheels.

Next came the curvature of the thing, made evident by earlier diagonals and the free flow nature of my confident pen.

If elimination was the key to progression, the only things left to do were to eliminate the rigidity, the boldness of colour and ultimately the pen for the most part. Origami paper and scissors a la Matisse were something to attempt, and therein the collage aspect took full hold. It was like being able to dance without plaster casts on your legs.

It's from hereon that things started to mute themselves all the more, and the exploration into persona came to play. I started getting attention for my more organic approach, garnering a show at Harcourt House Gallery over a hand full of university schooled applicants, much to my mostly unschooled relish!

Typing out all of this chronological stuff has struck me in the most puzzling of ways. I see this supposed progression from some sort of infancy to more than likely another, because my work of the future is keen to hark back to the things I've discarded.

It only seems right to get back to your more juvenile self in order to more brashly play...

Stay tuned

a'a

BRASH PLAY.

2008-12-10T23:34:00.000-08:00

This blog for the last while has been focusing on those exterior to me while in the fertile place of Edmonton, also as rough drafts to articles I've written to See Magazine, Edmonton's local free press.

How much fun that was, but now it's the time to get all selfish due to the fact that I've just relocated to the rainy city of Vancouver, where I'm a practical stranger. And this is the fertile ground to start anew, especially as a virtual foreigner.

So, in my alien state, I've decided to retract from my more reticent, pale and floral stuff of late and bring to hilt my most aggressive of voices in a show called 'BRASH PLAY', which brings to light my frustrations with those in the arts too hesitant to be playful, who have worries of being taken less than serious.

Guess what? I'm serious about being playful. And all that erratic stuff I've done in the past lies unrepentant.

This body will never cease to dance, if ever how badly.

And hereon now, all the more freely.

Stay tuned, because things are going to get even more brash.

Process and progress.

2008-08-31T22:17:00.000-07:00

For me, the most incredible occurrences in art happen when someone unschooled and impulsive decides to pick up an implement to make something that wasn't there before without fear of their own lack of skill. One fine day, local musician Blake Betteridge decided to do just that, keeping a remarkably frank record of his progress at artprogress.blogspot.com over the past year.

Blake opens the site proudly displaying his first painting of a teapot shaped like an elephant, and there's something refreshing about it's naivete. This is an infant at eye, and it signs it's signature like Van Gogh.

The pictures continue in chronological succession, each one getting more adventurous and experienced as he carefully explains his methods and misgivings for each of them. A picture of a blue vulture whose "head looks like it's on a balloon", or with a picture called 'The Stolen Chair' all at once he writes that "from now on he'll let the art speak for itself".

Blake is currently at canvas #49, two away from the last canvas posted on the site, a hilarious bare chested self portrait in gawky horn rims.

It isn't easy for many artists to reveal their trial and error trail, and Blake's honesty brings me to his digs to have a closer look.

The elevator up to the loft space Blake shares with his wife Kaylin rattles all the way to the top floor, and I am very relieved to get off. He's in silver Wayfarers and stripes when he opens the front door, but the emulated cool doesn't hinder me because his hospitality is real. An easel with a botanical diptych has been purposefully placed in mid-room with lemonade and a plate of sliced oranges offered as he shows me his collection. There are portraits of his friends, his wife, some very Vincenty florals and a houseplant leaning toward a window spookily titled "Desperate to live".

Behind the houseplant for which the piece is named, Blake has a camera taped to the window placed looking down to that missable park beside the Telus towers. Next to the window is his computer on which he uploads a screen full of icons, each one, he tells me, is a day in the life of the little park. By coincidence he pulls up my birthday, and the footage taken is in early morning, calm with a greenish hue.

Blake explains what is to be his first multimedia piece "2008: A Year in a Day":

"I started the film on midnight of January 1st 2008, and I recorded for 3 minutes and 56 seconds. The next day, at 12:03:56 I recorded the same amount of time on top of that. I have continued this advancing process daily, and by the end of the year I'll have accumulated 24 hours of film. A year in a day".

That is to say that the movie would move from morning new year to autumn sundown, which sounds really quite pleasant. What makes the unchanging view of the lens most interesting, however, is the way it coldly commemorates our everyday life. In between all the concrete and windows are these fragments of the river, the sky and some grass-- it's the pastoral life of an urban surveillance camera, take it as it is. Or, sorry, was.

"The first time I videotaped the park, I noticed that my reflection was in the window glass, so I slowly backed out of the shot and I faded away like a ghost".

I look above the computer at a self portrait of Blake, and to the right of it is a horrible painting of an elephant being ripped apart by lions. Suddenly, I feel a real hang of mortality in his budding oeuvre. The obsessive documentation, the relentless discipline, even the way his flower diptychs break mid-stem is funereal. Art as epitaph, I ask dear Mr. Betteridge?

"Kaylin and I are going to Mexico for Day of the Dead soon", Blake tells me with a twinkle in his eye.

a'a

Institute Parachute.

2008-05-24T13:16:00.000-07:00

It's hard to be whimsical and taken seriously, but easy to be serious and taken whimsically.

Institute Parachute is an Edmonton art collective of about nine people headed by Adam Waldron-Blain and Josee Ouellette with a difficult objective; a justification of the mean between the weighty and the flighty, the humble and the commercial.

When you look at artists like Bjork or designers like Betsey Johnson, a delicate balance of humour, composure and commodity is immediately evident. They come off as fun and Dionysian with their critical acclaim firmly intact. There are scads of local creative types who adore the both of these people, yet tend to direct themselves to a notion that in order to be successful you have to constantly appear grown-up and respectable. Whether or not this is a regional thing is moot, the real question is how can anyone expect to be taken as totally serious?

Adam and Josee started their collective around a select group of friends in University as a sort of larf to keep productive, but soon found the whim extending to enterprise. At first organizing things as modest as a portable arts festival in the Alberta Legislature grounds, the Parachute soon opened up to Raymond Biesinger's Royal Bison Craft Fair last year where they premiered the Cabinet Gallery.

The old cabinet, found in a garage and transformed into a small yet inviting space, is now situated in the fashionable clothing boutique Nokomis on Whyte avenue where it provides at surface value a way of commerce for the collective, but also a platform for a more intimate art display that many galleries fail to provide.

Josee and I meet for coffee over a tape recorder she's brought that nearly eats the tape. "I'd like to keep some sort of record of Institute Parachute", she explains to me, further adding that she doesn't have much record of it at all. We chat about 'zines, critics and scenesterism, and the constant use of the words 'quaint' and 'cute' to describe the Cabinet Gallery.

"One of my acknowledged fears and concerns is that we'll only be considered cute and not relevant on a larger scale, because I think the intention behind the Cabinet Gallery and Institute Parachute is valid", Josee confidently tells me. "We haven't really made that apparent enough to the public yet, but we will..." She goes on to tell me that the idea of a 'Parachute' magazine is up in the air.

After the somewhat strained conversation we have, I'm left feeling that the Institute has a rather precarious existence as a social adhesive between fellow schoolmates. Not without it's talent, that's for sure; Waldron-Blain's paintings of local party people provide a beautiful record of an Edmonton fete, and Travis McEwan's drippy androgynous faces are more than just striking, but jarring. A quick scan of instituteparachute.ca is scant, and I'm left wondering if this troupe wants to be known at all.

I arrange a photo shoot with Josee and Adam outside the TransAlta Arts Barns and just for fun I bring a parachute with me. I arrive to find not only Adam and Josee, but also Travis McEwan and Jessica Joan Delorme in tow. We snack on Fig Newtons before I'm given a tour of the developing set for "Willkommen In Spreepark", a multimedia musical show that Institute Parachute is designing and constructing for. I see a ripple-stitched creek and a plushy typewriter all in just a few short paces. Amidst the sticky sound of the paint rollers, I present them with the parachute, and we leave to toss it about on a little patch of grass outside the theatre doors.

