Beaton came onto the webcomic scene in 2007, when her friends pushed her to start publishing her growing stack of very silly comics online. Smart friends, I say with a tip of the hat. Thus was Hark, A Vagrant launched, and in the subsequent three years, this semi-weekly webcomic has garnered tens of thousands of regular readers and fans, while Beaton has been repeatedly nominated for a Joe Schuster Award, lauded in Wired and Macleans, published in The National Post, and has had illustrations accepted by The New Yorker. There's no doubt that Beaton has become something of a heavy-hitter in the eclectic world of webcomics.

Courtesy of kate Beaton

Raised in Mabou, Nova Scotia (on Cape Breton Island), this self-proclaimed Maritimer began her comics career in grade 6, collaborating with a friend on a series of cutting and juvenile cartoons that made their teacher (the comics' subject-matter) cry¹. Since then, it is safe to say that she has honed her wit and craft while still keeping alive that kind of intensely energetic, grade-school glee that goes with singing "Joy to the world, the teacher's dead...." Not that she's out to make anybody cry these days — after all, the vast majority of her Hark, A Vagrant subjects have been mouldering in their graves for a minimum of several decades. Hark A Vagrant, though in no way exclusively concerned with historical material, has gained a reputation for comic strips on history — even one of the site's first major surges in popularity can be traced to a certain comic about Tesla and the ladies, and it is these history comics on which I'll be focusing.

Beaton's educational background (a degree in History and Anthropology from New Brunswick's Mount Allison University) and her employment at museums in several Canadian provinces all certainly provide a foundation for Hark, A Vagrant's material. This webcomic is a gem for history buffs — but the real story is in its appeal to a much wider audience. Beaton's success is one of those myriad ripple-effects out of the invention and growth of the internet. Twenty years ago, the kind of information that is required to appreciate Beaton's more historically-rooted jokes just wasn't ubiquitous or accessible enough for Hark, A Vagrant to have gained a following outside of history departments and anthropological societies — may not have even been accessible enough for Beaton to build these jokes in the first place. I for one, though I've long had an appetite for nifty tidbits from times past, freely admit to having needed to put on my figurative research cap to properly get several Hark, A Vagrant jokes but (and here's the key) in each instance I needed only don it but briefly. Anything you need to know to make a Beaton joke click, you can find within five to ten minutes of an internet search. That's little enough time to make the payoff worthwhile, and oftentimes an obscure lead from Hark, A Vagrant plays the white rabbit, with its fluffy white tail of a joke luring the curious down curiouser research bunny-holes that ultimately provide entertainments all their own. It may very well be this sort of Wikipedia-effect that has helped Hark, A Vagrant to gain such a following down in the States whilst Beaton's Can-con proportions have remained at levels that could make even the CBC proud.

Courtesy of Kate Beaton

When it comes to craft, she's no slouch. Her style is deceptively simple, almost lackadaisical and doodle-like, yet her lines are spot-on where it matters most. Scribbling is not difficult per se, but to make that scribble express and emote like a Beaton character takes some true-blue talent. More importantly, this doodle-like aspect functions as more than just an aesthetic mode; there is a self-deprecatory factor in Beaton's loose, hurried style that reinforces her flavour of humour. Her flavour is, in many ways, distinctly Canadian: her self-deprecation is wry in tone, and cheekily self-aware (as in comic strip 81: "Kate Beaton Stop Being So Hard On Yourself") and makes a delightful and volatile concoction when twinned with the pomp and bombast of, say, King Henry VIII, Hatshepsut or a vengeful pirate captain. Hark, A Vagrant plays with a silly, self-lampooning grandiosity that somehow — with all its flagrant anachronism, self-reflexive ridicule and nonsense — makes the cast of history lectures seem more people-like than ever.

All that said, I'm stuck wondering, where were you Kate Beaton, where were you when I was suffering Canadian History in school? I remember the mood in that class, like an hour-long yawn, and I recall those hardcover text books, filled with literary stick-figures and slightly patronizing question-bubbles (and that heavy magazine paper, I swear the makers of Clue could have added that text book in betwixt the Wrench and Revolver), but I don't recall much of what I was supposed to have learned. Sure, we covered John A. and all the rest, but the material was such a fine-ground dust of refined information that it sieved its way out through pores and hair follicles once the unit test was done with.

Courtesy of Kate Beaton

My strongest memory from any history class was in grade seven, when my teacher wandered off on a tangent about Louis Riel's messiah complex. It was a flash of eccentric nonsense throwing a wrench in the otherwise well-oiled narrative of historical cause and effect which (given its intense distillation for grade school lessons) is frankly inhuman. My teacher gave us a flash of character in the drear wasteland of overly simplified plot. Beaton's history comics remind me of that unusual lesson, only funnier.

In the traditional bifurcation between character and plot-driven narratives, grade and high-school textbooks dig trenches through the chalk landscapes of Plot, whereas Beaton has built herself a carnival driven by Character, and it makes all the difference. Stuff like Beaton's work can whet the intellectual appetite, pique interest and build a memorable foundation for the drier details. Any high-school textbook writers out there? Call Kate Beaton. Seriously. History is bursting at the seams with character, wit, and incongruity, so what's with the curriculum guys? Everybody knows it's easier to eat celery with a little peanut-butter on top³, and, socially speaking, a solid education in History is as necessary as your daily quantity of dietary fibre.

Beaton has a book titled Never Learn Anything From History, available through Beaton's TopatoCo store. For anyone in or heading out to L.A., she'll be participating in her first art show down at Galley Meltdown, These are Their Stories, in which each piece is an artist's take on a one-line episode summary from "Law & Order". You can see a few at the show's website.

Hark, A Vagrant resides here and updates weekly, sort of.

¹ http://thefablerblog.com/kevins-column/creator-interview-kate-beaton-of-hark-a-vagrant

² Assuming no peanut allergies of course. I just couldn't bring myself to say Cheese Whiz; seriously, what is that stuff? It looks like some kind of goo that serves as blood for the villainous extraterrestrial from a 1950s monster movie that never was....

Nowadays he still does some comics and publishes lots of personal images (freely and happily at the web) while he tries to please his clients so he can pay his bills. By the way, his drawing and painting techniques are "tradigital".

His illustrations have appeared in hundreds of magazines, dozens of children’s books  (within mexican borders) and in comic compilations around the globe. He has also made concept design and background art for videogames and animation. In 2008 he made "Gris à travers les automnes" (swiss graphic novel); he published his first sketchbook "Mirador" (Mex)  and a color artbook, "Never Ever After" (NY).

Some shows: Bandée Desinée Mexicaine (Paris ‘02),  Consecuencias (Madrid '05) and Tecnopolis Comics Festival (Solo exhibit, Athens '09).

www.betteo.blogspot.com

Mister Nice Guy

SnowLow

Sea of Eggs

Scream is a double bill affair. Toronto-based artist Ed Pien's drawings paper the walls of the gallery, while the sculptures of Cape Dorset's Samonie Toonoo rule the floor in glass-covered plinths.

Pien's work is indebted to Surrealism— especially in the demonstratively-titled series, Three Minute Drawings (1998), where crude, hurried brushwork and naive technique belie Pien's smooth assimilation of ideas into tiny visual riddles, the answers to which stick to the back of the tongue, uneasily suspended somewhere between articulable and amorphous dream-illogical thought. The walls of the second gallery chamber are dominated by Pien's large-scale composite drawings. These wide spreads are what look like pasted together grids of computer paper, warped by entropic blots of black and delicate colour beneath palimpsestic Gordian knots of intertwined and otherwise conjoined creatures like, but never exactly, human. Here Pien's brushwork is less hurried, more calligraphic and sensual, yet somehow more out of control, more demented than the Three Minute Drawings, and no less automatiste.

Samonie Toonoo, Skull, 2008. Courtesy Feheley Fine Arts. Ed Pien, After the Meal, 1999. Courtesy Birch Libralato Gallery - Photo Courtsey of jmbgallery.ca

In contrast to the mess and fragility of Pien's work, Toonoo's sculptures in horn, bone and soapstone exert a sensual, relentless weight. Toonoo hails from a well-known family of Inuit carvers and printmakers out of the capital of Inuit art in Canada, but his subject matter strays from that stereotypically associated with Inuit art, to include the contemporary and prosaic — as in the balaclava-masked figure of "My Two Balls" (2008), holding out two snowball — and at other times, the cryptic and mystical — such as the skull-faced, prognathous and eerily eager "Seal Spirit" (2009). While Toonoo's work may sound like an entirely different show than Pien's, these two bodies of work have enough in common to keep from sparring in the gallery space— in fact, they harmonize. Pien's and Toonoo's artistic voices contrast, but theme in fugue.

Scream is the second instalment of curator Nancy Campbell's project to present Inuit artists in concert with contemporary artists from the Canadian south. It's an admirable project, or at least, a useful one. The ghettoization of indigenous peoples' art is an obviously condemnable yet still ongoing tendency. Ideally, an Inuit artist could command a solo show in a given contemporary gallery without a rattle or drag from the ball and chain of the speciality Inuit art market and/or suffering the dry myopia of anthropologically-based art criticism. But current conditions are not ideal, and Campbell's duets are at least a deliberate step in the right direction. Her pairing together of these two artists emphasizes thematic commonalities in their work; and this emphasis builds a partial defence against the anthropological tendencies that seem to shackle so much curatorial literature around indigenous art. The main thematic fulcrum Campbell clearly has in mind is in the show's namesake, Munch's The Scream.

Now, I usually find that when a curatorial statement or another such article of satellite literature is a little problematic, the best response is to ignore the text (as long as the text is the sole culprit) and just deal with the art. There are times, however, when textual irks can indicate structural troubles at the level of a show's basic ideological architecture, where wilful ignorance of the text achieves nothing but to insult the intelligence of the artists, curators, and art lovers alike. As you may have guessed from my going off on this tangent in the first place, Scream has put me in the latter position. The Justina M. Barnicke Gallery statement for Scream doesn't do the show justice.

While it is a bit ham-fisted to triangulate Toonoo and Pien with Munch's The Scream, I'm not complaining about that. In fact all three artists have a penchant for revelling in a kind of keyed-up, angst-wrung, go-for-broke emotionality. It's no great stretch to see both the show and its namesake cowled in a certain key of upset, like the restless horror that lingers after that really bad dream you can't properly remember anymore.

Where I do take issue is at the simplifying of this ambience to "the universal anxiety of modern man" and in the reduction of our continued fascination with the key of angst to "the universality of anxiety in contemporary life." Certainly there are representations of modern things in Scream, but as far as I could tell, the show does not go out of its way to engage with modernity per se. It would be easy to lament these points as merely specious, if the meeting of North with South weren't so belaboured (implying a loss-of-innocence narrative) and if Toonoo weren't subsequently posited as the outsider, unaware of pop culture by way of the unsubstantiated claim that Toonoo "has likely not seen The Scream".

It is certainly possible that this Cape Dorset resident has neither sought out nor encountered Munch's most famous work— but this is not something one can merely assume. Cape Dorset does, after all, have at least some TV and internet access, plus a steady stream of art loving tourists. Even in the Scream exhibit, Toonoo has a sculpture of a "hip-hop dancer", so evidently not all pop culture escapes him.  But without further elaboration or substantiation the word "likely" implies that Nancy Campbell has never asked Toonoo outright and has instead settled for a mere assumption that, given the remoteness and isolation of Cape Dorset, and given the seeming isolation of Inuit carving traditions, Toonoo couldn't have had sufficient opportunity to view the veritable Hello Kitty of European post-industrial-revolution art.

One purpose that Toonoo's never having seen The Scream would serve is to play up a certain binary model of genius, where Toonoo's departures from stereotypical Inuit sculpture came from some innate inspiration versus Pien's genius as cultivated by extensive academic study (Pien is, in fact, a teacher at OCAD, and UofT's Visual Studies program). This binary set-up invites other more problematic binaries to become implicit, and glosses over the history and politics of the Inuit art market, where until fairly recently, unorthodox sculpture was more likely to be labelled unsaleable and shelved or unceremoniously destroyed.

Such a domino chain of implicit binaries, while not dire or necessarily offensive, is still unnecessary when these two artists share a deeper, less historically-glossed connection through their intense immersion in the anxious realms of the in-between, liminal and ambiguous.

All that being said, it is a great show.

Scream. Featuring Ed Pien & Samonie Toonoo, Curated by Nancy Campbell at The Justina M. Barnicke Gallery is set to run from June 10 - August 21, 2010.

Exhibition details can be found here

For images and info about Ed Pien, see his website

Images of Samonie Toonoo can be found here

¹ For a clear and interesting article on the genesis of the Inuit Art World, see "James Houston, Armchair Tourism, and the Marketing of Inuit Art", by Kristin K. Potter, in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century, W. Jackson Rushing III, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999) pp. 39-55.

http://misselephante.deviantart.com/

High Waters (2010)

The Second Layer (2009)

The Woman (2010)

http://www.oakyotl.com

Ah ha (I think, too groggy for an exclamation point) so I didn't leave my cellphone set to "loud"— I merely dreamed the obnoxious ring-tone, and now for the surreal conversation. No doubt the scene shall soon shift without warning to a seaside resort or Santa's underground lair or somesuch.

Photo Courtesy of Nick Kozak/Torontoist

"... Seriously?" I mumble. But as the conversation proceeds, as I am reassured in the most realistic and persistent manner that Banksy has indeed come to town. As my grogginess only resolves into a vague yearning for coffee, it dawns on me that I am in fact awake, if not widely so, and that my inamorata's exuberance at the other end of the line is neither dream nor joke. Banksy (or, for the cynic: someone in possession of Banksy's stencils and in collusion with his publicist) passed through Toronto last weekend, and left behind several characteristic embellishments of the urban scenery.

Banksy is a British graffiti artist whose nom de plume commonly adjoins the epithets "notorious," "secretive," and "enigmatic." He was born around 1974, raised in Bristol and beyond that very little is known about this remarkably popular vandal. In 2006 the BBC ran a story that Banksy's real name was Robert Banks. Then, two years later, brandishing a photograph they claim was taken of the artist in Jamaica four years back, The Mail On Sunday named Banksy as one Robin Gunningham. Neither claim has ever been confirmed by Banksy or those associated with him. It all comes down to whether or not you take The Mail On Sunday's word for it— and first, it's worth asking, does it even matter?

As the two of us peddle our bikes out into the unseasonably cold drizzle, the secret identity of the mysterious Banksy is the last thing on my mind. We course downtown on a scavenger hunt with only sketches of directions and all the excitement of a day-care class let loose in Centreville and he could be an army of Nikola Tesla clones for all I care. What matters to me is that, when someone calling themself Banksy scribbles on your city's walls, its more than likely that said scribbles are worth the effort in finding them.

The art of Banksy is characterized by humorous quips, irony, and a stencilled aesthetic indebted to the likes of Blek le Rat. He often plays with a set of recurring characters such as cops, children, and most especially rats. His work has that rare characteristic of seeming obvious and simple after the fact, yet somehow it always takes a Banksy to execute. Rarely does he need to tag his name these days, his work is recognized by style, like an unsigned Rembrandt at a yard sale, and that sometimes includes the cartoon cash signs ringing up over eyeballs. Facelessness, as it turns out, is no great obstacle in the art market. His paintings have gone for as much as £288,000 at auction¹ and though he won't officially confirm any street art as his, there's fair reason behind Torontoist's withholding of detailed directions to the Toronto pieces.

When we get to Queen and Adelaide, it doesn't take long to find a Banksy, or rather a Banksy-shaped lacuna of flat grey paint on the stucco side of a drab office building. Some here are quick to "give graffiti the brush-off," according to the twee slogan that has festooned many a Toronto trash bin.

"Well that was stupid of them," my companion says. "Stucco's really easy to remove."

Her meaning is plain: at least one landlord this week just lost their chance at an extravagant profit on ebay.

Photo Courtesy of Rob Tyrie/Torontoist

It is against just this sort of profiteering that the flimsy information black-out barrier has been erected. Last month, a Banksy image of a guard walking a Jeff Koons-esque balloon dog in Los Angeles was cut from its wall and carted off. According to JetSet Graffiti, the coup was likely perpetrated by the disreputable Doug Christmas, owner of Ace Gallery (where the artists have something of a history of needing to sue to get paid). This is no paltry act of appropriation, even unconfirmed the work could fetch a heady price. After all, back in 2008, a west London brick wall on Portobello Road— on which a stencilled, old-fashioned palette painter brushes the finishing touch on a bubble-lettered "Banksy" spray-paint tag— fetched £208,100 on ebay, and that doesn't include the cost of relocating the wall.²

Tearing down a wall to collect or sell a piece of street art seems rather crass to me. Putting up sheets of perspex over a Banksy (as has become something of a habit in places) to try to curb the fluid overturn of graffiti on a given wall seems silly, and it's far from effective. There are at least two instances in which the perspex has been deliberately breached. Once in Islington, the perspex was removed and after alterations were made, replaced, as part of the ongoing feud between Banksy and King/Team Robbo (this following Banksy's appropriation and adaptation of a Robbo piece from 1985 that was either calculated or ignorant). In Melbourne, where silver paint was tipped through the crack between the top of the acrylic sheet and the wall, the attempt at preserving appears to have incited its very destruction.