They come off as uncomfortable and shy with having a basic group photo taken, opting to turn away from the lens or hiding themselves completely in the folds of the tarp. I get a little frustrated, so I take pictures of the group covered up like a garish Christo ghost.

The wind is heavy and refreshing with an incoming rain, and it's irresistible to toss the 'chute up in the air. We jump underneath as my camera plays Big Brother to the playground.

Jessica persists to use her Elvis Presley locket as a pair of opera glasses, and Travis hides away his mouth and chin with his hand. Adam is always staring off into the distance and Josee is the only one who ever seems upfront and centre, though she's careful not to show too much of her curious red pair of shorts. The photographs I take make visceral the uneasiness many artists have with being awkwardly in between the playful and the poised, and the supposed validation that seriousness and anonymity make a good work of art.

Getting back to their work on "Spreepark", I ask them to give me some insight of their involvement. The response I get is somewhere in between button-lipped and indifferent.

"I'm just trying to get some experience for my curriculum vitae", somebody drops.

Cubicle curio.

2008-03-30T14:13:00.000-07:00

In the middle of the exciting transitional state the Alberta Gallery of Art is experiencing, a rarely seen girl named Caitlin Richards works as a curatorial intern. She works in a basement cubicle to finish the final components of her arts and cultural management course, and could wear a feather boa to work without ever having it seen.

Being in the arts can be like being something between a pop star and a priest. Caitlin is a person best described as brashly shy, which in my opinion is a great pedigree for a curatorial position. Her placement gives her an inside approach to knowing what goes into an exhibition, and it even allows her the opportunity to contribute to the content of the gallery.

"This is where I want to be, in a creative role where I can see how people connect with an exhibit" she tells me. "I've always been interested in that".

Like the upsetting of an ant farm, the AGA took heel from it's faltering Brutalist home of many years and moved into the newly rendered Hudson's Bay Building, a temporary setting for the gallery before it's eventual move into a loud and curlicued building to be completed in late 2009. The modesty of the new space is of note, harking back to much earlier days when the gallery was showing at the Edmonton Public Library, and with the latest change in backdrop a new vitality has emerged.

However, the new space hasn't shaken off that sterile feel of gallery-going. Openings still feel like a fanciful walk through a department store, and the spectre of Warhol's 'Gretzky' still lingers.

"I hope the AGA will continue to take more experimental risks in the new building because I feel like an observer at art openings" says Caitlin. "They feel like performances, and if we could stage an opening as an event where the spectators become part of the event, an exhibition could become like theatre". Promising words coming from a promising talent.

At the end of the day, Ms. Richards takes the #9 bus to Southgate, where she lives in a townhouse with her family. I trace her ride and meet her in Mt. Pleasant cemetery where she shows me some of her own artwork. An appropriate place to meet, considering her fascination with artist Christian Boltanski's idea of the museum as a mausoleum. We sit on a park bench and go over her drawings, which use unusually bold colours in rather macabre ways. I see heavy pigment overtop bandages and joss paper, and some spindly portraits reminiscent of Egon Schiele. We play for a while taking photos of the work propped up on the tombstones, and I'm invited to her place for Easter dinner.

I'm fed a delectable meal of salmon, lentil loaf, nugget potatoes and tossed greens by Caitlin's mother in a living room sandbagged with couches, bookshelves and kitty-cats. Paintings of young girls and porcelain dolls adorn the walls. I can't help but notice the shocking resemblance Caitlin shares with her younger sister and mother.

She takes me up to her room, and it's the digs of a starry-eyed, morbid little girl. We leaf through her diary, which is actually a sketchbook full of these shameless colours that elude to little things papered over and penciled in underneath. Some pages are torn out or with fragmented figures with gaping holes, and some are delicate chalk drawings that dust the fingers with a turning page. She shows me pictures of Latitude 53 openings from the 70's while we watch silly YouTube videos.

Caitlin is a healthy fixture for the developing AGA, and visiting her at home you almost wonder if something clandestine and incorporeal has been overlooked by the Edmonton art scene, which seems at times like a scene always watching and recording itself. However hidden her acidic doodles are in the greater scheme, when I look at them I think of those little Otto Dix works that reside in private cabinetry and how much more evocative it is to be shown something intimately. The galleries of Edmonton could use a lesson in that sort of thing, and I think Caitlin Richards is the person to assist us.

"I try to show art as glimpses into a secret space. I want the viewer to become less passive as they move through".

Internally bold and behind the scenes, it excites me that her type of character is entering the gallery ranks. She gives me hope that I won't have to pry past the patrons and academia to see something enlivening in the future.

a'a

BEARing her teeth.

2008-03-11T20:05:00.000-07:00

I'll go out on a limb and say that I have practically no love for rock radio, and in this article I'm of a biased voice.

The roar so prevalent on 100.3 The BEAR has grown to sound like an industrial toilet flush to me, and sometimes I wonder about the people on the other side of the speakers and if they really like what they play.

100.3 The BEAR has been called Canada's #1 rock radio station, boasting the boost and break of Nickelback and other regrettable dreck like Linkin Park and the redundant Finger Eleven. I recently got back in touch with Lindsey McNeill, an old acquaintance from high school. She's a neo feminist snippet who makes short films at FAVA dressed up like Nosferatu. She also works for The BEAR and according to her, Fearless Fred is an environmentalist with a soft spot for Rachmaninov.

Lindsey is the remarkable girl in reception that gives out the radio prizes. Oftentimes, she's been offered second ticket by the starry-eyed rig pigs who win tickets chiefly to see her again; and what to make of all those Guantanamoesque torture contests Paul Brown keeps putting on?

The BEAR hasn't been Lindsey's only adventure in radio; she used to be with CJSR, and when faced with this drastic contrast one might ask Lindsey 'why are you working for The BEAR'?

"For our first bonding experience, my co-workers and I went to see a snuff film at the Black Dog", she might retort.

Dissolve to a scene of some hideous reptilian thing wriggling out from underneath a derelict mattress occupied by two entangled lovers. It's skin practically breaking from the tight squeeze between fabric and floor, it reaches with ghastly claws to the mingling tongues and throats, and then with mounting tension someone in the background yells 'cut'.

Lindsey McNeill is a worker of the unreal. On her lunch breaks, she takes out her smooth-writer and notebook. The scribbles from her pen become the frames of a film; the decided subjects cover death, loss, fear and the fear of further death and loss, asking a viewer if the dead hold more emotional viability than those alive and about us. She wakes up suddenly at 3AM to jot something down, knowing full well she'll have to wake up at 6.

"There are times where I want to stab myself in the eye with my letter-opener, and times where my face hurts from all the forced smiles", our subject says from her desktop, smiling aside as she thinks of liquid latex and spirit gum.

Dressed to kill quite literally, she plays the preying vampire in Travis Barton's film "Trespassing", shot on location at FAVA, a production I upsettingly couldn't glean any more information about.

She placates me. "I was in a zombie film recently, and a jet of blood was supposed to hit me dead on, but it missed by about a foot. I wasn't pleased".

Like Jacques Tati or Roman Polanski, she knows fully well the importance of possessing theatrical experience. Lindsey has a background in modern dance, and was one of the first in her earlier film studies to consciously incorporate movement into her projects. The way her monster lurks about is tell-tale of her earlier sashays, in the fanning of it's fingers or it's struggling shoulders.

"There are times when I'm fearful that I will forever be a weekend film maker, becoming more complacent and comfortable with the daily grind to not worry about how I'm going to pay my rent", she laments, "however there's also many surprising benefits about my job, like meeting people in the radio industry and the free stuff".

Dudebros and death-throes; an incongruent world she seems to casually sweep, and who could know of these creatures underneath the skin of Ms. McNeill at the reception desk? The lizardly Walter Mitty in all of us of course, and testament to the notion that wherever there's a desk, there's usually a daydreamer.

a'a

All about the gimmick.

2008-02-24T20:16:00.000-08:00

First grasp at your wardrobe, you ask yourself that tiresome question: "what am I to wear"?

Could the answer ever truly be 'but nothing'?

Don't downplay yourself. Even if you have only the blandest smock to wear, you can always accessorize it somehow. Now, I suppose it's easier if you're a woman because of all those purses, brooches, necklaces and things, but if you're a 26 year old dandy man you might have to have a broader view of what sort of panache could occupy that same shade of grey you inhabit.

It's all about the gimmick; like that thing in the Houdini magic schematics that was always under thumb, it's relation to style and spacial interaction. It's not just about what simply works well on your person, like a hat, sunglasses or a tie; there's always other means to adorn your dates or appointments as well if the opportunity arises. People flirt with their negative space with umbrellas, cigarettes and things, but why not try to make it all the more explicit just for fun once in a while?

I deal with large cardboard 'bumper boxes' daily in my shipping/receiving job. A 'bumper box' is like a sarcophagus that can hold many bits of sheet metal, yet while assembling one I can't help but think how many people could fit in one? I relish in the utility of corrugated card, it's distinction from curtain and chintz. The modularity of the thing is remarkable for the way it mimics shelter or entrapment. It's like a bunker, but highly breakable. Highly theatrical.

I arrange a photo shoot with the unearthly Marissa. She has this hovering, intangible sense of style and wears a lot of grey. She's an ideal alien, ectomorphic and delicate enough to clash appropriately with the industrial nature of my prop. I meet with her the soonest Saturday afternoon at Commerce Place downtown.

"What's that for?" she asks, staring up at the box I've propped against the wall.

"You're to be put into it", I dryly reply.

What a gimmick, indeed! Like Bill Clinton's saxophone or Harpo's harp, though less adorable. Marissa fancies the role of the commodified cutie for a few short hours in the city's core. We up-turn the rickety thing and she leg-vaults narrowly over the lip of the lid, clutching the sides like a gentle prisoner, peeking out kittenish from the side flaps. I climb inside and we're both surrounded by tight paper walls. In the train stations, then a back alley on Rice Howard Way I contain her like a moth and set off my prying flash-bulbs. Her eyebrows hold charisma like rain water.

We snack on honey wedges and marshmallow toast in between takes. I fold the box up underneath my arms and she holds the pedway doors open. In a parking stall under the Milner Library I give her a knife to carve out little windows from inside the box. Her legs protrude, her chin rests down upon the edge; she smiles and demurely peers out from a triangle like a Masonic sexpot. She's clearly having fun, and I get the feeling that in this box she feels uninhibited.

Fun and fancy-free, our fruit-punch and Judy in the streets. The box is a successfully drab contrast to such a regal looking girl in plain-clothes, which goes to show that the theatrical augmentation of every-day life doesn't always have to be flashy, but unexpected. The box simultaneously calls for the concealment and emphasis of Marissa in a public place, which is provocative on both accounts. People holler and whistle as we unfold and emerge.

It's been a strangely bucolic outing uptown with this cardboard box. How curious to have had a picnic in a parking stall! Like being desirably homeless or something...

...and how splendid to capture a sprite in the commonplace, at any rate...

a'a

Strictly pedestrian.

2008-02-18T19:07:00.000-08:00

Being a pedestrian in Edmonton is never easy, and especially daunting in late Winter when you do silly things like play hopscotch in the sludge trying to get your groceries home. I've actually had grit kicked up in my teeth while walking behind a struggling bus, or if I ride the bus, oftentimes I'm let off at a three foot snowbank for more fun and games trying to tiptoe through the tracks of the last unfortunate person. It's enough to seriously impede your sense of adventure, unless you're an aggressive pedestrian like me.

No cross country skis or snowshoes for this excursion-- who do I think I am going about this stroll in canvas-soles? What to do when a lack of sidewalk sidles me up to some speeding semi-trucks? Do not look into the headlights--look into the eyes of the man in the mobile La-Z-Boy. He'll surely be picking his nose. Dive into the three foot snowbank if you must.

I start in Riverdale over by the housing co-op. It's a really beautiful day, and droplets are falling from the overhang. For a good while you can forget you're even close to the downtown core. In the spring and summer, you can come across beavers and even porcupines on the trails, but not as much ever since the pseudo-suburban village took up the old brickyards.

Up the stairs and downtownward, I see ladies on stilettos trying not to slip. A man walks briskly while scarfing an Egg McMuffin and an older man runs by smoking. A pigeon glides through the crosswalk, I catch eyes with a stranger in a passing car. Somebody has left a backpack and a blanket in a shallow doorway, and there's an entire Kahlua cigar in the trash beside a crumpled fashion mag. The grate you walk across at Corona Station has a drop of twenty feet or so beneath it--don't look down!

I wind through the Legislative grounds along a narrow pathway, the kind that's intuitively carved out by hundreds of feet to end up a worn yellowish brown in the springtime. The High Level bridge looks like a Nazi death train. Familiar strangers on Whyte Avenue queue in front of shop windows poring over shoes as elegant and comfortable as foot-binding. This lady ahead should be told that it's just unacceptable to wear sneakers with a trench-coat... Immaculate patent leather brogues step out from a Mercedes Benz to the tobacconist's.

"Watch your step, the weather's been well, and a slip is sure"! I remember Fish Griwkowsky calling them 'Running Room retards'... By the LeMarchand mansion, practically every print on the path is from a Reebok. I used to have tea on the Victoria Promenade with a pocketbook once upon a time, and from it now I look down to the golf course. Someone has tread a message in the snow: "I love Kate" in twenty foot letters.

I could walk right on to Terwillegar. An ex-flame and I broke up while walking this way. I walked her to her Grandmother's place, and I think she cried there. Memories of bush parties in Laurier and that crush I had in Westmount... I remember when my grade 4 teacher described the crunch of snow as Rice Krispies underfoot. I think of powdered milk. A city covered in powdered milk.

West Edmonton Mall is full of Hurleys and Chuck Taylors. Blonde teenyboppers fix their stripey socks at H&M, then take the escalators down to Forever 21. I watch the figure skaters at the ice rink. The make-up is all messy and juvenile, but looking at it is like eating McDonald's for the fun of it. The fountains are too loud. Here are some prissy Mary Janes in T&T Market. My eyes follow the legs up to arms that clutch a basket full of ramune drinks and cuttlefish chips. I arrive at her eyes and the black hair tosses to the side, and shy she heads swiftly to the pastry shelf.

Turning back homeward, but not before bartering through the pawn shops and thrift stores that scatter Stony Plain Road, and now I'm clutching a smeared antique portrait for $10 while dawdling through Old Glenora and onward...

At night from my downtown apartment the snow-plows sound off distantly like an atonal string section. I hang the portrait, put away the groceries and wash my feet before climbing into bed. 'I never have flying dreams', I think to myself.

'But, I do have violent driving dreams, strangely enough'...

a'a

Make-up, mullets and monster trucks.

2008-02-10T20:00:00.000-08:00

Have you ever felt envious of people with split personalities? Let's face it, some days you tire of your habitual essence and want to be somebody else.

It isn't impossible or difficult to do. We live in a commodified and ultimately false world, and life is pretty interchangeable. Why not embrace others by becoming others? Life is pretty artificial, and no, you are not an original. Everything you are is made up of little things that others have provided. What came first--the chicken or the egg? Who cares.