Banksy occupies an unusual position, straddling street art and gallery art, commerce and vandalism, fame and anonymity. For some, this is uncomfortable. Banksy's egalitarian street art has attracted a crowd of admirers whose appreciation is expressed through the need to keep it.  The ethic of street art is one celebrating public access and rights to public space, lauding accessibility and an utter absence and impossibility of price tags. Consumerism can become a boogieman to flee and mock in the dead of night, and there is some truth to that position. But what Banksy seems to show is that people will want to purchase and keep something they adore and in the art world, this can lead to a snowball effect where high prices accrue higher prices, and the reason for making a purchase can turn somewhat inside-out, from buying a piece for love of it, to selling it for the demand-driven profit, to buying it for the investment and its expected addition down the road to one's RRSP. Rarely are these various motivations clear-cut or separated.

In all honesty, “selling-out” is an idea that I don't care for. There is an unfair tendency that crops up from time to time to blame an artist for the price inflation, hype and hullabaloo that the international art market rolls around their work. I'm in no position to become an investment art-collector, so I don't care how much money an artist makes or how much their stuff is worth. What I care about is the quality of the work they make, and I think Banksy is top-notch.

Photo Courtesy of Gary Smithson/Torontoist

Our Banksy scavenger hunt was, essentially, all in good fun. Times like these, graffiti is about being where you are, but I don't mean that in any pseudo-zen spiritual sense. It is an aesthetical "I wuz here" and it's the subsequent recognition by others that someone else wuz there too once, and that both of you saw fit to pay close attention to the environment.

Sometimes graffiti carries territorial meanings, but Banksy and the legion of other artists in his strata go beyond this. There is an odd community aspect to street art. Writing your name on a wall can't make it yours any more than writing your name in a reference library book will make it yours when it goes back on the shelf. Street art is more like writing a new story on the flyleaf of that library book, in the hopes of someone else enjoying it, and sometimes even continuing or inserting their vision into your story, until some librarian becomes terribly upset and pastes over the vandalized flyleaf and it's up to a subsequent bookworm to start the process again.

Our first find, a quizzical, sunglasses-wearing rat in a Chinatown parking lot, was shared when complete strangers came to where we stood, and shared in the excitement of discovery. In that moment, that rat formed a fleeting global network of hooligans and citizens. Banksy's visit was a transatlantic signal, Queen Victoria congratulating James Buchanan across the first fragile transatlantic telegraph cable only to have it break two months later, only instead of two months Banksy's cable snaps after two days, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Some of Banksy's art can be found at www.banksy.co.uk
¹ http://www.thelondonpaper.com/thelondonpaper/news/london/banksy-wall-could-fetch-200k
² http://elitechoice.org/2008/01/16/banksy-wall-sells-for-407000-at-ebay-auction/

Look at this piece and tell me what you see. Microscopic organisms illuminating a dark passage, maybe an ever-expanding mass of fireflies or perhaps it’s just one of those trippy 3D graphs. Whatever it is, it’s surrealism to the core.

The San Francisco-based Mario Martinez, better known as Mars-1, has been blowing minds for a long time. His works portray an otherworldly charm apparent to anyone familiar with science fiction, and also invoke a personal, subconscious experience unlike anything I have ever seen.

With his latest exhibition, Infinite Tapestry, conveniently nestled in Toronto’s Meta Gallery (recently moved to 124 Ossington Avenue) Mars-1 displays an array of works – all varied, yet still familiar. His attention to detail and sheer imagination challenges the viewer to explore the abstract nature of reality and form our own interpretations in the process.

On April 13, 2010, Mario and I spoke extensively about his creative process and the ambiguities of everyday life.

E: From what I’ve heard from people and press you’re works are science fiction-esque, sort of otherworldly. But it seems to me that they’re more personal than anything else – they provide a kind of subconscious experience. How would you describe it? What do your pieces mean to you?

M: One kind of component to it is that part of it is… it’s definitely a mystery for myself as well. I kind of like it like that because then it leaves it open, makes the boundaries a little wider instead of being a definitive work. Part of the reason of why I enjoy that is because it lets me move around more from piece to piece. You get people who experience the work and look at it and try to pick it apart. They come up with completely different angles I never really consciously thought of. It makes me wonder sometimes if I did it subconsciously. I get a kick out of hearing what people pull out of it. Sometimes there are things a lot of people will see like vaginas and sexual stuff, things that weren’t my intent. But the one that was cracking me up this time - do you remember the big piece in the middle of the gallery? Adjacent to the desk?

E: Yep, I think I do.

M: Well, someone told me it looked like a weird Jesus figure with its little tentacle arms stretched out. I was like... ‘what!?’ [laughs] I mean it’s kind of funny because I can see it!

But yeah, my work is definitely very personal. I feel that some of it, not all of it, has some kind of sentient or some… intelligence or life of its own. I mean not literally, but like something is looking back at you or what I call some of the pieces: ‘metascape.’

I’m not so much inspired by science fiction as I am by fringe science. That does interest me, but it’s never based off of one thing. I just like those fuzzy concepts that we all have within. Our minds kind of wander…

E: Yeah, I never got the impression that it was one sole inspiration. It seems too abstract. The fact that your works are ever-growing shows how abstract they really are. This… abstract mass.

M: Yeah, it’s difficult to finish a painting actually, the deadline just forces me to stop working on it for the most part. It’s really rare for me to actually finish something. It’s kind of difficult. They’re kind of like they’re own weird little terra-forming mini universes or something.

E: How do you know where to start?

M: To keep things interesting for me a lot of the work I do is kind of an ongoing experimentation. I do it to find new progression in my craft. About 90 percent of the time when I start a piece there’s not really a plan. Sometimes there’s a clear idea, but that’s on the rare side. Most of the time I start, almost automatismic, making random brush strokes, I’ll close my eyes and… shew, shew, shew… do it in a few places and just start building up layers.

After that, all the pieces start to fall into place. I start filling in the last bits or keep some things from the background, maybe get rid of others and just let it develop, crystallize as I go along. Sometimes I’ll take a break on it and start working on another piece, let it sit for few days and look at what I did. From there, I start getting ideas. I usually work on several pieces at once where I do that, I start getting ideas and I let them cross-pollinate.

You can see how, with every new body of work, it’s partly starting over. If there’s something I discover on another I start exploring that more. The new stuff I’m gonna be working on is gonna have a black background.

Transcendence

E: Yeah, I saw a few of those pieces at the exhibition.

M: Yeah, those are the newer ones. There weren’t too many new pieces in this show because I wasn’t sure of the size of the gallery and I got so busy. It was getting kind of tight. So some of the pieces were from a show I had in New York… The one in the very back [Transcendence, above] was new and the ones with the black backgrounds were all new pieces as well. The two that were kind of colourful with the black background [Chroma Depth #2, below], those are the newest ones. I really like how colour looks with the black, it almost makes it pop almost like a black light poster. I have to get that out of my system and then get sick of it and never do it again. [laughs]

Chroma Depth #2

E: I really like that growing variation in your works. It leaves that element of surprise, a moment where you don’t know what to expect, but the works are still familiar.

M: They somehow stay the same, but they change at the same time… it feels like I’m changing it, but somehow I’m not. For me, I would go crazy or become bored if I was too repetitive for too long.

E: When I was at Meta, I was looking at Transcendence up close and you could see the elements from your other paintings seamlessly interconnecting. You put so much into your works.

M: Yeah, definitely. It’s not that I feel stupid, but sometimes it seems ridiculous how much time I spent on some of these and how some are never done. You see other artists finishing pieces and I wonder, 'God, am I stupid for doing it like this?’ I’m happy the way I do it, but sometimes I wonder if what I’m doing is right. I don’t think people understand how long I spend on some of these pieces, it seems like I’m getting quicker somehow, but no matter what they take several sessions to get it done.

I have a couple collector friends and it took them awhile to understand, they were kind of impatient. They wonder why I can’t hang out… because I’m working …a lot! [laughs] Sometimes 7 days a week. The only way you can get anything finished is to keep yourself into it and come up for air sometimes. I’m sure you see that with other artist, but sometimes it’s not apparent how much time it takes.

E: Yeah. Well, even as a writer I take a really long time. I work 7 days a week and I write every single day. I don’t have to, I know others can wrap things up fast, but I guess I’m kind of a perfectionist in that sense. I need it to be just so.

M: You want to be proud of it and craft it, make sure it’s something you’re happy putting your name on.

Unified Grid Sphere 2

E: Yeah, exactly. I know it varies by the size, but how long does it generally take you to finish a piece?

M: I don’t know… the deadline is the motivator. The piece in the back of the gallery [Transcendence] I started in October. I didn’t work on it all the time, I worked on it in the background. As the show started getting closer, I began stepping it up and gaining more focus on it.

E: I actually understand what you mean. Since you’re putting it down and picking it back up your sense of time gets distorted and you can’t really tell anymore.

M: Yeah, it does… before a show it starts getting really intense and I start working every waking hour, but leading up to the show I may only spend a day a week. Especially the larger ones, I really lose track. For the smaller ones, if I had to guess, maybe a couple weeks? Like you said, time really distorts because some pieces seem to come together quicker. I think it slows down the more I have to think about what I’m doing. Sometimes I need to pull back, even work backwards a little to cover up stuff if the piece isn’t coming together so easily.

E: The process seems spontaneous. How does a piece begin exactly?

M: Well actually the beginning of the piece is the first part. It better resembles, not finger painting, but more like a child where you’re just like…‘raghh!’...there are no mistakes. That’s how I’ve been starting pieces. I don’t have anything I’m starting on with a purpose, I have no idea of where it’s going. That’s kind of how I get a direction.

Like, I stretch this giant piece on my wall and paint it black and take white and start smooshing the brush around and closing my eyes – kind of like what I was saying earlier. It’s the most fun part because you’re just playing around – you don’t have any attachment to anything you’ve done because it’s happening pretty quick. In an hour it can completely change. If you feel you want to take out big chunks of it or cover up big parts and make it really bold you wouldn’t normally do it on something you put a lot of detail on. That’s where I find, when I come up with something, I gravitate towards it and I’ll use later on in the piece when I feel confident to do certain kinds of brushstrokes or certain type of lines. I’ll happily go over some image that I’ve spent a dozen hours rendering.

Maybe if it was the first time I was doing it I wouldn’t feel comfortable, but maybe I would later on. Everything goes quick at first, but once the rendering starts it goes slow. I could spend a whole day on a 5x5 area getting it just right. So it’s kind of like a push and pull between the light work and the heavy. I like to do both but I don’t think I could do one or the other. It would lose the emotion as well as the gesture and movement of the piece.

Smokestacks

E: What’s the process behind your sculptures?

M: That’s a part I have a harder time with because it has to be more structured. You can’t just sculpt whatever. You have to have a structured idea of what you’re gonna do. If it’s small you can get away with more open experimentation. That’s why I usually start with a smaller piece and make it larger sometimes.

My work from a long time ago was figurative so that’s the only place where some of my sculptures appeared. I like the figurative work in the sculpture setting, it feels nice having a figure as a sculpture rather than a painting. I stopped using these figures in my painting because it felt like there was an end to it, as far as looking at it. You’d stop looking at the piece after a long time. Someone might have it up on their wall for 5 or 6 years and say, 'yep, seen it.'

E: It’s difficult to describe, but it’s as though the figurative paintings remove that freedom of interpretation.

M: Yeah, definitely. I want to experiment more with the abstract in sculpture but it takes a long time and it takes a lot of focus. Also, they’re really hard to sell. They cost a lot of money to make and nobody buys them. [laughs] I do it because I love to do, that’s pretty much the only reason.

E: Please keep making them though! They have so much charm!

M: Oh, I will, but it’s one of those things I have to plan out! If I want to have one ready for an exhibit next year I have to start them now. I can’t do that last minute. Basically I have to start working on something this year to get it done next year. I want to work on something big. The price difference from doing something detailed in bronze to something bigger is pretty small. So it’s not that bad making a bigger one as opposed to a smaller one. Plus it’s really hard for people to buy a tiny, expensive sculpture.

One thing I wanted to mention, and it’s completely bizarre, but so many people ask me what inspires my work. I think you even mentioned it in an email. I don’t know why but so many people asked me that in Toronto at the show. Different people ask, 'so what inspired you?' a slightly generic question. People have said it before, but never to this extent. I was like, 'what’s going on in Toronto?' [laughs]

E: That’s kind of why I omitted that question from this interview because even I thought that it was a bad question. Your works are so abstract, how can you possibly have one inspiration? Everything would serve as an inspiration.

M: Yeah, you totally nailed it down! I didn’t have an answer for anybody. I was like, 'fuck, I don’t know!' I mean, yeah, if I could really boil it down…

Tulpa 2

E: Yeah, that makes complete sense. I think that a lot of people are afraid of the unknown. They want answers.

M: That makes sense. They don’t want to not know so they feel that they need to ask. I’ve shown my works in a lot of places in the U.S., but I’ve never been asked that question so many times. I mean, what’s up with that? [laughs]

E: Well, after awhile, when I looked over some of my questions I’d wonder, 'why did I write down these questions?’ You really have to narrow it down. [laughs]

M: Yeah definitely. I think you shed some light on that one for me. [laughs]

E: Yeah, and some people get so upset about that! It’s not easy to explain something like the inspiration behind a piece. That’s what I like most about your works is how abstract they are. It’s not meant to be explained, it’s supposed to be whatever you make of it, your own interpretation.

M: That’s kind of a component of reality. We try to explain and understand but there are so many subtle nuances swirling around constantly it’s hard to even understand what’s happening – here, out in the universe, and all the little weird discoveries and quantum stuff that keeps opening up. The rules keep changing. I mean, a lot of reality is abstract thinking, there are several things happening simultaneously it’s not easy to understand.

You can see more of Mars-1’s work at his website.  You can find out more about Meta Gallery here.

Ambling up Ossington Ave. the other day (which, up-and-coming-neighbourhood status notwithstanding, I rarely do) I came across an establishment called Meta Gallery, located in a white-painted building built like an auto-mechanic's garage and set back from the side walk. The adjoining building's northernmost wall stretched out, painted black-on-black with a peculiar clouds-shaped artefact of more recent paint. This gallery was naggingly familiar, though I was sure I'd never seen it before in my life. It took me until Dundas to realize that Meta Gallery is none other than the the successor to the late Rolly's Garage, and the cloud-like shadow of paint on the wall is all that remains of one of my favourite street-art murals.

I first encountered Rolly's Garage as one of the SummerWorks Festival's bring-your-own venues last year and it was then that I was struck by the frenetic exuberance of its mural of paste-ups: hundreds of round, child-like cartoon figures with gorilla proportions and hipster outfits, ranging in size from tea-cup saucer to larger-than-life, and all stacked and layered on top of one another like the first joyous test drive of a real-life clone-stamp tool meets animate ball-pit.

Rolly's itself was intriguing. Auto shop by day, by night transformed by Robin Lacambra (the shop-owner's daughter) into a quirky venue for the arts in all forms. When her father retired, Lacambra rented the garage from him and kept the art going. However, disputes with neighbours and the insurmountable cost (approximately a hundred grand) of bringing the space up to code regulations eventually shut down Rolly's Garage last fall.

I was reminded again of the Garage, and of its hectic mural, when at approximately the same time that Rolly's was drowning in dire straits, one of the postcards on PostSecret¹, subtitled "Watch Out, Canada!" featured a black-and-white paste-up cartoon on a concrete post, with the caption:

"By Day, I am a 30 year old clean cut business professional. By Night, I am launching the biggest street art campaign that my city has ever seen."

"Street art" is a fairly recent term that emerged as part of the (contentious) move to distance the contemporary act of artfully embellishing public space from the problematic public image of "graffiti," as dominated by ubiquitous gang-associated tags and the unaesthetic "throw-ups" of bored teenagers futzing around with over-large cans of white paint. While a lot of street art (ie. the wheatpasted collage mural that so dominates my attention today) is not technically graffiti (traditionally scratched, drawn, or painted), most street art shares in graffiti-proper's cavalier attitude towards private property.

I was reminded of Rolly's mural, first by stylistic similarity and later, by the subtext of its presence, for the anonymity of street art does not make their intervention in urban landscapes any less of a personal gesture. Street art is a sign left by one person for another to find. It is transient evidence of attention to, and dissatisfaction with details of the shared environment; the infliction of creative humanity upon functional structures; the expression of dissatisfaction with an alienating and, frankly, boring city habitat; and an attempt to do something about that dissatisfaction. Paste-ups are a way to engage more directly with a predominant battle over the inequality of access to public space, a way to contest the indiscriminate postering of the city for the sake of corporate advertising. Flyposted art is a relatively cost-effective battle strategy by which an artist can hope to compete with all those who have grater resources, and far less to say.