All you have is you and a whole lot of floating plastic. If you feel like stepping into someone else's shoes, literally step into them. Or, if you're like Karly Paranich you can paint up your face and make a living doing it for others.

Karly is a cosmetic extraordinaire, resembling someone between Klaus Nomi and Kiki of Montparnasse. She arrives at my place with her bulging tote of tubes and brushes because she's a sort of doctor on call tonight. She's to render me a woman, because so many male alter-egos are always supermen.

First, she makes herself up as I watch her in an almost pornographic gaze, her lipstick and eyeliner applied without flinch or twitch. Rouge, blues and oily rich hues, and forgive my rhyming scheme--I have to express the subtle drama of this moment, watching her reflection. Then, with a wedge of foam and some foundation she turns to me. "Are you ready?", she asks me.

My razor burn is plastered over, the bags under my beads obscured. She starts with my strongest feature first, my eyes, explaining that it's good to build the effect from the most intense point. I get nervous because I don't even trust my own hand with the delicate task of applying liner on my water-line, but she guides the pencil along steadily. It tickles the same way your stomach feels as you drive down a rise of pavement, but I'm unusually calm, even as she cages me with her lash-curling apparatus. Verdant and golden eye shadow and mascara next-- I'm turning rapidly into a vamp with eyes closed. I can hardly wait to look in the mirror.

Powdered blushes in vivid cakes are administered sparingly with feathery brush-strokes. It's almost enough to make my toes curl, how girlish. It's apparent that the change in character is already beginning to manifest. A flash-back to the only time I've ever been shaven by someone, that tension, but this time it's anticipation. I open my eyes and Karly pulls out a fist of lipsticks. My lips are embarrassingly dry, so I blame the weather (true to a degree), but I've been shy. A balm, then a pinkish pigment, then I'm ready for dress-up.

A slip, a black bob and a red checkered scarf. No longer myself, and now a sexpot. She produces some false brunette tresses for herself to snap off a bunch of campy photographs in my circa 1912 apartment.

It's just not healthy, in my opinion, to stick personality fast in the mud, so as fey as my story sounds here's a bit of contrast. By day, I work in an auto parts warehouse with a young man named Cody Brown. Normally, he looks like an impish hipster with his scraggly beard and thick eye-frames, but he tells me that his hirsute look has been a plan to bring to the attention of an unsuspecting Ultracuts coiffeur.

"I want a mullet", he asks the frightened personnel. Such things can ruin the career of a hairstylist if the wrong person saw that sort of thing exit the shop. "I'm going to Monster Jam tomorrow".

Indeed, tickets for a monster truck rally were issued gratis for us employees, and Cody wants to be a spectacle. He comes to work the next day with a moustache and a waterfall of greasy hair protruding back from a crew-cut, and rebrands himself 'Dwayne' for the evening. For costume, he dons a wife-beater and denim cut offs obscured by black sweats.

His raucous cheering emanates from behind the old men, the ol' lady and the children, draft beer cascading over his fist. The engines roar and metal twists. The gawkers gawk like hawks (I'll rhyme again).

Dwayne swiftly becomes a sensation in the coliseum, louder in look and laugh than any engine. From rows down, a woman with a boyfriend in tow asks to take his picture, and as he and I take to the concourse it's apparent that everyone wants a picture with him.

"This haircut was the best $20 I've ever spent", Dwayne beams.

Spectacle, situation. Disposing with Guy Debord for a moment and calling upon Quentin Crisp, who was in what he called 'the profession of being', this axiom:

"Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are".

Or perhaps the same case if you don't care who you are.

a'a

45s for $50.

2008-02-04T20:38:00.000-08:00

So, SEE Magazine has assigned me to spend fifty dollars about town for the weekend. Being thrifty and nifty, this shouldn't be a difficult task for me. I love bargain hunting.

Let me just look at my schedule. Okay, so I have to DJ for Latitude 53's "53 Ways to Leave Your Lover" event, and the theme is that of 80's pop music in the vein of Carole Pope and Eurythmics. My record collection covers a lot of the obscure stuff, but I think I could use an augmentation.

So, I'm faced with two key rules--$50 to spend and 53 ways to approach the 80's. I might as well kill two birds with one stone and have some fun shopping for some new records. It's fun to write about record shopping, after all.

I can only think of one place to start the shopping spree, and that's Freecloud Records. This priceless hole-in-the-wall, run by Rich of the Mad Bomber Society for who knows how many years has been the back-drop of mine and many high school students over the years. The place is right across the street from the ol' Victoria School, and how wonderful is that? Riff Randall would cream her jeans. Rich has his walls festooned with musical memorabilia-- holy shit, is that an A&A Records bag?! I haven't seen one of those in almost twenty years...I feel uneasy with the staples in an original copy of 'The Tennessean' announcing the funeral of Elvis Presley as I flip through copies of Duran Duran, Men Without Hats and Pet Shop Boys. And then there is his stash of 45s.

I roll up my sleeves and thank God I have sharp nails to flip through the mass of thin black plastic. Fifty cents apiece this one lengthy section?! Okay, I thought I was thrifty, but come now! A pile accumulates swiftly, and let's tally it:

"Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley
"Don't You Want Me?" by The Human League
"Kiss Kiss Kiss" by Yoko Ono
"I Want Your Sex" by George Michael
"Express Yourself" by Madonna
"Venus" by Bananarama
"Hello" by Lionel Richie
"Wuthering Heights" by Kate Bush
"Cat People" by David Bowie
"Let's Go Crazy" by Prince
"Pop Goes the World" by Men Without Hats

In other words, a piquant pile of limburger for under six dollars. All in good condition. I ask Rich if a copy of "Don't You Forget About Me" by Simple Minds is in stock, and by gum he makes good for it after a bit of a search. Also "Eyes Without a Face" by Billy Idol, easily found on 12 inch for $3, amongst others.

The receipt reads under $25.

Next, I hop a bus to the south side to Sound Connection. This place used to be right next door to Freecloud Records back in the day, and it's always been a great provider of obscure delights.

Sound Connection's 45 selection is okay, but on the other hand you can find a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche's klaviermusik here, as well as Yma Sumac's "Fuego del Ande", and you'd be hard-pressed to find either of those records anywhere else for such decent prices. The new management is very helpful, finding my requests of Yello's "Oh Yeah" and Throbbing Gristle alumni Chris and Cosey's "Exotica" with ease. I'm relieved that the store's quality selection hasn't fluctuated with the change in ownership. I leave Sound Connection and the tab is just over $12.

You know, on the topic of amazing record shops, whatever happened to Leading Comics? I bump into it's hyperactive owner sometimes when I walk uptown...I'm getting tired. I think I'll go home and give these discs a whirl. I hope the cold doesn't warp them!

Calculator out by the fireplace. I want this to be technical--

Total money spent: $37. I have about $13 to spend. My girlfriend Jill calls and we're to go out to the Econolodge for a night of live music. Jordan Schroder has a night called "Sketchy Saturdays" there for a $10 cover charge. That leaves $3 to spend. $3 toward a pint, and just a little over the mark.

Such fun to be had for bugger all, and Latitude 53 can have some daffy stuff in between the curve balls I plan to throw them.

Toodles.

a'a

Muttart cavort.

2008-01-23T19:50:00.000-08:00

It seems that every time I mention the Muttart Conservatory somebody responds with the same reply.

"You know, I haven't been there since I was in elementary school".

Shame on us. Here we are in the dead of winter with nothing more than dog shit and exhaust to smell, wondering what bar to go to next. My sister Alyssa and I are sick of winter and snow-bound--what to do but await spring-time? The antidote is under our noses.

Architecturally, the Muttart is breathtaking. A geodesic group of pyramids that sit in the middle of ski-hills and snow machines. We trudge a little trying to find the entrance and eventually find our way with wet feet. Has it been so long as to forget our way? No matter. We make our way into the temperate pavilion where we run our fingers through moss. Trees stand off dramatically against the glass and a tiny trickle of water runs. I taste a bit of the rosemary. Someone has put a troll-like mask on a tree stump in the recesses. We talk with a staffer and she tells us that we've coincidentally arrived on the last day open. It turns out the Muttart is to undergo renovation in the front entranceway and interior. I think it poignant to come back to the conservatory at the literal threshold, and beg the lord God they don't fuck up the job.

Alyssa asks to save the cacti for last. The doors to the tropical shelter open like space-aged hatches to a scent as powerful as ammonia. Winter has been vanquished as we take in the strangely sexual plants. A sausage tree. The horniest bark you'll ever run your fingers down. Lollipop flowers, bird pepper, coffee, papayas. You might expect monkeys jacking off in the corner. After running a warty palm frond across her face Alyssa points with glee to the asclepias physocarpa, or 'hairy balls' as they're called. Koi fish swim and a lady is sketching the elk's horn fern. The trunks hang with shag.

We remark on the abundance of old people. A few families with youngsters.

I see a tiny pill of blood on my fingertip after I touch a cactus in the arid pavilion. Assumably, it was some kids that etched the names of Brandi, Nathan, Alicia and Andrew into this alien tree by the crown-of-thorns. How pleasant the air is in here. The sun shines through the glass and girders as if we were outside. A placard states how it takes 45 years for a giant cactus to grow arms. Succulents nearby form tiny white blossoms.

The girl I spoke with earlier finds me and gives me a copy of the future floor plans. She explains to me that classrooms will comprise much of the new space, which sounds exciting. A 'wet' classroom is to be included for a more hands-on horticultural experience as well as a photo gallery, front cafe and courtyard.

Alyssa tells me that we should make space helmets out of cereal boxes and check out the Space and Sciences Centre next. Or the Odysseum. Or whatever the hell they call it now.

Hopefully the renovations will draw more attention to this futuristic sanctuary. Want to escape winter? Tired of downtown and Whyte? Want somewhere to go and make out? I can refer you to a really good place...

That is, in ten months or so. We say goodbye to the Muttart we grew up with and trudge through traffic and snow the way home.

a'a

C A T F I G H T !

2007-11-28T22:30:00.000-08:00

STARRING JILLIAN E. AND LASCIVIA INCOGNITO

for a forthcoming show at the ARTery/ studio E

a'a

Faces donated, and the results so far...

2007-09-24T21:11:00.000-07:00

Jill E.

The Donate Your Face strategem has proved fruitful so far, as many people have offered up their looks.

Megan D.

These are some of the initial drawings, which stand on their own aesthetically, but I plan to utilize them further in future canvases.

Chelsea B.

I can't tell you how pleased I am with these lovely ladies, but then again I'm not so surprised. Their beauty stands in person.

Shannon A.

I've met with people in train stations and bus terminals, even stalked them down like a hunter. Some live in other cities, and I've asked those to shoot themselves for me.

Helen E.

Some, like Helen above, were just in town for a short while. I'm glad I was given her time.

Jillian Rose.

I have many other drawings/pictures not shown here. You might recognise Jillian Rose from the top of the last entry. Here's a variation of her portrait.

I'm not done yet! I still have more sittings to go through. I still have many more pictures to make from these sketches, and as for those I have yet to sketch...

a'a

Donate your face!

2007-09-08T21:14:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I've experienced the escapades of travel. I've been at home too long. Edmonton is such a funny place, but there's nothing like seeing a building or maybe a person you've never seen before.

How does it feel to be in a place where you don't hear English? What does the tap water taste like?

That's most of the reason why I'm introducing a campaign to periodically get me out of here. I can't grow without experience, and because I naturally see so many of the people I meet in a format so much larger than life I can see no other alternative but to ask you to donate your face to me.

The only things I can repay you with are my absolute adoration, an assortment of prints and original art and eternal glory in the citadels of this world or at least above the sofa in some suburban bungalow.

"You" are anyone, but up to my discretion.

Some of you have already donated your faces, if even inadvertently like Sheri or Bobbi (two pictures above). It would touch me if I could garner up some other participants.

a'a

Noteworthy.

2007-09-06T19:16:00.000-07:00

I've made the cover of Notebook Magazine, and it makes me very happy to say so.

This issue is really great because it covers pretty much all of the latest in new Edmonton art. You can see Adam Waldron-Blain's gorgeous party paintings, Travis McEwan's wonderful androgynous portraits, the work of Ted Kerr or Alexis Marie Chute's amazingly elegant paper rice-sack dress among so much else.

Joel Rhein is someone I went to high school with. Him and I used to sit and chat with this Christian girl in art class. His paintings are very impressive. Notebook features two of his works, each focusing on Edmonton modernism. Here's a picture he made of the school we went to.

Steven Teeuwsen, the managing editor really did his homework. I think he deserves a medal or something.

a'a

Verbal gonnorhoea.

2007-08-20T22:03:00.000-07:00

The Edmonton Crash Pad show has been an installation curated by Sheri Barclay, responsible for the Make It Not Suck initiative, and hosted by Latitude 53 Gallery. A move from vulnerable street-front to whitewashed interior... Street destruction aside, is this show any safer in a highly conceptual and sterile state?

I made a large sign simply stating 'You people give me the shits' for a few reasons. One, because I have little care for the snobbish attitudes of most local art denizens. I go out to an art show and find everyone is so very quick to emphasise the validity of their own personal view. I abhor the little white card next to the piece--it's taking over the walls but so very quickly, and with too much conceptual art things can get dreadfully boring. What's more, in many gallery settings a more naive or unfamiliar viewer could feel discarded or irrelevant around the gimmicky gobbly-gook and the intelligentsia. Where's the room for a more personal experience? Latitude 53 champions itself as a cutting-edge platform, but I just see it as rather incestuous, or empty and limp.

Also, Edmonton can be rather stupid. I'm referring mainly to the reactions to the street art. If it wasn't people senselessly tearing everything down, it was all the senseless discussion. I think it's pointless to talk about the merits or meanings behind this project. It has simply been a fun thing to see and do.

Above, you can see a sign I saw at Edmonton's Capital Ex. It also gives me the shits. I borrowed the design for my piece.

I just don't care. I'm going to have fun. I'm not going to let things get too complicated. How can you expect to be taken so seriously?

You've got to have fun.

a'a

New work in composition.

2007-08-15T20:55:00.000-07:00

Here's a new canvas I'm working on, from last sitting on.

It's not quite finished.

It's 36"x36", gallery-thick.

It's my introspection, I guess.

It's for sale. I want to travel, I need the funds.

Please message me if you're interested in having your portrait done--or if you want to buy this one.

a'a

Current events!

2007-08-03T23:03:00.000-07:00

This is the cover for The Mark Birtles Project's new release 'Art Crime', designed by yours truly. I am beaming, it's so sexy. Lauren Heppell was responsible for the digital tweaking, and she did pretty much everything we discussed. I've never had a more smooth production partner.

The album release at Teddy's was a firestorm, and I was decked out in free merch. I worked up a sweat and drank a lot of beer, then ended up in a cougar karaoke bar singing Elton John while wearing a floral apron. Here are some photos from the evening.

Bryan Birtles playing it up proper (above).

Mark Raymond sweating it out, like, hardcore (above).

My boys are getting really good. I love the track 'Sno Cone Sand Party', which features novelty vocalists and a horny fucking saxophone. I had a lot of fun that evening, and came to work about two hours late the next day!

In other news, the 'Make It Not Suck' initiative is having a gallery show/potluck at Latitude 53 gallery on August the 10th, and I have a couple of surprises for you--one of which I won't tell you about.