Movie studios, television conglomerates and music labels are in the habit of paying smaller companies to paste glossy advertisements all over the downtown area. They do this illegally, without any kind of permission or go-ahead from the city, and they do it constantly. I know from experience that a wheatpasted poster can outlast the elements for months if left well alone, but the turnover of one poster covering another on the telephone poles of, say, Queen West is so high that the average half-life of visibility for any poster in bad weather is about a day. At regular intervals the city figures that those telephone poles have borne enough (and gained enough resemblance to pythons in the process of digesting a supper of whole pig) and someone drives by with a high-pressure water hose, leaving behind clumps of soggy paper like the leftovers from some kindergarten craft project that got way out of hand. Flyposted art functions much like the advertising it mimics, but without the unceasing urge to refer back to some referent for sale. At least, not directly.

Street art worth its space is a complete impression in itself. More often than not, if it refers to some external entity, an entity that enhances the meaning of the art, whereas advertising attempts to build meaning, and confer importance upon its referent. Street art functions as advertising where all art functions as advertising: in the indirect building of an artist's reputation, the main distinction being that street artists are generally anonymous. The scope of a street-artist's reputation is most often limited to his/her peers. Street art goes unsigned, or if signed, it is with a pseudonym. Graffiti-type street art such as large paintings of a stylized name or word, invert and take to extremes the usual signature/image ratio, but the effect rides a boomerang of stylization around near-unitelligibility, and the effect is largely the same. The casual passer-by can likely only interact with street art on the basis of its own characteristics and placement— perhaps more clearly as a work of art than does anyone in front of a Picasso, its price-tag hanging in the room like the smoke from an overly-enthusiastic toaster.

The absence of an artist's name does not force everyone to deal with the art in some Modernist Greenbergian dream-land of attention to pure form. A name is only part of the ego dynamic that goes into art. Obscure the name and there is still a sense of personality. The personal gesture, the faith that someone intended to communicate something to you through this, and no matter how vague or juvenile that missive may be, someone considered it worthwhile. Over time, that artist's style may emerge to hold that aura of personality to a specific series of encounters with their work.

When I found that PostSecret postcard, it was this force of personal gesture. The assertion of personality and intent caught my imagination, and even though the postcard writer and the mural-maker at Rolly's Garage are not likely the same person, they might share the same drive, the same silent, guerrilla campaign of art versus drab and industrial urban functionality.

And when I discovered the mural was washed off and painted over, it was as if the city had struck back at the mysterious art hero, reinstating a no-man's-land of visual boredom, making the unknown artist's work elsewhere more worthwhile.

Thus far, I have described an encounter with street art, lacking prior knowledge of privileged information and that might have been the end of my story in a pre-internet age. The internet makes a postscript possible, and even likely. There is no simple dichotomy of an anonymous artist making a name for themself, and it is not a simple matter of street artist versus gallery artist versus advertiser. Street art in and of itself is utterly unprofitable. It's no wonder the punks loved it so. What the internet provides is a venue and network for a post-hoc "ah ha!" and even the potential for a street artist to earn some revenue ².

I returned home from my stroll, and sought out the details of the Garage's fate, and instead found the identity of my unknown artist: the mural was part of an installation at Rolly's, extending along the wall through the interior of the Garage, set up by one Eric Cheung as part of an ongoing series of "Orphans." (There can be no better name for those wheatpasted characters!)

Overlap between street art, gallery art, and the internet is not uncommon. The success of Banksy and Pixnit attest to that. And this overlap means that should they choose to, with a little daring of a different ilk, street artists can shed their anonymity for those who make an effort to look for them. Cheung is one of these.

The Orphans are also for sale as one-of-a-kind, hand-made plush toys — art objects in their own right and well worth a look.

The art of Eric Cheung & collaborators is gathered at: http://www.at-aw.com and http://atomicghosts.blogspot.com.

I also recommend checking out one of Cheung's other urban projects: Poster Pocket Plants, a collaboration with Sean Martindale, found at: http://posterpocketplants.blogspot.com. It's something to keep an eye out for this summer on those postered hoardings I mentioned.

Meta Gallery, for those interested, is located at 124 Ossington Ave. just a couple blocks north of Queen St West. Their current show includes a lot of digital curlicues and some delightful bronze Martians.

¹Ah, PostSecret! Where voyeurism and the occasional flash of artistry meet under the shield of near-complete anonymity! Where the distinction between fact and fiction is functionally irrelevant!

²And for anyone who might believe that capital gain compromises the purity or integrity of art, I have relegated this footnote for you: printing costs add up!

Comments

• May 13, 2010, Robin Lacambra writes: Thanks for the mention! This is an awesome article. The "man" may strip down our murals, paint over our walls and kick us out of our garages.... but my heart for art is still strong. "Rolly's", the brand, is waiting on non-profit-status confirmation, then we'll be back in business! Not in it's former home, however... but here, there and everywhere. Stay tuned. And I'll for sure stay tuned to Steel Bananas!

You may remember Dan Perjovschi from last month’s piece: Illustration Proclamation: Gary Taxali and Dan Perjovschi.  After writing that piece, I decided to go down to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to meet Perjovschi and tell him about the uproar that Libeskind’s Crystal caused after its grand opening in June 2007.  By introducing myself to Perjovschi and giving him a copy of this article, I was hoping to add my voice to maelstrom of information that Perjovschi would condense into his cartoon installation.  The illustrations for this article are a selection of the works that Perjovschi produced for Late News, which is currently installed in the ROM’s Roloff Benny gallery. Late News will be on display until August 15^th 2010.

The controversy surrounding the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal (henceforth the Crystal) at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) has focused too closely on the building itself, its spaces and materials.  I will argue that the Crystal represents a commitment to a global commercial culture, and I will consider how this commitment has affected the way objects are displayed in the ROM.  Until now, the controversy surrounding the Crystal has been focused mostly on the design of the building, and the consequences of that design for the collections housed by the ROM.  I will review these controversies and clarify their relevance to what I see to be the more pressing issue: that the Crystal evidences our government’s priorities regarding the strategies that it has taken toward promoting Canadian culture.  These priorities are reflected in both the design of the Crystal and the artifacts that it contains, and represent the most controversial aspect of the Crystal.  These priorities are the aggrandizement of Toronto’s retail culture and the redefinition of the ROM’s collections in accordance with an aesthetic suitable to consumer culture.

Illustrations by Dan Perjovschi | From Late News at the Institute of Contemporary Culture | Courtesy of the Artist

The Crystal is the centerpiece of a $256 million dollar renovation project, which included the refurbishing of most of the ROM’s existing galleries and the expansion of the ROM store and restaurants (Browne, 142, 143).  The Crystal cost $135 million, and replaced the Terrace Galleries, which were built in 1982 (Browne, 143).  After it was decided that the Crystal would replace the Terrace Galleries, the final plans for the new building made many think that the Crystal would not be as “crystal-like” as they had thought (Browne, 141).  What many people had believed would be a translucent building, clad in opaque or semi-translucent materials, was revealed to be covered mostly in anodized aluminum (Ibid.).  After this change in plans, the media coverage surrounding the renovation focused mostly on design issues.

The two critics who have hitherto determined the agenda of issues surrounding the design of the Crystal are Lisa Rochon and Mark Kingwell.  Lisa Rochon writes for the arts and entertainment section of the Globe and Mail, and published the first and most dramatic of many articles condemning the Crystal.  Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, and has written and spoken about the Crystal in a variety of different forms and settings.  Their focus has been on the decadence of the architectural style, and the poor quality of the interior design. Rochon mentions the three elements of the Crystal that have dominated the controversy surrounding the new building in her article “The Crystal Sheds no Light”: the change to the exterior cladding from some unspecified translucent material to anodized aluminum; the stark, impractical interior of the Crystal; and the arrogance of the design and its mastermind, Daniel Libeskind (R1).  The first of these three issues (the change from glass to aluminum) does not go beyond a criticism of the Crystal’s design to consider the role of the crystal in defining Toronto’s cultural landscape.  Rochon’s article is something of a straw man, but deserves to be recognized for a few reasons.

Rochon turns the Crystal into a pseudo-event, making Torontonians believe that they are being made privy to the sly dealings of Libeskind’s design studio, which dupes its clients with flashy model diamonds only to build massive gray geodes in their place (R1).  Criticizing Libeskind and the ROM’s staff for not understanding that a glass building would not work for protecting precious, light-sensitive artifacts from Canadian weather is meant to make important decision-makers look thoughtless.   Belittling important public figures with pithy remarks can be damaging to the public’s engagement with the institutions that define Toronto’s cultural landscape.  Richard D. Anderson has argued that political participation is negatively affected by mudslinging (38), and it is plausible to assume that representing important cultural decision makers as flakey and irresponsible may have a similar effect on participation in Toronto’s main-stream institutionalized culture.

The use of aluminum on the outside of the Crystal has persisted as a theme in criticism of the ROM, and has distracted from other issues. When media sources set the agenda of issues surrounding a topic in an irresponsible way, the public discourse around that topic suffers (Anderson, 36).  Rochon’s criticism is an example of sensational journalism. Her work has contributed to an inappropriate agenda of issues surrounding the Crystal controversy, and to a demeaning misrepresentation of important cultural decision-makers.

The importance of having a star architect involved in the Crystal project is an issue much closer to the controversy that I wish to bring to the fore.  Mark Kingwell summarizes this issue well, asking: “are the monumental conceptual works [like the Crystal] living up to the responsibility of public money and public attention, or are they large-scale con games feeding the self-indulgence of a new breed of installation artists, the architect as seer?” (43).  Kingwell notes that Toronto is seeking to be noticed globally as a culturally significant city (57).   The audacity of buildings like the Crystal conveys the dynamism and energy that a lively city should possess.

Illustrations by Dan Perjovschi | From Late News at Institute of Contemporary Culture | Courtesy of the Artist

In contrast to the supposed link between Libeskind’s style and the cultural dynamism our city needs, Kingwell has pointed out several other consequences of the forces of innovation at work in the Crystal.  Kingwell notes that the interior of the Crystal makes displaying objects difficult because all the walls in the Crystal are slanted (60).  Rochon has also criticized the interior of the Crystal as being disorienting and bleak (R1).  And this is not an unfounded criticism. I’ve found that the lack of right angles in the Crystal makes it hard to orient myself, and the combination of bright white walls and florescent lighting can easily give you a headache.  The attention that the Crystal and Libeskind brought to Toronto was privileged over making a practical space that is pleasant to be in.

The interior space of the Crystal is relevant to more than the artifacts and visitors who will inhabit it.  The privilege given to the grandeur and profile of the Crystal and its maker over the functionality of the space is a sign of a broader shift in focus for Toronto’s cultural institutions. Barbra Jenkins explains that the Crystal is evidence of the municipal government’s effort to attract creative workers to Toronto (170).  Creative workers being that group of well educated workers, so important for the production of intellectual property, who make up the core of any advanced commercial economy according to Richard Florida’s economic theories (4, 5).  New, awe-inspiring architecture will raise the standard of living in Toronto by adding to its cultural life (Jenkins, 178).

Illustrations by Dan Perjovschi | From Late News at Institute of Contemporary Culture | Courtesy of the Artist

Rather than simply acting as a tourist attraction, like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, the ROM is designed to act as the centerpiece of a lively creative community; which will attract intelligent, well-educated workers looking for a city that can accommodate their interests. A high standard of living may help bring innovative people to Toronto, boosting the creative core of the city’s economy (Jenkins, 178).  Jenkins expands on criticisms that only pay attention to the design of the Crystal. Jenkins takes into consideration the relation of the Crystal to economic policy and she explains how the Crystal may not help foster local music and other independent arts sectors; seeing as a new building will produce very few (if any) new jobs for cultural workers  (174, 176, 182).  Jenkins has touched upon the fact that the Crystal is evidence that mainstream institutional culture has been privileged over other forms of culture that could also help Toronto develop as a creative city.  I will consider further what kind of cultural scene is being created and promoted in Toronto.

Illustrations by Dan Perjovschi | From Late News at Institute of Contemporary Culture | Courtesy of the Artist

By focusing on the building itself, critics have mostly ignored the significance of the strategies that the government has adopted in an effort to achieve a higher standard of living in Toronto.  Those strategies are a commitment to building on a massive scale; massive in terms of monies and the number of projects being undertaken.  The significance of those strategies being that Toronto’s most valuable cultural institution has become a grandiose performance of power designed to pander to the desires of a monied elite.  The Crystal is more a display of wealth that seeks to establish a relationship with a new global citizenship who move in a space occupied only by the rich, rather than a place focused on communicating with Canadians in a context that is designed to appreciate their unique perspectives.  The first aspect of this criticism must be understood in light of the Crystal’s place within Toronto’s retail landscape.  The second aspect of this criticism relies on an appreciation of how ROM CEO William Thorsell’s approach to appealing to a global culture-seeking community has compromised the museum’s ability to orient its exhibits with the aim of engaging with the unique cultural perspectives of Torontonians and other Canadians.

The Crystal coalesces two post-millennium architectural trends.  The first is that the new museums – like the Crystal addition and other museums designed by star architects – have come to define a space of aesthetic discourse that often seeks to defy the specificity of political or social places in favor of expressing commonalities that transcend political, maybe even temporal, specificity (Becker, 157).  Carol Becker explains how the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain and international Biennales are often examples of how the space of Western aesthetic discourse can find its place in any country in the world (157).  Becker is keen to note that the people who occupy these spaces are often wealthy Westerners who, having the luxury of following these transnational sites of contemplation form place to place, “take the best from each location and move on” (159).

The second trend in post-modern architecture evidenced by the Crystal is the fluidity of the transition between urban context and the built space of a structure.  Fredric Jameson outlines this phenomenon in his 1991 book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.  The elucidation that Jameson tries to convey is best understood as an opposition between modern building techniques and some characteristics of recent commercial structures.  Where modern architects attempted to create buildings that existed beside and despite hectic urban spaces, the postmodern structure aims to join with and replicate the urban environment (Jameson, 81).  Jameson makes his point about the nature of commercial structures by considering malls, in particular the Eaton Center in Toronto, while specifically excluding buildings by Gehry, which are similar to the Crystal (80, 81).  Jameson excludes buildings by Gehry in favor of buildings more closely linked to the new scale and pace of contemporary capitalism.  However, the distinction between the Eaton Centre and the Crystal seems less drastic in light of a few similarities.

The narrative that the ROM has sought to impose on its visitors has shifted to the exterior rather than the interior. Instead of being focused exclusively on the gallery spaces, the ROM’s new addition has been spatially oriented in relation to Bloor Street to create a second narrative that exists beside and despite the galleries.  The Crystal is what William Thorsell has devised to bridge “the moat on Bloor” (i.e. the old terrace galleries) (Browne, 138).  To whom is Thorsell reaching out?  The answer is: the ROM’s neighbors on Bloor, the retail giants.  Kelvin Browne notes in his book Bold Visions that Thorsell had imagined the ROM to be “not exclusively about the housing of objects, or the educational use of them, but about creating an institution that people want to visit perhaps for no other reason than that it’s a pleasant spot to have lunch” (139).  Browne’s assessment emphasizes Thorsell’s desire to blur the boundary between the commercial strip and the museum.  Not only has Thorsell moved the front entrance of the ROM to Bloor street, but he has also included street level access to the ROM store and put the entrance to C5 (the ROM’s five–star restaurant) in the Crystal’s courtyard, before any of the gallery spaces. Libeskind even acknowledges a common attitude taken toward the museum space: to replicate in miniature all aspects of nature or culture (and in the case of the ROM, both) (Browne, 149).  The ROM manages not to leave out any aspect of western culture, and, much like the Eaton Centre, recreates all aspects of the urban experience in miniature.

It is clear that the ROM needs to make extra money because of cuts to its operating budget (Jenkins, 182).  But because so much effort has been put into the façade of the Crystal and so much emphasis on the products that lie directly within its entrance, it has becomes obvious that the ROM is now a location designed for one–stop shoppers from around the world.  By investing so much money in the Crystal and the other high–profile renovations in proximity to the ROM (The Gardener Museum, The Royal Conservatory of Music) the municipal government has added to a plan to revitalize Bloor Street that has been an ongoing project for years (Hume, A9).  The commercial heart of Toronto, Yorkville and Bloor west of Yonge, has begun to spread into the museum. Monumental museum architecture of the twenty-first century has become a hallmark of commercial space in Toronto.  The clothing brand and the museum brand have become spaces that reoccur from place to place throughout the world, and Toronto is no different.

In order to examine the similarity between the Crystal’s interior spaces and certain aspects of the transnational art scene, as described by Becker, it is important to consider Thorsell’s vision of the ROM’s permanent galleries.  Elucidating these similarities will help determine the extent to which the Crystal has been used to align the ROM with both globalized commercial and aesthetic interests.  Thorsell has decided that the ROM should be devoid of any narratives that “dumb down” the ROM’s collections, and instead to privilege the objects, letting each artifact speak for itself (Browne, 139).  This vision has lead to the demolition of the award–winning Dynamic Earth Gallery, and resulted in fewer labels and more artifacts throughout the ROM’s galleries.  Thorsell believes the ROM’s collection should be one that caters to an adult audience, and these changes reflect that belief (Browne, 139).