Here's what I'll allow, and you can see it on Jasper Avenue and 109th while it lasts... posted over the supposed 'Suck Manifesto', which I disagree with almost completely. No offense to the artists responsible. Go and see it, huh huh...

In response to the arrogant git that rightfully graded the manifesto an F- in red pen at the site: We're not stupid kids (you've offended kids), and I don't think we're trying to say anything. You don't discuss the 'relevance' of the street art in bigger cities this much or this maliciously, and it's hilarious and frightening that people take the time to do so here. I'll admit--some of the art we've put up was pure shit, but would you rather be looking at plywood? The point of this project was to simply make downtown a little more fun, and you should have seen the grinning people as I was stapling these banners up tonight. Even the cashier at Save-On-Foods tonight co-incidentally commented on our project, and sent me off with a smile.

a'a

Judging the snack by it's package.

2007-07-18T20:28:00.000-07:00

I confess, I buy things for the packaging. That's why I love to shop in the ethnic markets, because the packages are truly spectacular.

For instance, this bag of fish chips--the comic strip on the front features a group of men stripping in a laundromat in front of a bunch of wide-eyed women.

This six pack of Taiwanese apple 'sidra' is particularly fetching. It uses a very basic graphic design--the bright yellow backdrop and the cross-sectioned apple make it a very picturesque thing to carry down the street.

Food as fashion statement seems like such a shallow thing, but maybe I'm just so put off by most North American packaging. Most of it is a 'remastered-reworked' version of a classic image, for instance the Campbell's soup can. Nowadays, most Campbell's soup tins sport garish banners with 'sub-marketing' declarations like 'healthy request' and 'homestyle' overtop the classic red and white (and minimal) original designs.

I love packaging that isn't necessarily 'retro' or ''exotic', but eye-catching, and the more complicated and branded your brand is the more it sullies the surroundings up. It's exciting to see a model drinking Pocari Sweat, and conventional and forgettable to see a model drinking Orange Crush.

Also, it's fun to try something called Pinkus Organic Beer. The cameo pictures on the label far outrank any Jones soda labels I know, and I love Jones soda labels. It tasted really...folksy, actually.

These little yogourt drinks look like tiny cabbage-patch dolls, and they provide you with these thin little straws on the side. These ones are coconut flavored.

These jelly-cups taste of mango and lychee, and provide you with tiny spoons on the side.

This box of biscuits is so bloody kindercore, and I was okay with paying $4 for the dried up things. I like how the little girl in the picture is riding a plastic dog while eating one of the biscuits, which look made for dogs.

The other side of the box looks like a cigar box.

Overall, I wasn't disappointed with the way everything tasted, so it's okay to be adventurous and buy something that looks pretty. My cupboards have never looked better.

a'a

Honing in on hipster Mum and Dad!

2007-07-11T00:08:00.000-07:00

The big screen took my attention tonight when I went to see "Ratatouille", the latest Disney-Pixar thingamagig and from preview to credit roll I have never witnessed such skill in marketing. Not to say that I didn't enjoy the picture, I thought it was adorable--but you really have to hand it to those boosters out there in Disneyland, they really do their homework.

We see the poster for "Ratatouille" as we enter the theatre (it informs us rat-a-too-ie), and we take our seats as the previews begin and the tone is set with the first one--"Mr. Bean's Holiday".

Yes, it's that lovable twit Rowan Atkinson again and now he's gone with Universal and remade Mr. Hulot's Holiday for us young twats with his old Bean concoction, now just aged long enough for a little revival. And yes, it's in France.

France is so cool. Jarvis Cocker writes for Charlotte Gainsbourg, boys in tight jeans all want Audrey Tautou...

...and seeing as the 'smart families' are buying into that Frenchie crap like "Amelie" or "The Triplets Of Belleville" (the latter film I actually care for), it's only natural for some marketing maniacs to jones it up a bit while those people behind "Transformers" get the greasier patch.

Of course, Disney's a REAL fox of a company-- long in the tooth but it has something on us--strange sentimental digs like Bambi's mom being shot or more recently Mufasa's violent death in "The Lion King". In a sense, it may know it's audience too well. Perhaps because "Triplets" was animated, and Pixar had a good aim at broad family enjoyment (inside jokes for parents, Shrek, etc.), Disney went for it. Of course Disney went for it. They want it all.

In the still from "Triplets" above, you can see a framed poster for "Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot" underneath the trombone.

"Ratatouille" is reeking of the same stereotypically Parisian hues that paint the edges of films like "Amelie" and other westernly popularised foreign product, but it's a step in a good direction I'll give it that and more. The animation was lush and bristly and more importantly the story centred around the culinary arts, something I think people generally lack. This is refreshing. Also, the hero chef happens to be cuter than a cockroach--a rat.

It reminded me of the film of Roald Dahl's "The Witches" vaguely, not just because of the glorification of a rodent in the kitchen but because of it's refusal to lighten up on it's violence and vulgarity. The film shows an old lady firing a shotgun madly 'round her kitchen at the rats among other scenes of the ilk, as ridiculous as Bruce Willis letting caps off about a sea-based oil derrick in "Armageddon". The menacing head chef character in "Ratatouille" resembles Rowan Atkinson's menacing role as concierge in "The Witches". A coincidence his movie is being pitched along? Not really, but I'm picking something up from Madison Avenue, I'm sure.

Is Disney starting to shed the Faerie Tale altering facade? (Does anyone remember the saccarine treatment of 'The Little Mermaid'?)

They're honing in on us, hipster Mum and Dad! But that's okay--I'd let my kids watch "Ratatouille" in hopes that they would make me a sumptuous dinner one day.

a'a

Who put the frame in Roger?

2007-07-06T18:04:00.000-07:00

Michael Paulus is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. I found him totally by chance simply by Googling the name "Fred" for whatever reason, and as expected I soon came across an image of Fred Flintstone. This picture of Fred was different, though. Fred had bones.

"Who Framed Roger Rabbit" is a great film because it provided a more contemporary (and gritty) definition of the cartoon in relation to the human being. Remember when Roger threw back a shot of whiskey, only for it to splash on the wall and through his head? The 'physical death' of the 'toon by submersion in paint thinners? The sexual appeal of the chanteuse Jessica Rabbit?

Mr. Paulus put together a show of anatomical drawings for cartoon characters--a series of skeletons veiled in a translucent vellum print of a popular cartoon character that gave hint to a sort of cartoon 'mortality' underneath.

"Animation was the format of choice for children's television in the 1960s, a decade in which children's programming became almost entirely animated. Growing up in that period, I tended to take for granted the distortions and strange bodies of these entities".

This is what opens Michael's artistic statement. I've always loved the impossible violence of 1940's Looney Tunes shorts--those are the earliest makings of satire and surrealism that I can recall. A "Roadrunner" short is like Punch and Judy--the strange thing is that although the Coyote is always squashed murderously with a boulder he keeps coming back for more...

As a child, I was always afraid of blood and injury. I broke my collar bone at the age of four or so, and I remember clutching a teddy bear under the X-ray machine in the hospital. I asked if I could see the prints afterwards, and I expected my Teddy to show up. When I saw nothing of Teddy later on I was a little perplexed.

On the drawing of Homer Simpson above, a teacher in Oregon devoted a class assignment to this very idea of cartoon mortality. Paulus continues:

" This was from a class assignment from Mrs. Susan Duncan's science class at Meadow Park Middle School in Beaverton, Oregon. While undertaking the human anatomy, one week was devoted to the human skeletal system. The students were asked to render the skeletal system of any cartoon character of their choosing and try to include all of the primary bones of the human body using the cartoon skeleton system pieces as a model".

I went to see a family friend in the intensive care ward with my sister Alyssa the other day, and I found the whole experience very traumatic. Seeing someone I've seen so happy in such a compromising situation surrounded by tubes and bleeping machines communicating via paper and pen was too much for me, and if I didn't leave I would have fainted there and then. I feel bad that I had to leave.

I feel like a cartoon sometimes, which is feeling like artifice itself. Like Warhol being famous for being famous I feel like a figure on an acetate cel at times. I live for a thrifty sort of decadence--like Bugs Bunny tunneling around the undergrounds into construction sites.

I forget about my mortality sometimes.

You can see Michael Paulus' site here: http://michaelpaulus.com/

a'a

Obscure?

2007-07-01T19:42:00.000-07:00

Anthony Easton and I made something extraordinary happen by the Edmonton Journal building. He provided a bunch of tea lights and we lit them in the cement of Central station.

Public art is temporary, like these candles, which could hardly sustain themselves in the wind. Anthony thought it would be pretty to set this installation up. I look like a penitent Jesuit or something here.

Candles to the wind, a reflection of stapled paper to plywood? Maybe. No. Anthony had this planned for some time. He's receptive like that.

By Sorrentino's by the Milner Library he hung a bunch of paper labels on a found hook board. Labels labelled 'blank', 'elegant', 'pure', 'white' and 'creed' ( a slight reference to Martin Creed) hung literally to the wind or whomever wanted to take the labels to perhaps wear as dog-tags.

This was a good week ago, and Karen Chow and I saw a few of the labels strewn across the alleyway the other day.

Anthony anticipated a very natural movement of these labels. Like the candles, blown away in the wind but only a few of the tags were readily visible in that alleyway. Let's hope that they were taken, and well kept.

To be labelled. What a daunting thing. What if you saw this chance installation and decided to take a tag along with you? Could you call yourself 'blank'?

What a mystery to see this obscure installation. The beauty of it being not a spectacle, not an 'art installation'. Only something you could encounter. And what happened to it?

Art to the wind. How gorgeous and how poignant. Be observant, you Edmontonians--the artists are sneaking up on you.

a'a

Canadian Idol.

2007-06-29T22:23:00.000-07:00

Here are two posters I found today that reflect our patriotism this Canada Day weekend. I found 'Vote For Greg' on Jasper Avenue, the other was passed to me in the audience at a Curtis Santiago gig in Churchill Square.

Yes, I find them funny.

a'a

Perfect day.

2007-06-24T21:58:00.001-07:00

So, today I expected to do relatively nothing. I walked to the Milner Library and realised that the Works festival was happening. I took in the exhibits around Churchill Square, then heared some strange noises coming from the stage. It was Mother Mother performing.

The sound was like this equation--Dixie Chicks+Alt-Country+hip hop break downs+pompous lyrics. They kept a strange restraint in their pitches, too. As if sour notes shy of being labelled as microtonal. They were great. I saw drunk guys get up on picnic tables and dance--in fact a sort of dance contest ensued, the participants being a 40-something construction worker, a long-bearded old man in sunglasses and baseball cap and Daniel Buxton!

Mother Mother was tight and infectious, which sounds hideously sexual. I saw some members of The Mark Birtles Project in the audience, and I tagged along with them on a little adventure I never expected to go on.

We ate some great Lebanese food at La Shish, which is open practically all the time (four in the morning food on a Friday night--sorely needed in Edmonton, a place full of bars and liquor stores), then we went to Listen records to see Calvin Johnson and Julie Doiron perform live.

At 7:30pm we entered the record shop to the drawling solo set by Mr. Johnson. He happens to be the founder of K Records, one of the most revered indie labels there is. As the intimate and delicate show unfolded I started to giggle. Uncontrollably.

He looked like Bill Murray in an overgrown brush-cut. He sounded like a manic depressive Bill Callahan. I kept thinking that he should sign that lady who sings monotone country songs in Central Station downtown, and perhaps team up with her.

I bit my lips and cheeks. I prit near drew blood. Five minutes in I couldn't help but release a snicker that sounded like a sneeze. As applause erupted, I laughed insanely.

This man is an icon of the indie, just like Mike Alway. He's released stuff by Beck, Chicks on Speed, Modest Mouse and The Gossip--this man is worth his salt. Why are you laughing at him?

Because I swear he was putting us on. If I'm laughing I'm not necessarily disrespectful. His songs were amazing. His delivery was uproarious.

Then, Julie Doiron took the floor. The room got warmer. She started her set solo with an amplified guitar in a cute red skirt. She seemed like a broken marionette singing in a moldering sweet voice. She was extraordinary.

She asked the audience if anyone had a place to stay for the musicians. I wish I had the space.

Some people sitting on the floor could see her underwear as she played drums.

I'm open-closed lately. I'm not so lonesome as it seems. I can walk uptown on a free day and see some beautiful people who will invite me along for a perfect day. I am grateful.

The damage is done.

2007-06-20T23:54:00.000-07:00

I look at my staple gun and realise it's futile. The damage is too great. Andrea's Chevrolet is in shambles, Eddie Murphy has been reduced to ribbons. I confess to being a little jealous of what Sheri made, and now it's gone. Taken away maliciously, only three days after it all went up.

Jasper and 109th is a busy area. The Oil City Roadhouse and The Bank rake in a great deal of garishly dressed yokels, and then there's always the Midnight Money Mart crowd... It's a Wednesday night, it's raining again and the walkway is swarming with strangers. Perfume is on the wind, transients are begging for change with paper cups. There are torn bits of fancy paper underfoot.

"The Magician's" mask is missing, but a pile of soggy cards remain. A hand-drawn iron fence has been crumpled and put to the gutter.

Environmentalists can be displeased--the litter is terrible. This aside, write your favorite local press and tell them to add staples to their weeklies/dailies for the sake of stupidity. People tear away at poster boards as well as local art, but the tossing of newspapers to the wind is like an atom bomb of trash.

Another aside--this outing for the "no-sucks" also had some surprises--abductions...and additions!

These show posters made their way into some available checker-spots, and Karen Chow had her work taken away completely!

The taker presumably left something behind, however. This brittle pastel drawing on black paper now occupies the place where Karen's kittens were.

Karen seems happy with the surprise result.

Okay, the crux. Why did it take such a short time for all of this to disappear? It's an uneasy feeling, like if it isn't bolted or glued down it's as good as gone--no matter if the weight of the paper in hand indicates the care of a hand made product.

We now have an interesting gauge for the invasion of ultra-personal public space. As ignorant to the effort as the rain or the wind, but expect the same from human nature as well. Amelia, I loved watching your cardboard buildings fall.

until next time,

a'a

Haters on the wind?

2007-06-18T20:36:00.000-07:00

It's only the day after the install, and already the signs of deterioration are cropping up. Is it the wind or the same oblivious drunkards who toss the unstapled free press mags to the wind weekly? The people who tear away at the poster boards angrily? Ever see the paper cyclone at the Standard Life Centre downtown around one in the morning?

I am going against what I believe in. I want to see this stuff deteriorate, but it's only the second day after, damn it! Eddie Murphy is going to have to take a staple gun to the forehead.

It's like making a sandcastle and watching it wash away, then trying to put it back into shape. It's futile, but the elements of local nature and the nature of certain people just don't jive with any sort of satisfactory lifespan for this kind of project.

In many cases, it was only the wind and rain that caused the damaged. Most everything was put up within forty-five minutes with whatever (borrowed) implement was available. This left the site vulnerable to begin with.

Let's get forensic. This could be the job of the breeze. The staples were weakly put in, after all, however...

...after a quick restoration, you can see what look like deliberate tears in the paper.

Here's a napkin shoved into one of the little paper buildings.

Here's one in the gutter about fifteen feet away.

This is why the taggers use spray paint. Sometimes, the more indelible stuff can look whole and pretty...