Illustrations by Dan Perjovschi | From Late News at Institute of Contemporary Culture | Courtesy of the Artist

Thorsell’s aversion to narrative seems shallow seeing as the ROM has exchanged the interior narrative of the traditional didactic museum space for an external narrative that functions in conversation with Bloor Street and a wider commercial community.  The Louvre of nineteenth–century France opened its doors in a display of grandeur that enabled Parisians to situate themselves within in a narrative of cultural development that was outlined in a progression of gallery spaces (Duncan, 306).  This opening also signaled a political development: a nation–wide democratic system within which the public was finally privy to the knowledge and treasures of the King  (Duncan, 307).  It is implied that these Parisians played a role in the narrative established throughout the Louvre’s galleries by the very fact of their admittance (Duncan, 307).  The Crystal opens the walls of the ROM in a display of grandeur that allows Torontonians to situate themselves within in a narrative of commercial culture that is defined by the unmistakable concentration of wealth in the area surrounding the ROM.  This opening signaled our participation in a global capitalist economic system in that the centerpiece of our new retail strip finally aligns us with the wealth and stature of other metropolises.  That so much wealth is concentrated in one place mocks that idea that everyone is admitted to this performance.

The Crystal is a political act through which Torontonians have consented to the centrality of consumerism in their new creative city.  The exclusion of technologically savvy galleries as well as those focused on youth education suits this new consumer hot spot nicely.  An internal narrative of cultural development is not needed for a museum whose façade acts as the central point of a commercial arcade spanning three city blocks.  The objects return to the status of treasures displayed in order to satisfy our way of seeing; objects to be ranged over, not penetrated and deciphered.

Arguably the most pressing controversy surrounding the Crystal is whether the Ontario government has taken the correct approach to achieving the vivacity of cultural life in Toronto that will attract young and well educated workers to our city.  Jenkins has been keen to observe this, and to the extent to which Kingwell and Rochon have noticed the emphasis on surface evident in the Crystal, they too have seen aspects of its place in a larger economic culture.  Jenkins does shift away from a focus on the design of the ROM, but her mention of Toronto’s local music scene falls short of a more in depth consideration of the link between the Crystal and the profile and centrality of Toronto’s retail culture in the city’s larger cultural landscape (174, 176, 182).

To what extent does the Crystal represent a commitment to branding Toronto’s Bloor Street as the cultural center of Toronto for the sake of aggrandizing participation in a transnational retail culture?  Are Torontonians content to gawk at the neutral gorgeousness of our mute treasure collection, which speaks in the language of surface and the desire for significant form, for the sake of satisfying William Thorsell’s desire for a more mature ROM?  This controversy will determine how much more of this place, our city and the cultural institutions that define it, we are willing to sacrifice to the space of Western global commerce and transnational aesthetics.  I believe that the ROM evidences the role our government believes culture should play in a political strategy to position Toronto and as globally significant economic center.  Determining whether our representatives have chosen the correct role for culture to play (the role a massive work of art and a nice place to shop) in a strategy designed to make Toronto relevant to a global community of intelligent young workers is an important aspect of the crystal controversy.

Sources:

Anderson Jr., Richard D. “The Place of the Media in Popular Democracy.” Critical Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Politics and Society 12.4 (1998). 481–500. Print.

Becker, Carol. “The Romance of Nomadism: A Series of Reflections.” Art Journal 58.2 (Summer 1999): 22–29. Print.

Browne, Kelvin. Bold Visions. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 2008. Print.

Duncan, Carol. “From Princely Gallery to the Public Art Museum: The Louvre Museum and the National Gallery, London.” Representing the Nation: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1999. 304–331. Print.

Florida, Richard. “The Transformation of Everyday Life.” The Rise of The Creative Class. New York: Basic Book, 2003. 1–17. Print.

Hume, Christopher. “ROM Plaza will Bring Bloor St. New Life.” Toronto Star. 25 Aug. 2007. A9. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Postmodernism: A Reader. Ed. Thomas Docherty. New York: Columbia University Press: 1993. 62–92. Print.

Jenkins, Barbara. “Toronto’s Cultural Renaissance.” Canadian Journal of Communications 30.2 (2005). 169–186. Print.

Kingwell, Mark. “Monumental-Conceptual Architecture.” Opening Gambits: Essays on Art and Philosophy. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2008. 41–61. Print.

Rochon, Lisa. “Crystal Scatters no Light.” The Globe and Mail. 2 June. 2007: R1. Print.

Axe Cop is drawn by Ethan Nicolle, the 29 year-old creator of Eisner-nominated "Chumble Spuzz," and written by his little brother, Malachai Nicolle who (while five when Axe Cop started) celebrated his sixth birthday a few days ago, and wants to be a wizard soldier when he grows up. Malachai's age is essential to Axe Cop and ties it to a thread that has been winding through the art world for over two centuries (and farther back still, in the wider cultural sphere). From Surrealism to Cubism to Naïve art, one can always find a vein of interest in the creative mind of a child, and meanwhile, "child prodigies" are always in vogue. The insidious and pervasive attitude toward a child artist is steeped in the Romantic assumption that a child is somehow purer in intention, more in touch with some natural truth/the unconscious, and that his or her work is guileless, l'art pour l'art. And when a prodigy is involved, following close behind the last roster of assumptions is often a kind of patronizing wonderment at such precious precociousness — not to belittle the quite considerable skill of some prodigies, but the attention lavished on them can be more reminiscent of a circus ape in a three-piece suit: "it's just like people!"

Axe Cop may make "written by a 5 year-old" a main tag-line, but the comic evades all of those aforementioned child-artist pitfalls, and I suspect even the webcomic's audience successfully circumnavigates Romanticism's rose-coloured theories of childhood.

In format, Axe Cop consists of one-page comic-book-style episodes (one of which has been animated², and there may be more to follow), plus a no less important and hilarious, "Ask Axe Cop" series. The story mostly follows the titular character who, after chancing upon "the perfect fireman's axe," takes up a life of killing bad guys 24/7 (except for the occasional hotel-room vacation with 30 TVs and a diet consisting exclusively of birthday cake). His side-kick is Flute Cop, who turns into Dinosaur Soldier when he gets dinosaur blood on him, who turns into Avocado Soldier after eating an avocado¹, then becomes Uni-Avocado Soldier after taking custody of Uni-Baby's (incidentally, another good guy—er, baby) wish-granting unicorn horn, and finally (thus far) turns back into Dinosaur Soldier. Axe Cop and his sidekick team up with Sockarang (a superhero with prehensile sock-boomerangs for arms), Ralph Wrinkles the dog, and a motley assortment of good guys to battle bad guys (who can always be identified by their front-kick technique) such as Bad Santa, King Evilfatsozon from Evil, Evil, Evil Planet Tinko, a (literal) truck-load of ninjas, and Telescope Gun Cop who (in true comic-book form) turns evil when Axe Cop won't let him onto the team after bad guys interrupt side-kick try-outs. Seriously.

Ask Axe Cop #16 | Courtesy of AxeCop.com

The universe of Axe Cop is gory and bombastic, frenetic and quasi-logically nonsensical — not unlike Lewis Carroll's Alice flights of fancy, but with superheroes, dinosaurs, outer-space, more exploding poison than you can shake a sponge at. In fact, as in most action movies, most everything here explodes, and not just when a bomb is planted inside, or when hit hard enough, for there are also several instances of puncture-induced explosion and a clear distinction between good guys and bad. The whole thing reads a lot like a comic-book version of the playground game, "let's pretend _____!" which should come as no surprise, since that's how Axe Cop started out. During the Christmas holidays, Malachai, running wild with a toy axe, asked Ethan to play Axe Cop with him. He brought out a flute (recorder) to be Ethan's weapon as Flute Cop, and when Ethan said he'd rather be Axe Cop than Flute Cop Malachai switched happily and the game began. Struck by the vivacity of his little brother's imagination, Ethan distilled their game into a one-page comic for the family's amusement. Three further episodes later, he secured Axe Man a home on the internet, and the rest is viral history.

Ethan Nicolle's part in this collaboration cannot be undervalued. The artwork is quite good — granted, it's nothing to write home about if taken solely on its own merits of composition, form, etc., but I would be a poor critic indeed if I were so myopic. After all, what is a comic but the offspring of a co-dependent relationship between Image and Text? And in combination, Malachai's screwball little-kid humour and Ethan's professional, straight-man-esque art makes for some of the best collaborative work I've ever seen.

Ethan's approach to Malachai's invention channels the stone-faced Buster Keaton with a hint of Mel Brooks. Under Ethan's stylus, Axe Cop is the quintessential moustachioed cop with Ray Bans and a chiseled jaw. At night, when he goes out to punch bad guys in their sleep, he wears a cat-suit... complete with ears and tail. It is moments such as these that remind me of being a little kid who was certain that "starving" had something to do with the formation of gastrointestinal galaxies. Though they are also puns, Axe Cop's visual gags would be more accurately categorized as hyper-literal moments; and these carry a very five-year-old sensibility over into the final product with remarkable aplomb. Without any preciousness or patronization, Ethan deadpans a 5-year-old's idea of a world that is half Utopia, and half the real world as seen from thigh-height, where anything with wings is capable of interplanetary flight, you make lots of money working at a fruit stand, and cop training consists of writing your name on the sign-up sheet.

Because Ethan translates Malachai's words with such a high level of graphic professionalism, aspects that would have been cute, or simply humoured if drawn in a chlid-like style (ie. the Moon Warriors' absurdly extended list of moves and powers) are instead elevated clear into the realm of parody and satire. In a sense, Malachai serves as a surreal, cultural fun-house mirror, reflecting common entertainment tropes ad absurdum — and the result is a mode of parody that is at once ironic and utterly, refreshingly earnest.

New episodes are released ever Monday, new "Ask Axe Cop" segments every Wednesday and Friday; however, translate that into 6 year-old time and severe schedule fluctuations are forecast.

You can find everything Axe Cop at www.axecop.com.

Ethan's own website is www.ethannicolle.com.

¹ This throws me way back to this tape recording of stories that I had when I was very little. One of those stories was about a runty little baby who wouldn't eat, until someone thought to feed it avocados, whereupon it thrived and grew into a kind of baby Popeye who went around beating up the neighbourhood bullies. Oh Malachai Nicolle, do you know what I am talking about? Or was it all a dream... Another story was about a mouse who just wanted to play the balalaika, but I digress.

² http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZquaoUMfIc

Alexis Barattin is an illustration student and a freelance illustrator from Toronto. She spends most of her time drawing and enjoys experimenting with collage and other media. Alexis also likes really expensive cookies and is trying to learn how to do the cryptic crossword. Check out more of her work on her blog and in Steel Bananas' Spotlight Gallery.

Installation view | The Taxali 300 at Narwhal Art Projects | Courtesy of Juxtapoz

The retro look of the materials, typography, and characters in Taxali’s work have attracted attention from a range of creatives, including critics and artists of the ‘Low Brow’ or pop-surrealist movement, as well as illustrators and design junkies of all stripes. Taxali certainly has an affinity for the American idealism of the first half of the last century. As Taxali tells us, advertisements from pre-war America “were selling hope in an age where the possibilities of technological advancement were exciting”ⁱ. Compared to the strained gardening metaphors of “shovels in the ground” and “green shoots,” wherein analysts betray the frail grasp we have of the complexity of our current financial circumstance, Taxali’s embracing of the frank, awkward solicitations of old logos is a breath of fresh air.

What has been lost in contemporary appeals to green futures and financial regulations, Taxali tells us, is not only the cheerful tone of Big Boy and the Monopoly Man, but their honesty: “In my work I attempt to show the awkwardness in the characters and logos to praise their humanity and innocence by purposefully highlighting their imperfections”ⁱⁱ. These characteristics of ‘humanity,’ and ‘innocence’ come through in Taxali’s work as a gentle nudge away from an insistence on control that some designers convey with “sterile imagery of water, the colour green etc.”, promising serenity and clarity in a more harmonious, fertile futureⁱⁱⁱ. For example, Taxali illustrates the slogan “eat local” with a smiley bunch of fruits and veggies growing out of a pile of dreary apartment blocks, and they’re doing this all by themselves, too! I don’t see the smugness of most greens, and I imagine that we are more inspired to tend our own garden by this jolly bunch than by swooping panorama shots of wind farms and solar panels. Furthermore, the happy food group doesn’t force a tenuous connection between global sustainability and my vegetable garden, but rather, captures the charm of the DIY mentality without taking on an air of self-importance.

From The Taxali 300 | Courtesy of Narwhal Art Projects

Taxali’s charm sets an important tone in our visual culture that has not gone unnoticed by other illustrator-cum-fine artists. Dan Perjovschi is another master doodler who has stripped his work of the sleek, sterile style of advertising visuals, and the sensational scale and gravity of most news media. Outside of Romania, Perjovschi is best known for his illustration installations. Using simple tools (indelible markers and projections) Perjovschi covers the walls of galleries with black and white cartoons. Perjovschi will be coming to Toronto on February 15th to create the next of a series of these installations, which have been commissioned by numerous prominent galleries, in the Royal Ontario Museum’s Roloff Beny Gallery. The coincidence of these two exhibitions will provide valuable insight into the value of artists who are able humanize an increasingly confusing visual world.

By constantly translating the ideas and issues that he encounters on his travels into cartoons, which he records continuously in notebooks, Perjovschi captures the attitudes and behavior of local communities as well as his reaction to changes in place^iv. Each installation is an edited and enlarged version of these notebooks^v. Perjovschi adds a humanized character to his work by taking such a personal approach to art making.  “Everything I see is linked after all with the way I see things, and with what happened to me,” Perjovschi tells us^vi. Art is a working out of everyday experience in Perjovschi’s practice, where drawing maintains the humility of a journal entry.

Installation view | Postcards from the World | Courtesy of Lombard-Freid Projects

The best example of this diaristic aspect of Perjovschi’s practice is his current exhibition New York, which bears a striking resemblance to the exhibition of Taxali’s work at the Narwhal Art Projects. Postcards from the World, which is currently showing at Lombard-Freid Projects, is an installation of small format illustrations by Perjovschi sprawled out across the gallery space like the cells of mammoth comic strip^vii. Postcards from the World brings together a work by that same name and a second work: Postcards from America^viii. Each piece is a collection of the notebook, scribblings that Perjovschi uses as the subjects for his installations^ix. Postcards from America is a record of Perjovschi’s first trip to America, which took place in 1994 after the Romanian revolution in 1989^x. A doodle of a man whose bulging bicep is also his head captures the flippancy and wordplay that pervade Perjovschi’s illustrations: the annotation ‘Be strong, be smart’ is lent a Kafkaesque humor when we see that the macho man showing us his ‘guns’ has actually metamorphosed into the might with which he’s conflated right. Perhaps this drawing captures an early encounter with the archetype of the American machismo.

From Postcards from the World | Courtesy of Lombard-Freid Projects

Perjovschi has created a personal account of his first encounter with America with hundreds of similar drawings in order to allow viewers to see the great struggle for understanding that characterizes an inquisitive, critical mind. If we consider the current installation at the Lombard-Freid Projects in isolation we can see that a time-based element of Perjovschi’s work is emphasized thanks to the comic-style hanging of these two temporally charged pieces. Each piece is the result of a journey, a passing of time and place, captured like a snapshot. Nuno Faria explores a second aspect of time at play in Perjovschi’s work by explaining how these illustrations act as an invocation of memory.

Not only are the works at the Lombard-Freid Projects a record of Perjovschi’s travels, they also represent a constructive act through which he organizes and filters his experience into comprehensible segments or episodes. Without outlining a clear psychological analogy for this process of constructing an image of the past, it is still plausible to suggest that such acts of willful remembrance are an important aspect of becoming conscious of the constant shifts in our understanding of the world. Faria suggests that a viewer’s response to the montage of works presented by Perjovschi can be understood as an act of remembrance^xi. This is not to suggest that we remember as Perjovschi would, but that the images someone ‘gets’ are the images that resonate for them. An installation such as the one at the Lombard-Freid lends itself to a kind of free association of images, and the weaving of idiosyncratic narratives present in the diverse array of subjects illustrated by Perjovschi.

Much like Taxali, Perjovschi presents a less serious or highhanded form of design. However, where Taxali brings a tangible sense of character to our visual culture through a sensitive attunement to a humble attitude present in the forefathers of the contemporary logo, Perjovschi has further developed the time-based aspect of his performances in order to tap into a similar vein of humanized illustration. The performance of the continual act of understanding and the subsequent redefinition of that understanding is a central element of Perjovschi’s work, through which he admits his own fallibility. Perjovschi must constantly revise his responses and adapt his illustrations to constant changes in the media environment, as well as other aspects of the local context, that he encounters on his travels. For example, while his macho-man could back a big mouth with a bugling bicep in 1994, by the second Moscow biennal, whether by virtue of a new setting or a different time, our meathead is all talk. His images have such rich character not only for their wit, but also for the development of themes that reoccur across the passages of time and place that Perjovschi captures in his notebooks.

Installation view | Footnotes on Geopolitics | Market and Amnesia at the 2nd Moscow Biennial | Courtesy of Dan Perjovschi

The humanizing affect of the temporal and commemorative aspects of Perjovschi’s illustrations is a vital aspect of his ability to maintain the role his work fills as a public art form. The way Taxali can capture our fallibility in his toons by avoiding the sleek, inhuman look of advertising is another valuable contribution to a public visual culture. Kristine Stiles has paid close attention to the status of print media and illustration as a public art form, and with direct consideration of Perjovschi’s practice. An outline of Stiles’ work on public art will flesh out the relevance of the term ‘public’ and help draw out the importance of the humanizing elements that I’ve identified in the work of Taxali and Perjovschi.

For Stiles, it was Perjovschi’s role as political cartoonist and the context in which he took on that role that were the most compelling reasons for calling his work a genuine public art^xii. After the fall of Ceausescu’s regime in 1989, Perjovschi soon began to create the illustrations for two new publications - Countrapunct and 22 - both avenues for critical voices emerging after the silence of the communist state was broken^xiii. Stiles argues that post-revolutionary Romania shared a history clouded by secrecy, and that a collective assessment of that past was essential^xiv.  Presented with a moment in which an entire country was faced with issues that would resonate throughout the population, Perjovschi’s illustrations could help focus the attention of the public on the complexities of the social consequences that would arrive in the wake of the revolution^xv. The presence of such shared interests is key for Stiles, and is what constitutes an identifiable 'public.’ Stiles is able to elucidate the value of Perjovschi’s work because she can explain the relevance of the issues that Perjovschi illustrates to a clearly defined group.

However, by focusing her analysis on the communicative brilliance of Perjovschi’s illustrations within the context of his practice as a uniquely Romanian artist in a Romanian moment, Stiles must end her treatment of public art on a wan note. If there is no public interest in an appreciation of our past, or a critical reflection on how that past resonates in our present, then public art does not exist because there is no clear public to engage^xvi. Though Stiles presents us with an example of a Western community within which public art has engaged successfully, she is concerned with the difficulty of defining publics within western democracies^xvii. Above, I have tried to articulate the means through which Taxali and Perjovschi have managed to engage people without a public that could plausibly be said to have the same invigorated sense of the importance of the past that Stiles believes to have been present in Romania after 1989.

Developing communicative tactics with the flexibility of those employed by Taxali and Perjovschi shows that illustration (within the context of print culture and installation art) may be able to engage with people despite a lack of a clearly defined public. The engagement that I’ve described takes place on a level of a humanizing of visual culture. The value of this humanization of visual culture is best understood in opposition to a misplaced faith in the role of news television as the centerpiece of the deliberative democratic ideal.

Laboring the supposed rationality of a democratic or economic sense of progress by employing a medium that cannot support the sustained thought required for such complex projections, i.e. television, is a misuse of our creative potential. Richard Anderson, in "The Place of the Media in a Popular Democracy", has shown us that the impact of ‘negative campaigning’ (read: mudslinging) and ‘agenda setting’ (read: sensational journalism) are enough to undercut a vision of a rational, well informed group of citizens being led by a visual culture. It is not visual media that we should look to for guidance in goal setting and decision making. The persistence with which we have done so reveals a misunderstanding of the potential of visual media. It is, perhaps, art that can help us understand a more valuable form of engagement with visual forms. When news television can only present us with so many uncertainties, vagaries, and abstractions, it seems strange that we have not given up the hope that visual communications might help us grasp the complexities of the early twentieth century. The work of Taxali and Perjovschi points to another, more valuable, potential inherent in visual media, the potential of an engagement with more basic aspects of human nature in a way that may help people understand how their shared humanity is iterated in the present moment.

From The Taxali 300 | Courtesy of Narwhal Art Projects

Fallibility is the aspect of human nature that Taxali has shown us so skillfully. Taxali has given us a renewed humility in the form of his jovial characters, which drop the pretense of a sleek, serene vision of a revitalized, green American economy. The self-consciously caricatured quality in Taxali’s work, which is achieved with a charming handling of the visual legacy of the American dream, not only makes the hubris of American finance laughable but also humbles contemporary attempts at easily encapsulating the flaws in our economic system. Taxali’s handling of the now-quaint mascots of the past reveals that both the new and old must stand together in their acceptance of their fallibility and the uncertainty of their grasp of present crises. Taxali’s Monopoly-Man-come-Uncle-Sam is perhaps the best instance of this humanizing tone. The star-studded hero of commerce looks on in disbelief as his bubble is about to be burst. This bubble could be the bubble of  ‘bubble capitalism,’ the bubble of our neighbor’s supposed economic superiority, and perhaps the deflating of a more collective personal fable: that ubiquitous visual media could bring the coherence promised by a dream of electric omniscience. No, no. The best we’ve got are Taxali’s chumps.

Perjovschi’s work is a performative and time-based rendition of our fallibility. The theme of fallibility is not an obvious one to relate to Perjovschi’s work when presented with his vibrant wordplay and the breadth of the thoughts that he stimulates with such simple drawings. One might imagine that if anyone can present a thoughtful or comprehensive view of the world, it would be this adept visual communicator traveling the world with no job other than doodling. But once you consider that Perjovschi has seen what it is too live in a place where images were elevated to the level of infallible icons, my proposal gains new weight. Perjovschi is embracing the beauty of a continual transformation of belief and understanding; an organic process that was perhaps denied him, or at least curtailed, by the limits placed on his access to information and freedom of speech. After he left Romania this process broadened in scope. Though Perjovschi’s practice as an illustrator may be addressed to a more nebulous public, the more fundamental exploration of the value of a constantly shifting imminent critique has enriched his practice by adding an inspiring characterization of the essential struggle we all face by virtue of our imperfect understanding.

- - -

ⁱ Gary Taxali Illustration Press, “Juxtapoz Interview”, http://www.garytaxali.com/press.php

ⁱⁱ Ibid.

ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.

^iv Dan Perjovschi Official Website, Texts, “The Line That Speaks”, by Julia Friedrich, http://www.perjovschi.ro/line-speaks.html.

^v Ibid.

^vi Ibid.

^vii Dan Perjovschi Official Website, Current Projects, “Dan Perjovschi—Postcards from the World”, http://www.perjovschi.ro/dan-perjovschi-postcards-world.html.

^viii Ibid.

^ix Ibid.

^x Ibid.

^xi Dan Perjovschi Official Website, Texts, “Dan Perjovschi: When I’m working I see everything as a drawing”, http://www.perjovschi.ro/dan-perjovschi-when-i-m-working-i-see-everything-drawing.html.

^xii Kristine Stiles, “Concerning Public Art and “Messianic Time””, Google Scholar Search: “Concerning Public Art and “Messianic Time””, (accessed February 12, 2010).

^xiii Ibid.

^xiv Ibid.

^xv Ibid.

^xvi Ibid.

^xvii Ibid.

© Megan McKenzie

© Megan McKenzie

I tend to get sick of things quickly. This factor, in combination with a need to get my hands dirty, has led me to work in mixed media – everything from spray paint to collage to watercolour can be found in my studio. I have a strong fascination with intricate patterns, albino animals and the Dark Arts, and am currently in love with the work of Aurel Schmidt, Matt Leines and Shary Boyle. One day, I would like to test my hand at wallpaper design, and developing graphics for snowboards, longboards and skateboards.

Check out more of Megan's work on her website and in our Spotlight Gallery.

Comments

• February 15, 2010, Marshall writes: o_O !
• February 15, 2010, Taxali, Nickle, Dino Porn, Winterlicious and more! | >fruitlet writes: [...] David Nickle, whose recent release Monstrous Affections has been making quite a stir, and our visual art spotlight this month is a great illustrator from Toronto, Megan McKenzie, whose beautiful work really blew me [...]

For the first time, Hot Potatoe provides a solid catalogue of Bell’s constructions, many of which were shown as part of a solo show at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in 2004. These works are a departure from Bell’s busy works on paper. For those unfamiliar with Bell’s drawings, his works are obsessively detailed, pen and ink or watercolour doodles, which rely on a density of line, along with comical annotations and characters, to create the semblance of narrative in an otherwise random hodgepodge.

Marc Bell, Hot Potatoe (Cover) Source: Adam Baumgold Gallery

The constructions present a viewer with less visual clutter and constitute a simplified iteration of Bell’s humour. The critter’s you’ll find in the drawings stand alone in the constructions as collage inspired, cardboard sculptures. Rather than the dozens of obscure little jokes you’ll find in the drawings, Bell allows for one central theme to carry the comedic thread throughout the constructions, that thread being the presence of faux fountain-pop cups (from up-standing establishments such as ‘Hot-bun Parachute’ and ‘Gravy World’) in almost all of these works. This seemingly innocuous trope ties into an important shift in pop-bottle art from London, Ontario, and serves to flesh out Bell’s exploration of the inside joke.

A comparison with another London, Ontario fizzy-pop aficionado will help me link Bell’s love of soft drinks to persistent themes in the art of London. Greg Curnoe is the second soda-lover I have in mind. By drawing out the love of soft drinks shared by both artists, I’ll explain their shared sensitivities for our emotional connections with the mundane and cast relief on their respective attitudes toward the everyday.

Curnoe’s interest in pop is tied to his brand of Regionalism: a term now synonymous with Greg Curnoe in South Western Ontario. After a brief and strenuous period at Toronto’s Ontario College of Art and Design in the late fifties, Curnoe decided that the isolation and sense of community he found in his home town of London, Ontario was preferable to what he perceived to be an Americanized art world in Torontoⁱ. His rejection of the big city would snowball into a hyperbolic Regionalist ethos, which was most clearly articulated by Curnoe in terms of anti-American artworks and an often-autobiographical approach to recording the minutia of life in his hometown.

So intense was Curnoe’s love of London, even the simplest objects were infused by his loving eye with the richness of the relationships and inspiration that he found all around him. With Drawer Full of Stuff Curnoe was able to turn trifling keepsakes from his life in London into a readymade portrait in which those easily-sterile genres were infused with a life time’s worth of memories and emotionsⁱⁱ. “A metal spring from his father’s chair at The Farmer’s Advocate, part of an old ceramic towel rack from his parents’ house on Langarth Street, one of Grandma Curnoe’s teaspoons,” along with a meticulously rendered inventory of the Drawer’s other contents, are all piled by Curnoe into a worn wooden drawer lined with bus transfersⁱⁱⁱ. Curnoe’s sensitivity for the objects that denote his movement throughout London, the places and people who loved him, and the time he’s spent amongst these things are not squirreled away, but rather dignified by their caretaker's diligent affection for the signs of life in the everyday.

Curnoe’s pop-bottle collection is an important point of intersection between his obsession with daily recordings and his regionalist agenda. Curnoe gathered the collection of bottles from regions across Canada before the centralized manufacturing of brands like Pepsi-Cola would have created a uniform bottle design, and before the demise of regional brands such as ‘Twisty Cola’ and ‘Snow White.’ Idiosyncrasies in bottle design along with local brand names captures some of the charm of Canada’s retreating backwater towns. For Curnoe, the collecting and itemizing of the bottles might have preserved not only their form, but also the satisfaction that he may have found in cherishing such subtleties.

In View From the Most Northerly Window on the West Wall we find thirteen of the bottles (each labeled according to its province of origin) arranged in a row along a windowsill in Curnoe’s London studio^iv. Within the confines of his creative spaces Curnoe can force us to see the variety and colour that animates his world while lending permanence to that diversity by anchoring it in his paintings and collections^v. Curnoe is overt, even forceful, in his insistence that a viewer spend time with every detail of his hoard of memorabilia. The use of text — as annotations and lists — may inspire others to share the insights offered by such attention to details.

Greg Curnoe, View From the Most Northerly Window on the West Wall | Source: Greg Curnoe: Life and Stuff © 2001 by the Art Gallery of Ontario

Bell’s work is aligned with Curnoe in its use of text, but in Bell’s work a psychotic scrapbook replaces the faithful diligence of Curnoe’s commitment to recording the vitality of life in London, Ontario. For Bell the use of imaginary brand names like ‘Continental Stone World’ and ‘Gnostic Pizza’ replaces the verité of Curnoe’s antique pop-bottles. Tracing the source of inspiration for Bell’s pretend pop will reveal a possible affinity between the two artists being discussed, an affinity for recording the everyday and for demanding attention to detail. It is the details each artist chooses to preserve that will differentiate them and crystallize the importance of their fizzy-pop-inspired artworks.

Marc Bell, Greenbun, Canadian Aztec, Continental Stone World | Source: Hot Potatoe © 2009 by Drawn and Quarterly

Unlike Curnoe, Bell is a man of the world. Since his boyhood in London, Bell has spent significant periods of time in New Brunswick, British Columbia (where most of the construction were created), and now lives in Montreal.  A wandering quasi-bard, more a scruffy wanderer than wholesome small town champion, Bell records the smirks prompted by the laughable brand names and quaint anachronisms that he encounters on his trans-Canada meanderings. The inspiration for the ‘Continental Stone World’ cup in the Greenbun, Canadian Aztec, Continental Stone World construction is a custom countertop manufacturer in Vancouver, BC^vi. “Continental Stone World” sounds more like an amusement park for marble and granite enthusiast than “granite & marble specialists in marble finishing & installation of all kinds of natural marble & granite”^vii. The Walrus’ blogger Sean Rogers was keen to point out that Bell seemed to be a bit too obvious in All Day War With Paper by referencing an actual restaurant chain: ‘Lime Rickey’^viii. However, Bell tells us the ‘Lime Rickey’ soda in All Day War With Paper was inspired by a fountain-pop available at Sackville’s historic Mel’s Tea Room^ix, which you may know is not any old diner, but rather a longstanding fixture in Sackville society that was once honored by “the patronage of many of the ladies of Sackville.”^x.

Marc Bell, All Day War With Paper | Source: Hot Potatoe © 2009 by Drawn and Quarterly

Both Curnoe and Bell are archivists of a peculiar sort. Where Curnoe colours the objects that have invigorated his zeal as a collector, lending them the vibrancy of his keen attention through a bright palette and playful composed colour fields, Bell could be capturing his own disbelief. How could they not see how funny they are! Each encounter with the ridiculous is a cause for celebration. It’s not a commitment to a particular place that allows Bell to find inspiration in Canada’s backwaters and global pretensions; a good sense of humor is all he needs. Both artists capture the value of fleeting perceptions, but for Bell the charm of momentary encounters with quaint Canadiana is found in the laughter that we should relish when reminded not to take these signs too seriously.

If we look hard enough we’ll see that the laughable forefathers of sleek, twenty-first century uniformity are still all around us, waiting to give us a good laugh. Bell’s cardboard cartoons dramatize these encounters, playing up the awkwardness of our negotiation of logo-land. We’re usually caught between a shallow recognition of which signs are passé and an assent to those that remain new and therefore attractive, but in Bell’s hands a leveling occurs not in terms a formal uniformity of design, but in the uniformity of ridiculousness. There’s no need to draw out a moral here, some greater meaning in a shift away from Curnoe’s attempt to brighten and rigorously investigate the dignity of the soda pop of old and toward Bell’s homage to the pleasure in a near-juvenile chuckle at the expense of ‘Continental Stone World.’ But it is important to see the transportability of Bell’s humor. Every town, city, and province Bell visits must bow before his leveling humour. If you can agree that his quirky, mock cafeteria patrons are worth laughing at, that their calculated clumsiness and the abundant insider references can capture Bell’s immediate satisfaction with even the slightly-humorous things he encounters on his journeys, than perhaps you can find this vein of humor throughout his oeuvre, and maybe even practice it yourself.

*

ⁱ Sarah Milroy, “Greg Curnoe: Time Machines”, in Greg Curnoe: Life and Stuff, ed. Dennis Reid and Matthew Teitelbaum, (Toronto, ON: Art Gallery of Ontario, and Vancouver, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2001), 22, 51.

ⁱⁱ Milroy, “Time Machines”, 28.

ⁱⁱⁱ ibid.

^iv Milroy, “Time Machines”, 85.

^v Pierre Théberge, “The Studio”, trans. National Gallery of Canada, in Greg Curnoe: Retrospective, (1982) 5, 6.

^vi Lulu Peabody Sherman, “Hello, Is Peter Gabriel There?: An Overview of Recurring Memes and Utterances in the Marc Bell Oeuvre”, in Hot Potatoe, (Montreal, QU: Drawn and Quarterly, 2009), 18.

^vii “Continental Stone World Homepage”, http://continentalstoneworld.com/ (accessed January 12, 2010).

^viii Sean Rogers, “Chegg it Oot”, The Walrus Blog, November 20th, 2009, http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2009/11/20/chegg-it-oot-an-interview-with-marc-bell/

^ix ibid

^x Canada’s Historic Places, “Mell’s Tea Room: Why is This Place Important?”, http://www.historicplaces.ca/

Lovelace and Babbage

It all began one year ago, when journalist, blogger and social software consultant Suw Charman-Anderson spearheaded the first international Ada Lovelace Day. The objective was to celebrate and bring attention to the oft-overlooked women in technology such as Ada Lovelace: the word's first computer programmer for the world's first (if uncompleted) programmable computer, Charles Babbage's analytical engine (the successor to his difference engine, also uncompleted within his lifetime). Which is also, incidentally, the only legitimate child of "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" Lord Byron. Charman-Anderson's call was for at least 1000 people to blog on March 24 about a woman in technology they admire. Nearly double that number pledged to do so, Sidney Padua among their ranks.