...other times not so much. It's like the signature without the piece. (Photos from the Arlington site.)

That's why the kids had it right the first time when they contributed their scribblings, if you want to be all archival or something.

Jam union indeed, Mr. Schroder. It's also beautiful that the jam doesn't always last for very long...

a'a

Sucked In.

2007-06-17T15:13:00.000-07:00

Sheri Barclay strikes again! This time, the "Make It Not Suck" crew took the plywood on Jasper Avenue and 109th, and despite rainy conditions made another bold impression for the lucky passerbys. Here's some of the work:

This one is Sheri's. All I can say is I love it.

Wolfskin, the man who brought you Bill Cosby last time really went above and beyond hilarity here.

The rain was a bit of a nuisance. I had to hang all my drawings in a telephone booth to keep them dry, but it looked really pretty.

Josh Blumenthal elevates Eddie Murphy.

A lot of people used text. This one, dubbed the Suck Manifesto uses Mary Christa O'Keefe's article in Vue Magazine about the last outing.

Some people didn't show up, so there's some empty spaces. The children took the proper initiative.

Inspired by a Liquidation Station flyer I found in the Edmonton Sun, and this is what I came up with. Like the flyer, it's just a scattering of random goods. Empty line drawings of bottles, handbags, coat hangers and crossbows (yes, the flyer had crossbows on it--right next to warehouse packs of sausage), like a shamelessly stark store front. If you want to get all sexual about it, there's a great deal of empty vessels and pointy objects, but that wasn't on purpose.

I even did the other side of the walkway.

Andrea Pinheiro is sublime. I like the plug coming out from the grill and the fleur de lis.

There's words written underneath the brown feather-leaves on this one. I tried to read it, but the speech balloon was well covered. It will be fun as the piece deteriorates, the feather-leaves will fall to reveal it's probably cryptic message.

Here's a closer look at the little cardboard buildings.

Parasha Rachinsky's drawings are so hotshot. Her poster/portrait of Cadence Weapon is on the poles lining the side of the walk.

Karen Chow nixed the printer paper for this extraordinary work on fabric. There's a plane in the window further down from the cat lady.

Huh huh. Big Bear.

Jordan Schroder got the big corner spot. He made something delightfully smoky with spray paints, leaves and branches. I don't like the birds, they just seem like a tired image now, what with the Listen stuff. The way he's lined them up is good.

This "spidor-man" ranks a close second place in the funny category, second to the Mandel Man-Love.

Everyone loves this. Everyone loved Andrea's last one. Well, the Christians probably don't like this one.

Cut up cranes and blotchy paint becoming a crowd of people.

Then, after a heavy morning, the artists gathered at the Commodore for breakfast.

I arrived at the Commodore a good half hour later than everyone else. I was busy cutting out large pictures of scissors. Thank goodness the rain stopped!

This time, people really came prepared. Perhaps the buzz from the first one? It's out there, that's for sure. I lingered around the site for quite some time afterwards and a man pulled his phone out and called a friend to tell him that the "not suck crew" struck again. People love it. Gawkers everywhere. It's this stuff that makes me happy to be an Edmontonian.

I wonder what Stephen Mandel will think when he sees himself in his drawers as he drives down Jasper.

Thanks to everyone

a'a

Imprisoned.

2007-06-04T00:30:00.000-07:00

The Edmonton Art Gallery sits behind a barbed wire barricade. This beautiful bunker on a closed street next to the beautiful Law Courts building.

I took some photos of it the other day, and had to work my arms in through the bars to get a good shot.

This functional and simple building is going to be rebuilt into a Frank Gehry rip-off as I've already written about a few months ago in my disdain for the new "crumpled tin can" design by Gehry pupil Randall Stout.

Many people say that this stark and simple building "has something yet to be added to it", and of course why shouldn't there be? But why shouldn't that addition be a consistently updated group of installations? The gallery shouldn't be a sweeping and dramatic poop-shoot--the gallery should be a ready platform for others to come and go!

Doesn't anyone out there think it was creepy that they devoted the last show in this building to any and many of the local artists in a sort of "last hurrah hodge-podge"? It's almost as if Edmonton's local artists are being condemned--the gallery is now called the Alberta Gallery of Art...

Now, everyone is criticizing the rising budget and the abundance of potholes out on the streets. Artists should be resourceful and not reliant upon something as elitist and stupid as this up-staging and expensive sort of gallery site. I mean, how can anyone even care to compete with this sort of waffle?

Edmonton is in a critical state. Apparently, we're the cultural capital of Canada this year--what are we doing about it? Making an ugly and over-budget piece of ripped off tin?

Fuck off.

a'a

Nursery Rhyme.

2007-05-29T22:22:00.000-07:00

Jolly-jumper porch swing
a pulley to the seat
and Mom she holds the buttons
to permit me to excrete. a'a

Crochet my crotch!

2007-05-28T19:32:00.000-07:00

I recently came across this site called CrochetMyCrotch.com, and the crafty lady involved loves to knit the hairy vulva you like. You can purchase a shag rug from the site (with clit piercing or not) and roll about it in your living room to the amazement or dismay of your friends.

In the winter, what better than a set of hot ear-Muffs? Heared of that old rumour that pussy-juice smeared behind your ear will increase your sex appeal? This is less messy, and bloody hilarious without the menstrual blood!

I cunt here you!

CrochetMyCrotch.com also offers coasters, handbags and totally indiscreet tampon pouches. You know you want it all.

Eat it up,

a'a

Bird Song. And a crash.

2007-05-23T20:44:00.000-07:00

This ain't a scene, it's a god-damned arms race.

I'm happy to say I've never given the chance to fall out with Fall-Out Boy, but these imbecilic lyrics really do define a lot of pop culture right now. It's loud and inane, permutating but boring and full of this synthetic angst that plays post- 911 people like an instrument--a heavy guitar, a whallop, whoosh and a thump-it. And a scream.

After the fall, we'll be born again, sings Klaus Nomi while Lee Perry sets urine filled bottles down on the mixing board. I'm not being obscurist and "hipster" to top you off, but apparently Franz Ferdinand loves Felix Kubin and Serge Gainsbourg like me, so...

Enough with this noise! Lets cough and fart in silence for a while as rice falls on a stainless gamelan! The best record I own is a set of four floppy acetates by National Geographic that I found in the sleeve of a Ferrante and Teicher album I bought at Goodwill. It was by chance this collection of bird calls came into my possession, and I've played it to dust.

A woman tells you the name of the bird before it sounds off, and the variety of birds is spectacular--sandpipers, nightjars, waterthrushes and warblers, it goes on. High-pitched twitterings to the thumping wing-clappings of a ruttish grouse. I drink tea or wine and cook and clean as it plays, and the woman's voice starts to turn me on like a lovely dentist. I make apple pie to it and hear the birds outside my window call out to the speakers!

The acetates are not in sleeves, they're wedged in with each other, and when I pull one out I hear the grooves rub together. I really must put some papers in between them.

I do like noise, though. Lately, it's the older fellows I've been favoring, in particular John Cale's Black Acetate and John Oswald's Plunderphonics, which is particularly great; it's a bunch of sampled and fragmented top 40 radio mish-mashed into this fetid funk of a record, clocking in at a whopping 12 minutes of head-ripping discord.

And also Elton John. And John Cage... Wait, what's with all the Johns?

So, how about Cagesan? Cagesan is a finch owned by musical artist Toog, and recently Cagesan released an album (profile at www.myspace.com/cagesan) in collaboration with some pretty nifty people. He's not the only bird in the music scene either, there's an African Grey on lead vocals for this death metal band called Hatebeak as well.

I guess I like bird-song, but then again I have to break some plates or something. Or use that Terry Jacks record as a Frisbee. I never feel the same...

a'a