Padua is a story artist and animator (or, visual effects artist, as they're sometimes calling them in these computerized times) native to Edmonton, but presently working in London. Her contribution to Ada Lovelace Day came in the form of a short origin story comic that absconds with Lovelace's already interesting history and returns bearing its oddball hyperactive twin, in which Ada Lovelace is trained up as a human calculating machine so that math may squash the mad poets' blood roiling within her. This short extended to the meeting of Lovelace and Babbage at a party over the model prototype of his difference engine (almost totally historically accurate!), and from there it was only logical that they should then team up over comic-book science and, of course, fight crime. Since then, Babbage and Lovelace have starred on the BBC's The Tech Lab, enjoyed a place of honour in Oxford's Museum of the History of Science "Steampunk" exhibit, and been generally well received wheresoever they wander on the internet.

The Thrilling Adventures of Babbage and Lovelace is presently an ongoing series of raucous episodes in which the two titular characters (based, of course, on the historical figures of the same names) fight crime, and try to keep their funding from being cut off, so as to support their cathedral-sized clock-work super-computer difference engine (and varieties of other inventive endeavours). It is all steampunk with substance and great levity.

Babbage and Lovelace is, essentially, a webcomic, but unlike most other webcomics, this one doesn't quite settle for imitating print comics in what just so happens to be a web-based form. No mind-blowingly radical features are explored, but the unusual effects that she tries are effective. The most immediate feature is that of the blog-posted jpgs of fairly straight-forward, black-and-white sequential art, but Padua surrounds her artwork with a mass of hyperlinked historical resources that twine with the narrative and make the wild antics of her cartoon characters seem more alive; nowhere near so strange or fantastical as they first appear, and far more interesting. This retinue of historical documents and expository commentary sets the whole endeavour a head and shoulders higher in my esteem.

For those of you out there whose sepia-toned education has ruined your appetite for history as if it were all one tedious list of violent squabbles between powerful people who nonetheless remain insufferably dull: if Padua's reference sources can't inspire any new interest in the past (at least, for the nineteenth century), then surely you're a lost cause — poor soul! For Padua, it seems, has a knack for digging up characters who, if I didn't know better, I'd expect to have fallen off the fiction shelf and into the history drawer by accident!

The spoils of those digs feed into the comic directly, informing characters and plot elements to a more historically accurate degree than seems plausible judging by the hubbub and buzz of the surface steampunk glaze. Not that this is in any way a comic to wink conspiratorially at history majors — no, indeed, for Padua's research channels the comic in a far less direct manner, via the aforementioned hyperlinked sources, and dense thicket of expository endnotes (which are often as funny as the comic itself). There is a great flexibility in the blog medium for diversions and multiple streams of information, and Padua works here with very simple, but very effective tactics. The comic-proper and its endnotes work together like two translucent images which, when overlaid, create a third, bolder, more complex image.

This intertextual conversation often functions as a reflexive lampshading as well and Padua has practically turned the lampshade into an artistic, narrative and comedic style. It is through this idiosyncratic interplay of truth and untruth that she has kept Babbage and Lovelace from getting too light and blowing off in a breeze of simplistic amusement.

If I have but one complaint, it is this: that what a tragedy it is that it would violate all reasonable codes of human rights if Sidney Padua were to be locked up somewhere, with a chute for food, a chute for library books, and an internet connection, where she might then focus on Babbage and Lovelace without that pesky timegobbler known as a day job. Updates are few and far between, and I find that the peaking of my anticipation for the next instalment has often passed over towards forgetfulness by the time it arrives. Nevertheless! As I write this, "The Organist," a story arc that has been a long timein the works has at last begun, and it is off to a most promising start.

I encourage you to check out The Thrilling Adventures of Babbage and Lovelace, Sidney Padua's own website and you can find out more about Ada Lovelace Day here.

Photo by Leda and St-Jacques | SSENSE

This (Canadian) boutique is advertising Alexander Wang pieces (that name is only funny to people not interested in fashion, I swear to god) by pairing a female model and a dog in a sexually-charged scenario. Someone will point out that this is animal abuse. The dog does not care about the model. The dog is only interested in the peanut butter smeared on her thigh and it’s not fair to put him in that position. Yes, it’s not the most humane photoshoot animal-wise but that’s not really the main issue here. The difference between erotica and pornography is the presence of mutual respect and lack of exploitation. This editorial is blatantly pornographic and misogynistic. Can you think of another setting where you get to see a dog almost performing oral sex on a woman?

I am interested in other interpretations of this shoot because my opinion is that it’s about the degradation and humiliation of women. Imagine these photos without the sophisticated makeup, designer clothes, and professional lighting. It would just be a pantsless woman giving the camera a sultry look while straddling a dog. Classy.

I hope everyone gives SSENSE as much shit as they do American Apparel. At least their dogs are wearing clothes and keeping their tongues to themselves. And for the love of whatever deity you believe in, don’t order anything from that place when you click to see the photos! I hesitated about writing about this in fear of unintentionally becoming part of their advertising. You can get whatever they sell from other places, I promise.

Comments

• January 18, 2010, marshall writes: oh peanut butter.

© Yien Yip

© Yien Yip

I am a huge fan of Chinese brush work and Japanese wood cut. I enjoy using detailed lines and bold brush strokes to communicate my art work. I do the occasional screen print on t-shirts as well for a bit of a break from the paper. I am a huge fan of Jillian Tamaki, Sam Webber and Yuko Shimizu.

© Yien Yip

For more of Yien's work, visit our Spotlight Gallery.

Photos by Zach Hertzman //

Through performance and body painting, Adrian Cohen-Gallant and Sophia Ilyniak have negotiated their relationship with several issues central to the artistic representation of sexuality and the gendered subject. The early successes of this artist couple are related to two tensions in their works. One tension is the conflict between the alluring symmetry of the marks that adorn their canvases and the distance these suggestive marks create. The imprints Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak leave behind are both enticing abstract compositions that draw the viewer in and, at the same time, incomplete figurative images that resist the satisfaction that a clear identification of the partially portrayed bodies would allow. The second tension is related to the live performance of the painting process, and arises from the status of the body as an unstable symbol. This tension is between the performance of sex as an erotic act and the performance of sex as an imaginative exercise aimed at negotiating gender relations. Tracing these tensions will help reveal a space of thought opened by these two artists. This space is best understood as existing in opposition to images explicitly designed for sexual arousal.

Amelia Jones has explained the importance of works of art in which enticing formal elements (striking colours, rich materials, exquisite detail etc.) and symbolic elements related to gender politics coexist within the same work in her article ““Post-Feminism”—A Remasculinization of Culture?” We can simplify these terms slightly and explain them as the coexistence of the sensuous and the political or critical within the same artwork. Jones has suggested that, according to some critics, female artists who create works that can be enjoyed for the visual pleasure they entice are somehow relinquishing the critical potential inherent in their gendered position in favor of creating things that people enjoy looking at[i]. Jones suggests that critics who do not recognize the compatibility of sensuousness and criticality in the work of female artists may be willfully ignoring the polemical intentions of an artist in favor of their own surface oriented preferences[ii].

Untitled #1, from the Grey Series

Jones mentions this point in an effort to chastise male critics who ignore the importance of an artist’s gender in favor of emphasizing the beauty of an artwork. It is important to recognize that the visual pleasure that works by female artists create is an important aspect of understanding how a female artist has negotiated their relationship with visual pleasure. This negotiation is especially important because women are so often considered to be the site of visual enjoyment. Nonetheless, as a male critic, I’ll have to be careful not to privilege any purely surface enjoyment I find in Adrian and Sophia’s work in an effort to avoid removing the work these artists have created from the context of the sexual relationship and emotional connection that has been central to the realization of these works.

The gray series, in contrast with the colour series, presents the most interesting examples of the tension between the sensual and interpersonal aspects of Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak’s work. In the gray series, Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak use the same paint colour on both of their bodies. Hands, feet, knees and forearms, printed in black paint on grey broad cloth, create roughly symmetrical compositions.  The sparse markings combined with the clinical execution of the poses distances a viewer from a clear perception of the poses at work and the actors who have performed those poses.  Furthermore, by sharing the same colours, Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak seem to have leveled-out the markings, making any connection between them or speculation about their interconnectedness tenuous. However, there are two sets of hands and feet, and the space between them, rather than being a vacant negative space, reverberates with a tension that almost demands that the connection between the disparate points be drawn out.

Activating a negative space in this way is of the utmost importance because it may move the viewer’s focus from the marks themselves to a more curious engagement with the absence of an insistent, comprehensible representation of the two naked bodies. If you accept that curiosity is propelled by the activation of the grey field, and not just the fact that there are two sets of hands and feet, then you might imagine along with me that this field gestures toward the context of the encounter implied by the fact that it is a couple who have marked the canvas. The gray field is not just a pictorial space, but also an imaginative space that engages a mind that seeks to see the place where this coupling was realized. Viewed in this light, Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak might not be using austere pigments to sanitize their bodies, sapping them of the liveliness of colour. They may be gesturing toward a connection with their surroundings, a connection that is such an important part of understanding the significance of any specific sex act. The heightened importance of the negative space in the grey series is made even more obvious in contrast with the coloured series.  In the coloured works the negative area remains important, but the vibrancy of the colours, and the more easily deciphered poses, draw attention to the sex act being depicted, rather than allowing for a more subtle use of colour and gesture to create a respectful distance between the pair and the viewer. The gray field may entice the viewer to imagine the context and exact articulation of the act, but it also presents an insistent distance or privacy.

Untitled #1, from the Coloured Series

Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak are currently struggling to achieve the thoughtful tone that they have accomplished with two-dimensional pieces while performing the painting process for a live audience or for the sake of documentation. However, their understanding of the symbolic and sexual charge that their bodies carry during a performance may allow them to avoid a potential pitfall that is present in some performance work. This pitfall is also articulated by Amelia Jones, this time in her work ”Presences” in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation.

Jones explains how some performance artists insist on the importance of their presence during a performance: the actual physical proximity of the performing artists to the viewer. This insistence on the importance of physical presence, according to Jones, is sometimes meant as a radical act that supposedly allows the artists to avoid the possibility that their work could be misinterpreted[iii].  Jones quotes Catherine Elwes analysis of performance art as one example, amongst many, of the idea that “Performance is about the ‘real-life’ presence of the artist. […] she is both signifier and that which is signified. Nothing stands in between spectator and performer.”[iv] On the contrary, there is a great deal standing between the performer and the viewer: an indeterminate and fluctuating set of memories and cultural norms that mediate a viewer’s understanding of the piece regardless of whether it is a performance, a photo, or a painting.

The danger that the difficulty of interpretation presents an artist also implies the possibility of success. That a given object, pose or scene does not have an indisputable meaning suggests that there may be room to maneuver these symbols in favor of the artist’s intentions. The intentions that Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak bring to their performance piece highlight the positive potential of symbolic instability. Those intentions are to distance themselves from a sexually arousing performance, and instead to highlight the shared responsibility and comfort that they feel are essential aspects of their relationship. Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak are particularly concerned about their ability to avoid eroticism when it comes to their performance piece, which is a concern that justifies Jones’ insistence on the instability of the body’s symbolic significance in the context of a performance.

Untitled #2, from the Grey Series

Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak are so concerned about their performance piece because the presence of their naked bodies brings with it the danger that their performance could be viewed as pornographic, especially because their poses are sexually charged. When discussing the performance that Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak did for the sake of the photographs printed with this article, Ilyniak expressed her reluctance to use a certain pose: the doggy style position. She explained that:

“…when we were trying to decide what we were doing for you guys [during the photography shoot], and we thought about the doggy style position, and we wondered if we should do it; it’s different of us.  It’s something we’ve talked about a lot, there’s less of a connection happening because we’re not looking at each other.”

The motivation for using the position, as they both explained, was that it allows them to leave behind a beautiful set of marks on the material. The difficulty in using the position is that it lacks the intimacy and connectedness that Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak try to convey in their works. The solution, as Cohen-Gallant explains, is a simple gesture: “I did feel awkward in the doggy style position, so I decided to hug her because I felt that that was the least erotic thing I could do in that position.” The spontaneity of this gesture is a poignant moment that points toward a less fractured model for sexual intercourse, even in the doggy style position. Cohen-Gallant’s spontaneous act also expresses the urgency with which he confronts any anxiety that he may feel to be connected to his treatment of his partner’s body.

Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak have negotiated their relationship with sexual images and acts in a way that bodes well for any future exploration of the subject that this couple may undertake. They have been able to create balanced, pleasurable images with their bodies without separating themselves from their marks, and without deleting reference to the setting in which these pieces were created.  Though the situation in which the coupling depicted in these paintings takes place remains ambiguous, the curiosity aroused remains respectful due to the careful use of colour. It is gesture and ad lib not colour or composition that allow Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak to distance their performance from the sexually arousing. Finding new and equally casual ways of enacting their loving embraces may expand and reinvigorate the range of poses they are able to transform in performance.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Amelia Jones, ““Presence” in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation”, in Art Journal, (Winter, 1996) 13.

[iv] Ibid.

Comments

• December 15, 2009, Melanie writes: This entire review is overrated - if you were to know these two people, you would know their personalities. Sorry, the work is unimpressive, over done - stop trying to find meaning behind it.
• December 16, 2009, Karen Correia Da Silva writes: ^ Eep. Personal vendetta? The interpretation of art is a rather personal exercise, so art that is not within your realm of taste is not necessarily bad.

Photo by Zach Hertzman

I met Adrian Cohen-Gallant and Sophia Ilyniak at Gallery 1313. They were performing as part of a live Internet broadcast hosted by In My Bed Magazine. The artist couple has created a series of body paintings since their senior year at the Etobicoke School of the Arts (ESA). Together they position themselves on sheets of broadcloth, linen or burlap to create quasi-symmetrical imprints with their mud-covered bodies. The suggestive forms left behind allow Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak to draw a viewer in with a sparse and graceful composition, while maintaining distance from intentionally arousing representations of sex. Since their performance at 1313, I have learned how the reception that these works received at ESA, and the intimacy Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak foster, help cast light on the potential these two artists share.

￭

Will: Lets start at the beginning. When were and how did you guys meet?

Adrian: I didn’t necessarily have the greatest high school experience in my first four years of high school. I went to a school called Metro Prep [Metropolitan Preparatory Academy]. I actually started in grade eight, before I really had an opinion of my own about schools, my parents just put me in that school. In grade nine, I ended up getting into a drug addiction. In grade ten it had sky rocketed into terrible, terrible drugs. So, I ended up going to treatment in Utah. Spent a year in school there, got incredible marks because Utah’s academics are terrible. I got like 100% in most of my classes. And I was basically two classes, from my understanding when I was in Utah, away from graduating. And then I come back to Canada, transferred my credits over, and they transferred basically into nothing; they transferred into a pile of electives. So I still needed so many mandatory classes. I had basically spent no time in school as far as they were concerned.

Sophia: That’s when things get really kinda screwed up I think. We were friends most of the school year, and then I went to a treatment program for eating disorders, so I was gone for most of the year. And in the middle of that I lost my boyfriend, who I had been with for over two years. That’s when he kind of came in, and became my best friend. Took care of me pretty much. You were there everyday. And that’s just kinda how things happened. It was an OD [referencing the passing of her boyfriend], so he totally understood what happened.

Adrian: So I just told her 'I can be there for you.'  And I just talked to her about things after her program everyday.

Sophia: The last thing that was on my mind was getting into another relationship. I was so content with being single for the next however many years. A month later we were already together. And I felt so terrible. It was a really, really hard time because I wasn’t supposed to be with him. I wasn’t supposed to be with anybody. I was supposed to be grieving. It was just wrong and some people had issues with it. Anyway, after a while we started making art and started doing really fun stuff together.

Will: Tell me about the initial idea and how things developed as you guys started working together.

Adrian: Initially, I feel it’s a little bit cliché, but it was just how incredible the little things are, and how art is held on this pedestal but our daily life is below it. Such a beautiful part of our daily lives is artistic in every way; there are so many facets of it that are incredible. How could I actually express that? The next obvious conclusion was getting covered in paint and leaving the remnants of it behind on a canvas.

Will: Why does the naked body represent the opposite of  ‘elevated’ art for you?

Adrian: Where I want to go with this was to show how other things are sacred and ritualistic that people do but are, especially at the age when we first started, very kept in the shadows. We refer to making love as sleeping with someone because it’s supposed to happen at night behind closed doors. It’s a hush-hush topic even though we’re supposed to be a liberal society.

Sophia: Especially during high school; we are [supposed to be] a-sexual beings in high school.
Adrian: It’s really hard to visualize what it’s going look like until you actually do it.  Once we actually did it and saw the first print we stood holding one another as if we were looking at our child.

Sophia: The first thing that we really liked about it was that it was a 2D sculpture.

Adrian: Yeah, its an imaginary sculpture. It’s not a performance piece; we were making love on them, and a lot of them you can really see the passion in them. There is a lot of motion and movement; you can actually see the passion of what happened. The ones that aren’t like that area whole lot cleaner. They almost have a completely different message in them. The whole gray series, I almost find it too sterile, but at the same time it is an interesting look at lovemaking. It’s really sterile: here’s where your hands go, here’s where your legs go, here’s where your body goes.  It really isn’t that far of a stretch to go from what we do to a performance piece. We’re not opposed to public nudity.

Sophia: It’s amazing that I’m doing that right know, when you consider where I was last year.

Will: [to Sophia] Was it important for you to be able to do these [performance] pieces? Was that a step forward for you, it terms of you being comfortable with your own body?

Sophia: I’m in a way different place now. I’m just really happy that I don’t have any anxiety about that at all.

Will: Do you think your performance pieces convey something completely different than the finished works themselves, the canvases.

Adrian: I feel like the finished works are really open to interpretation. You see one and you don’t necessarily link it to sex or anything of that sort. There is a whole lot more risk involved in the performances to be interpreted as erotic or just in a less wholesome way, because we are naked and on display.

Sophia: We’re showing how comfortable we are with each other.

Will: That’s an important part of staying away from the erotic in my mind: just how comfortable you guys seem with one another. Is that a big objective for you: staying away from the erotic?

Adrian: We were afraid of In My Bed [Magazine].

Sophia: We checked it out, and did some research, and checked out what the magazine is actually about because we didn’t want to put our stuff into some porno crap. That’s not what it’s about at all.

Adrian: Our culture absolutely disgusts me with the way sexuality is portrayed and woman are portrayed.

Sophia: That’s another reason that I don’t shave anything on my body. It’s about equality, and I think the symmetry in some of the pieces conveys that.

Adrian: So many people will see my ass or my back on the canvas…

Sophia: And they instantly think its my body!

Adrian: Just because it is a sexualized object, but yours or mine looks exactly the same on the canvas.

Will: Has it’s been difficult to overcome the association with the erotic when it comes to your body art?

Adrian: I find that the finished pieces do a much better job of avoiding that than the performance. And I think in order to achieve that same distinction with the performance it will take a lot of thinking. Doing it and finding out what happens is a big part of that. It wasn’t interpreted that way at Gallery 1313, but it could have been. I find I have to think about where my hands are because where my hands are can change it from being ritualistic to erotic really quickly. If I have my hands on your breasts it is all of a sudden erotic because your breasts are so eroticized by our media.

Will: You describe it as a ritual, that it’s a ritual act for you guys. Can you explain what that means?

Adrian: In our culture it’s a means to an end, its not part of an everyday ritual that you share with someone you deeply care about. And as cliché as that may sound, it terrifies me to think that something as fundamental and animalistic is viewed in the same way as people view alcohol and drugs. The top three addictions are gambling, alcohol and pornography. It’s insane to think that we view sex in the same way as we see a mind-altering substance.

Will: How was the first series received at ESA?

Adrian: Every year the grade twelves have a gallery show. Last year it was at the Whippersnapper on College. Our big assignment of the year is due before then so we have a chance of getting into the show. It had to be a series of seven works.

Sophia: We had seven of these ones [the coloured pieces]. Our stuff was up. It took hours to put it up. Everybody was so stoked about it. The day of [the opening] we come to the gallery and ‘Sorry guys.’

Adrian: We get there early, the teachers came up to us and told us ‘you guys have to take this down.’  I feel like they were more anxious than they needed to be about it, they had made it a bigger deal than it needed to be.

Will: What were their concerns? How did they explain things to you?

Adrian: Well, it was explained to us that the board of education, the TDSB [Toronto District School Board], and the teachers union were in conflict at the time, and they explained to us that a gallery show is something that most high schools don’t do. It’s really a privilege that you get from going to ESA. And most kids in the fine arts program don’t get into the show. The teachers select those who get in based on the caliber of art they’re producing. And it would just take one parent whose kid’s art didn’t get into the show to complain and get our teachers fired. I’m skeptical about that, but that’s how they explained it. There was no arguing, but at the same time as an artist I felt I should be behind my art 100%.

Sophia: After the Whippersnapper Show we were both so upset, but after that we thought about how awesome it is that after completing our first body of work we’re already being censored. We’re doing something right if we’re already out their doing something that’s not accepted.

Will: Do you think your teachers felt that it was impossible to avoid the erotic aspect, or the potential for you art to be interpreted as being erotic? Or was it just that any comment on sexuality was not allowed?

Adrian: I think they were just being oversensitive. They were more afraid then they needed to be about it. They already push it a lot at an art school. It is far from the norm of a high school. Getting us into a gallery is something that high schools just don’t do. They’re already going out on a limb. And you push it even further, and it’s scary to them. When people are scared they’re less rational. I don’t know if it really is a question of whether they didn’t think it was possible to avoid the erotic aspect, it’s just the fact that there is the chance that someone would view it that way and make a complaint, and that was just too much for them to risk at that point. Like we said, they gave us 100% on that assignment. They viewed it as a completely successful series. It was totally what they were looking for in the context of the assignment, but it was just too much for them to put it up I guess. And then you take it out of the high school setting, and we’ve shown in a couple of different shows since, and it’s not even taboo in the slightest, it’s not even that risky.

Sophia: It stands out to people, but people don’t giggle about it that much, it’s not really that out there. Until they see us naked in the gallery. That’s where things get a little different.

Will: (to Sophia) As a woman do you think people’s reaction to your involvement in the performance is different than the reaction that Adrian might get?

Sophia: I have thought about it; being the naked girl in the gallery. It makes a big difference that he’s there. Him being there and being comfortable, and not being sexualized in any sort of way, changes things.

Adrian: It spreads out the responsibility onto two people. Like I was saying, I feel responsible for where my hands are, I have to think about it, I have to make sure that I’m not sexualizing your body. There’s less focus on one person, it’s a focus on the ritual and not on the individual.

Sophia: That’s why, when we were trying to decide what we were doing for you guys [during the photography shoot], and we thought about the doggy style position, and we wondered if we should do it; it’s different of us. It’s something we’ve talked about a lot, there’s less of a connection happening because we’re not looking at each other. We did it though.

Adrian: In the finished piece doggy style makes a really interesting composition, but in performance that posture suggests many things. I’m not looking at her. It sexualizes her body a whole lot more.

Sophia: I’m on the ground, and on my knees. That’s kinda what we were trying to stay away from.

Adrian: We did research before we started doing this art. We cracked open the Karma Sutra and read up on their explanations of every position. We tried to pick ones that were interesting and lead your eyes into the piece, but ones that also avoided eroticism. While we were doing the performance, I did feel awkward in the doggy style position, so I decided to hug her because I felt that that was the least erotic thing I could do in that position.

Will: Do you think it’s important to work with other artists? Was that a difficult step for you, sharing the creative process with someone, when usually it’s all about you and your ideas?

Adrian: It’s a double bladed sword. To be sharing it with a loved one can be easier, but at the same time it can be harder. You really have to avoid the competition. I feel like if I was working with a friend, and not necessarily a lover, there would be a little bit of a battle of ownership because there isn’t the same level of commitment, whereas here there is the commitment. We do share this; we share a lot of our lives together so sharing our art isn’t that big of a step. At the same time when it comes to diverging into our own artistic endeavors we do have to avoid any competition, we have to view ourselves as one artist and compliment each other.

Sophia: Which recently has been a little hard. We just really like to work together.

Adrian: Combine that with art school. We want to work together. But at the same time if one of us is getting crazy good marks and the other wasn’t it would become a competition, and that’s where art could interfere with our relationship.

Sophia: It’s been an amazing thing to be able to make art with another person.

Adrian: It’s a little microcosm of the grander relationship. We do compromise and we do accept each other’s decisions and tastes. I think its something you should value and hold onto if you find it.

Will: Would you hope that people see that collaborative side of the project? Is that something you are trying to convey to others?

Sophia: Definitely.

Adrian: That’s one of the pillars of it. There isn’t a single artist. There isn’t an individual. It’s cooperative. At the beginning, when we did the first series, I didn’t know whether you were okay with the whole school knowing that you were involved with me. And we wanted a critique from Mr. Varey [the art teacher at ESA]. At any rate, I brought it in [the coloured series] and it very quickly became my work because I wasn’t mentioning Sophia. And that was tough. It was tough for me, and you were pissed about it.

Sophia: Well yeah, it’s mine too. It was tricky. We were in a difficult spot. I had just lost my boyfriend, and I thought that I wasn’t supposed to be with Adrian. But eventually everyone knew.

Adrian: It had to happen. I couldn’t handle this being my art, it is our art, and we produced this together. Taking responsibility for it all made me feel guilty. I really cherish the fact that it’s ours and not just mine. As much as it was the case that I came up with the concept, I feel like I couldn’t have done it with anyone else. And that’s why I didn’t. I wasn’t sure whether it was going to work between us when we first did it, and it worked so well that it became something I had to hold on to.

Sophia: It’s one of the reasons I stayed in the city. I was going to go to Concordia, but we had this thing going. We’re on a roll here and I thought we can take this somewhere.

Comments

• December 16, 2009, Frank Levey writes: very beautiful and thoughtful young folks. Its difficult , in our overly sexualized age, to view the other as an object. Very refreshing to see their connections as love expressing itself as joy and endearing friendship.
• December 16, 2009, The Blog for the Webzine | steelbananas(dot)com writes: [...] William Lockett for Steel Bananas: I met Adrian Cohen-Gallant and Sophia Ilyniak at Gallery 1313. They were performing as part of a live Internet broadcast hosted by In My Bed Magazine. The artist couple has created a series of body paintings since their senior year at the Etobicoke School of the Arts (ESA). Together they position themselves on sheets of broadcloth, linen or burlap to create quasi-symmetrical imprints with their mud-covered bodies. The suggestive forms left behind allow Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak to draw a viewer in with a sparse and graceful composition, while maintaining distance from intentionally arousing representations of sex. Since their performance at 1313, I have learned how the reception that these works received at ESA, and the intimacy Cohen-Gallant and Ilyniak foster, help cast light on the potential these two artists share… [continue reading on Steel Bananas] [...]

The tour begins in the entrance hall. At the foot of a sweeping circular staircase, a tour guide tells the story of how a box of documents, pertaining to the estate, landed on The Grange's doorstep. Among these documents were found the detailed Pantry Books of Henry Whyte (the butler who served the Boulton family in the 1840s and 50s) and a strange sketched map of the house, with certain places marked, like a treasure map. In his Pantry logs, Whyte describes the odd behaviour of one maid, a young Irish immigrant named Mary O'Shea, who he observed illicitly collecting candle wax, and hiding mysterious objects in the architecture of the house. Anthropological Services Ontario was brought in, and under Dr. Chantal Lee, the excavations began. The tour moves through the house, from excavation site to site as the story unfolds.

Many of those marked spots on the map denote the hiding places for some very curious objects: balls and bricks and plugs of wax and clay, fairly crude, moulded mostly by hand, and containing objects and substances that invoke homesickness (a bundle of letters, a flower from Ireland), and folklore and witchcraft (a child's tooth, a rabbit skull, flakes of human blood...). A wide selection of these artefacts are displayed in a laboratory set-up in the Library, and in glass cases, labelled like museum pieces, all tentatively attributed to "Amber" (Whyte's code-name for O'Shea). The grand finale of the tour is in a small secret chamber in the basement: O'Shea's plastered-up work room, hidden until Dr. Lee began knocking on walls and measuring floorboards for mysterious draughts. The tours are participatory, and visitors are encouraged to chime in with observations of their own. Afterward, visitors are handed a small leaflet and encouraged by the guide to contact Dr. Lee should they have any comments, questions or insights into, perhaps, heretofore undocumented folk practices.

It's enough to switch any third grader's career goal from astronaut to archaeologist in a blink. It's also a lie.

The leaflet is titled "Excavation Notes 03/2009" but the message is a meandering, soft-footed letter of disclosure, signed "Iris Häussler." Häussler is the non-fictitious, contemporary artist behind this whole elaborate theatre of an art installation. Its official title is "He Named Her Amber." The only clue during the tour that all may not be as it seems rests in the Library, in an out-of-the-way display case of 1850s-period items: three rosaries are draped so as to spell "A R T."

Born in Germany, Häussler studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. She has lived and worked in Toronto since 2001. In 2006 she gained local Torontonian recognition with "The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach." I had the pleasure of hearing Häussler talk about "Amber," her working methods and inspirations, back in November when she visited York University. Tall, thin and intense, Häussler never does anything by halves.

"I am not a set maker, I have to feel things, know their structure, I want to bite into things." Her interest includes, to the point of obsession, the whole of some thing, not only its surface. Though embedded in a fiction, her creations are physically real through and through. All of the artefacts in "He Named Her Amber" are true to their placards in all but age and parentage. All their odd contents are all exactly as described. With 700 lbs of Manitoba beeswax in her studio and weeks as a social recluse, Häussler went into character as Mary O'Shea. "You feel you are betraying history by using an electric heating pot" she laughs, but apart from the twenty-first century transport from studio to the AGO, that heating pot is about all the anachronism she allowed. There is a shamanistic aspect to Häussler's work, like a novelist channeling various characters, but instead of into words, it is into her movements, into her physical creations.

In fact, she describes "He Named Her Amber" as a novel in three dimensions. This description invokes up the matter of "willing suspension of disbelief." With a novel, suspension is always willing; with "He Called Her Amber," the only will is that of the artist, and subservient to that, the curator, and the tour-guide actor. In short, belief is tied up with the dynamics of authority. In some respects, this feeds into a sensitive interaction with the space, yet in other respects becomes a breach of public trust that isn't neutral or kind.

"He Named Her Amber" investigates the myth of The 1817 Grange as Toronto's oldest house. When Häussler prospected The Grange for "Amber," she was surprised to find drywall. Further surprise came in the form of slides documenting the gutting and re-modelling of the entire building's interiors during the 1970s to better fit the idea of an "historical" 1840s manor house. It was then that the Bolton family's square-cornered staircase was replaced with a sweeping, free-standing steel structure deemed to be more historically "accurate." All but a few furniture items are "period," not from the original house, the basement kitchen floor is new wood over a concrete slab... and yet, the Grange has a history of presenting itself, without disclosure, as Toronto's oldest house, with actors in costume giving tours and baking bread for visitors. There are no records of the servants prior to 1857, and after all the house has been through, the practical likelihood of anything like O'Shea's creations surviving is so slim as to be ridiculous. What Häussler does with the house is reach through those promotional myths to dig fingers into the very clay the house stands on.

"He Named Her Amber" has a clear goal to provoke challenges to authority. By tricking visitors, Häussler underlines the trust they placed in the curator and administrators of The Grange, in A.S.O.'s appearance of professionalism, and in the tour-guides. This comes, at least in part, from Häussler's own cultural background in Germany: "with my parents and grandparents, I have to challenge authorities—it's just part of my inner task."

However, she approaches this task from the position of an authority, and so any resulting challenge is, in part, to her own authority. She distanced herself from the work by sending the woman who plays Dr. Lee to the opening, and her name did not appear on the list of artists commissioned by the new AGO — the effect is only to solidify Häussler's control of the situation. The power dynamic is rigged, and the audience is subjected to a bait and switch.

There is a fundamental difference between experiencing this artwork with or without prior knowledge of its fiction. To those who have prior knowledge, the presentation may not be very convincing, for the key issues are contemporary art issues of direction, redirection, directness of experience and site-specificity. The idea is that the visitors find some more direct engagement with the art because they do not know it is art.

For those who do not have that prior knowledge, the core issue is of deceit — for above all else, the installation deceives the uninitiated. There is no "more direct" experience, only different frames. To approach "He Named Her Amber" as contemporary art is to see it after the illusions have been stripped away. To approach it as an archaeological presentation is to be "had," to be the butt of a prank. A very smart and elaborate prank, but a prank nonetheless.

This is not to say that it can't be fun to be tricked. I myself did not mind it. Nevertheless, I know a great many are not so pleased, and I think their experiences should not be dismissed out of hand under the umbrella of "they didn't understand" (as is to often a tendency of art officials, alas). In fact, I think it would be quite contrary to the intent of the piece to do so.

The buzz of getting caught up in this mysterious story does not come without a cost. Glee may be killed by disappointment, and "He Named Her Amber" is a set up for disappointment. Häussler sets her audience up for a fall and as much as I adore the installation, as much as it has been some of the most interesting art I've seen in years, and as much as I enjoyed being tricked, I am not certain that it is dignified, respectful or right. I am not certain that this glorified prank is not, in fact, unjustifiably cruel.

In spite of all my reservations, I'd give "He Named Her Amber'" a big high-five if it had hands. The craftsmanship is exquisite, the story is captivating, and I highly recommend taking a tour as a piece of truly excellent site-specific theatre.

The exhibit is slated to be open until April 26, 2010.

Comments

• December 16, 2009, MikiU writes: Thank you, I enjoyed your article! I must declare my immediate bias and obvious subjectivity being one of the narrators that Iris trained (created more like it). Beautifully clever and sensitive analysis of the installation I do disagree though when you say that Iris "sets up the audience for a fall" ... As I see it, the audience is part of the piece, they play their own role and, it is never the intent to deceive in the long run, just to challenge and the audience reactions: from boliing outrage to sublime bliss is part of the piece too.

My name is Dani Crosby. I am a graduate of the Sheridan BAA Illustration program and am currently based in Oshawa Ontario. I put my personality, emotions, and twisted sense of humor directly into my work to create strong visual messages that words alone cannot convey. Through my work I love to make people from all walks of life think, and smile, and understand.

Visual communication touches people, crosses barriers and brings us together. I believe visual art is powerful enough to change anything from a person's perception of a brand to a person's perception of the world. I enjoy the building process behind each illustration, communicating with clients, listening to and fulfilling their visual communication needs. This is my passion.

I am grateful to work with clients who have challenged me to create a wide variety of illustrations for use in the production of: t-shirts, booklets, posters, buttons, magnets, cards, package art, the web, concepts for toys, 3-D sculpture work, logos, album art and editorial.  I enjoy creating my own products, participating in group and solo shows, and have also instructed art classes privately and through the local college and galleries.  I love it all, the people I meet, the things I experience, and cannot wait to see where this line of work takes me next.

For more of Dani's work, visit our Spotlight Gallery.

What drew you to art in the first place?

Escaping from society.

Escaping from society?

Ahhh, I think so, yeah.

So why did you decide to broadcast it?

Because I got sick of escaping from society and being an introvert so I needed a way to interact with people again. I did a cycle where I became a monk, and then I got tired of being a monk and now I need to express myself in public. In a healthy way.

How did the treadmill come in?

That happened in '05. I just sort of brought that in and I sort of saw it visually as an interesting idea and then developed it as such. It came in as a visual, but also sort of an accident of sorts. It was an experiment. I experimented with it in my studio, making paintings without broadcasting it. I likened it to being outside in the public painting landscapes, because I paint landscapes outside anyways. What I like about the treadmill, as I answer the question and move on to another answer, what I like about it is how it gets you into the painting process really fast. Your endorphins and breathing get going. There’s a hurried aspect to your application of the paint, and a lot of people when they start off painting, they’re so careful and they’re so slow and deliberate and with this you just can’t do that. You’re forced to go for it and just throw everything down.

Would you say it’s just a good technique for an artist to experiment? Perhaps not just with a treadmill but the exercise of multitasking?

Yeah, maybe it’s a far-fetched idea, and maybe it’s just silly for anyone to even, y’know, try, but at the same time we all have these issues of having to feel like we’re doing everything and like we all have these issues, sometimes we feel like we have our heads cut off like a chicken running around... with blood squirting out. So, in that sense, I’m showing that it’s okay to be in that position where you’re running around, crazy, doing it all, and not necessarily doing it great or well, but you’re persevering. And ironically, at what point of embracing failure are you not failing anymore? It’s a valid point, and I’m starting to think about it more. Mostly because now, it’s starting to become successful.

So what does it mean to embrace failure?

Well look, the other day, I’m in Brooklyn, I did a performance and I didn’t “fall” off the treadmill but as I got off the treadmill I tripped over something else, like an amplifier namely. I didn’t know I injured myself, and I continued on with the program. Then the next day I felt like shit, I realized I bruised or did something to my rib, I got a fucked up rib right now. Shit happens! Stuff happens and you just gotta keep going! It’s a failure right? Well make adjustments and keep on going. That’s what I’m doing right now. I’m havin’ a beer. That helps. As long as I can still do it, I’m gonna do it. Maybe a doctor would say, “Y’know you probably shouldn’t be doing it.” But, well, I did slow the treadmill down, I hadn’t been running as fast.

I don’t think anyone’s going to hang you up on that one.

No, and in the process of doing it I’m not in any pain FROM doing it.  So I feel relatively safe. But if there was a position where I was doing it and I was feeling pain, well at some point you gotta be reasonable.

You emphasized safety up there.

Yeah I know! It’s a big deal for me because I’ve been doing this long enough to know that it is dangerous, what I’m doing. To be honest it’s not good to be drinking beer and stuff on the treadmill. Not safe at all. But again, I definitely don’t do it when I’m drunk.

When you were on cable access and even up on Stickam, anonymous strangers seem very hostile and angry. Why do you think the stranger is so obnoxious?

Well because they can hide behind their phone. Wherever they are. They are usually clever enough to have an undisclosed call. They can hide in their house, in the safety of their homes without saying who they are. I liken it to the idea that everyone has a little bit of Tourette's, on their part. I still think that all of us, we all have variances of these mental illnesses in our brains. Some of us have obviously way too much, it prevents them from doing anything. We all have moments. And so they hide, this is like an escape valve for them, to do that kind of stuff. It’s juvenile, I suppose, maybe that’s all it is. Probably is.

Probably is.

Yeah it probably is. Really, that’s probably all it is. But I just found it more fun to imagine they all just have Tourette’s, just laying it out. I felt good about that for some reason. I’m not an expert about that stuff. I shouldn’t actually say that.

What would you suggest to an artist that is “stuck”?

Try a new experiment. If they are really stuck, or wasting a lot of time on one project, just stop it maybe. Maybe just take a break. Take a break! There are so many variations you can do. It really depends on all the possibilities. Stop, take a break, take a walk around the block, take a vacation. Or, on the other hand, just jump in there and screw it up. Throw a wrench into the system and clog it, get it messed up, fuck it up, delete everything, throw paint on top of it. Times ten it, I like to say, whatever you were going to do?  Make it even more outlandish. Times ten it.

Comments

• November 16, 2009, Patrick Grant writes: This is easily the greatest interview ever published.
• November 16, 2009, Ted Killin writes: Hilarious, straightforward guy to be sure.

Snow first gained notoriety outside of the New York graffiti scene when his photography began to appear in the pages of Vice magazine. Alongside the work of Ryan McGinley and Jason Nocito, and in the context of the jam-pack photo spreads of the ‘Vice Pictures’, Dash’s work fits seamlessly into the garbage dump of cast away culture. In Vice Vol.8, No.10 many of the photos found in Polaroids make their first appearance. The images are shrunk down and lined up in order fill an entire page with debauchery; a buffet of naughty nighttime memories served up for our viewing pleasure.

Courtesy of Vice Magazine

Ryan Bigge in his work Hiding in Delight: Transgression, Irony And the Edge of Vice summarizes the effect of the photo spreads found in ‘Vice Pictures’. Bigge sees spreads by Nocito and Snow as easily digested and easily disposed of ‘anti-photos’¹. Rather than polished, arty images which seek out a careful look, photo-spreads of work by Nocito and Snow can be quickly consumed en masse as if they were some kind of perverse eye candy².

Bigge might be too quick to imply that Snow’s work can be viewed as casually as Nocito’s. Nocito’s photos are often less shocking than Snow’s (an image of some guy taking home a fake dear after a night of drinking rather than a punk covered in gore or piles of coke and money). But continuity exists amongst the photos of both artists in the context of Vice magazine: a flippancy pervades them all when arranged so casually and in such abundance. This flippancy is almost entirely absent in Polaroids.

Snow decided that two pages of Polaroids should be dedicated to each shot. On one page you’ll find a scale reproduction of the polaroid centered on a matte black backing. The second page is filled to the edge by a close-up of the photo on the opposing page. Rather than relying on the impact of a chaotic collage, Snow thought that each polaroid should stand alone. Maybe there just aren’t enough good Snow polaroids to make a book of Vice-style spreads. On the other hand, I find a more generous reading to be appropriate to the new context in which we find Snow’s early works.

Courtesy of Peres Projects | Berlin | Los Angeles

First of all, I believe that Snow’s photos deserve to be considered as works in their own right.  The Polaroids have not been done wrong by Vice’s photo editors and designers, but Snow has done well to help differentiate his work from every other this-is-me-drinking photo. Any web-junkie knows too well how polluted the net is with this-is-me-in-a-cocktail-dress and this-is-me-drunk photos. They’re a genre in their own right! Any facebooker with more than a couple hundred photos is sure to have countless duplicate photos of bleached-white smiles and frenemies in their ‘photos of me’. In many ways Snow’s work is proto-The Cobra Snake etc. But rest assured, I will nail down the distinction between Snow and dslr-wilding photo-bloggers without setting up a pissing contest for who is the most reckless partier or, worse, most ‘authentic’ badass.

Many critics of Snow’s focus on an autobiographical reading of the polaroids. Many of his friends and other art world aficionados have stressed the authenticity of Snow’s escapades³. Others have found an echo of troubled times in the anarchistic images⁴. I have no way of relating to these claims, no desire to romanticize Snow’s reckless behavior, and no inclination to explain away his photos as symptoms of degenerate times. Instead, by focusing on the intimacy lent these works in Polaroids, I’ll look for a more private reading of Snow’s work, one that leads to an understanding of the qualities that activate the sadness evident in his photos.

The vapid party animal attitude that pervades so many blogs and profile pics is rarely present in Snow’s polaroids. His choice of medium lends itself to dodging the glossy finish that saps the life from all party photos. The grainy, white-yellow light of the built-in flash seems welcome in these polaroids; lending quietude to even the most boisterous scenes. For example, featured in Polaroids are several renditions of the ‘hamster party’: a party taking place in a hotel room filled with ripped up newspapers and phone books that ends in gratuitous levels of intoxication.

All three ‘hamster party’ scenes are completely childish grown-up slumber parties: three sleepy pairs of toes poking out from under the nest, a game of ‘doctor’ that has gotten way out of hand, and the aftermath of a pillow fight. In two of the three photos the pinks and yellows take on a warm and welcoming glow in the fuzzy yellows of the camera flash. There is nothing cuddly about the threesome, however. It is the warm softness of this flash that can bring sadness to the shower of down in the pillow fight scene, and which adds pity to absent minded caress in the orgy scene. The low resolution also instills a tangible sense of the numbed and gritty headspace to which our three sleepers will awake.

The photo of the Shell logo that reads ‘Hell’ has one obvious connection to the sorrow I’m speaking to: the reference to urban malaise in this work that at first seems a bit heavy handed. But this reading does not account for the sense of the ‘you should have been there’ that nags me when I consider this image. Snow was just in the right place at the right time. It’s just too haphazard. The transiency of this chance meeting with corporate decay lends another layer of complexity to this photo. A layer that adds sadness linked to a chronic sense of doubt I feel when seeing these works.

Courtesy of Peres Projects | Berlin | Los Angeles

It is when I doubt the characters in Snow’s photos, when I distrust them and the other visions provided in these works, that I find the source of the pity I see in them. That the feeling of pity is not patronizing is what makes it beautiful. In the ‘hamster party’ series any tendency for condescension is made tender by the bashful light; the tranquility it inspires is filled with an intense sadness for anyone touched by the same effect of the blurred and softened shapes. In order to see the sadness in the Hell station, the viewer must move past the surface fuck-you to corporate America, and recognize the implicit hope for a lost American dream.

I will compare Snow’s Hell station to a series of photos dedicated to gas stations in order to help explain where the pathos lies in Snow’s photo. Ed Ruscha documented twenty-six gas stations along Rout 66 between LA and Oklahoma in his artist book Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Ruscha does not mince words: the book consists of twenty-six pictures of gasoline stations. Ruscha’s series is a clinical catalogue, a leveled-out version of the right of passage romanticized by Kerouac, Kesey and Cassady⁵. In Ruscha’s work a disconnect between the individual and a liberal ideal is calmly laid out through a documentation of the flat, impersonal landscape in which people must enact that idealized freedom⁶. There is a satisfying, levelheaded approach taken by Ruscha in Twentysix Gasoline Stations. The novelty of Ruscha’s deadpan design captures perfectly the quaint sense of independence that he parodies with his homage to the flattening of culture. His cleverness mimics the American spirit of ingenuity and independence that he daintily derides in his series.

Courtesy of Peres Projects | Berlin | Los Angeles

Snow, in contrast to Ruscha, only finds a voice because of a series of random occurrences: the light in the ‘S’ goes out, one goes on in Snow’s head, and there you have it!  As Thomas Micchelli notes: “Snow took the pictures and the art just happened”⁷.  What’s disconcerting about Micchelli’s observation is not that Snow isn’t trying hard enough.  What is troubling is that I am unable to perceive the coincidence that Snow has captured as some sort of epiphany.  Beyond the stunning colours (the operating room metallic green, traffic light red, and a flattening black) there is only a haphazard contention.  In this case, rather than being found in some quality of the photo, the pathos lies in the randomness with which the polemics of this photo are realized.

Associations of oil with the end of the world, or of car culture with urban sprawl nightmares, are not the source of the sorrow I find in this work.  The surface message of the Hell Station is just too neat and tidy.  Snow has captured the notion that the heaven of Chevys and cheep gas has turned into a Hell on earth in a way that is too simplistic and random to be taken seriously.  That it is impossible for me to accept such a crisply reified notion in the form that Snow has provided points to the chronic doubt I spoke of earlier.  Snow envisions a world where any insight that I might happen upon could be just as random and limited in scope as a snapshot taken from the window of a moving car.  Seen in this light, the invasiveness of the night and the imposing colours of the station’s lights mock those who believe that such crystallizing moments could ever simply reveal themselves in the darkness.

I have claimed that I would leave the biographical out of this review. However, it could be argued that my insight into these images could only have come after the death of their author. I would agree, in part. Snow’s death may add an element of loss to my understanding of these works that wouldn’t be apparent to a viewer imagining the living artist acting out these images elsewhere. When he was alive there may have been a more palpable sense of Snow’s presence in these works. But now, especially for an outsider, the pathos found in the low-tech feel and chancy attitude of these works may have become more pronounced. Despite the element of the biographical that may have found it’s way into my writing, I think that I have managed to avoid any appeals to Dash’s persona in my efforts to bring extra dimensions to these works.

Internet Debut | Courtesy of Peres Projects | Berlin | Los Angeles

My efforts have surely been assisted by the thoughtful format of Polaroids. Without the access to Snow’s early work provided by this collection the polaroids might have remained in the obscurity of the Viceland archives, unedited and jumbled together. Or they could have been left online in the Saatchi gallery in their Digital C-Print format. A second glance at this work lends new life and new facets to the spectacle of random contemporary en masse artistic realism, creating an unexpected and undoubtedly memorable connection.

Polaroids was published by Peres Projects, Berlin | Los Angeles, in 2008.

Notes:

¹ Ryan Bigge, Hiding in Delight: Transgression, Irony and the Edge of Vice, (Toronto, ON, Ryerson University, 2007), 19.

² Bigge, Hiding in Delight, 120.

³ Ariel Levy, “Chasing Dash Snow”, New York Magazine, January 7, 2007, http://nymag.com/arts/art/profiles/26288/.

⁴ Alan Feuer and Allen Salkin, “Terrible End for an Enfant Terrible”, in The New York Time, July 24, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/nyregion/26dash.html.

⁵ David Hickey, “Edward Ruscha: Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962—photographer”, in ArtForum, January, 1997.

⁶ David Hopkins, “Blurring Boundaries: Pop-art, Fluxus, and their Effects”, in After Modern Art: 1945-2000, (Toronto, Oxford University Press, 2000), 118.

⁷ Thomas Micchelli, ‘Dash Snow’, review of Silence Is The Only True Friend That Shall Never Betray You, at the Rivington Arms September 7–October 15, 2006, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006/10/artseen/dash-snow.

Born in Belleville, Ontario, Nicholas Di Genova is a young up-and-coming sort now living and working in Toronto. Educated at OCAD, he pays homage to golden age comic books, dangles his roots in street art and boasts a solid list of gallery exhibitions both in Toronto and internationally. He has published three books of fantastic drawings, Wunderkammer No 1 being the most recent, and the most likely to fit inside your toaster. (Not that I'm suggesting you try anything of the sort—in truth, I urge you not to!) Wunderkammer No 1 is an itty-bitty, unassuming book measuring 5.75" x 7.75" and clocks in at a slim 24 pages long. Inside, its illustrious pages bear a concise selection of Di Genova's black and white drawings from 2008 and 2009. It is the first in an intended series of WunderKammer booklets.

Di Genova first garnered critical attention back in the early 2000s with his post-apocalyptic visions of mecha-animal hybrid armies duking it out over absurdly round, green hills and pink cartoon clouds, all masterfully drafted in ink and animation paint on mylar. These were couched within an absurd epic narrative of comic-book-grade evolution and land vs sea creature battles over the newly green Earth. It all very much sounds like a selection of ancient creation and apocalypse myths thrown in a blender with a hearty serving of Transformers memorabilia and an old Hard-Boiled Detective comic or two. Splendid, if simple-minded work.

Lately, Di Genova appears to have shucked the narrative to focus on increasingly organic hybrid creatures. His colour work, while not always eschewing the silly landscapes of earlier work, nonetheless situates the peculiar creatures against less obtrusive backgrounds. In black and white, Di Genova's monsters float against the white of the page; a fertile departure that opens up the conceptual environment and allows room for more complex ideas to play. While I do adore Di Genova's delicate handling of colour, WunderKammer No 1 is no weaker for lacking it. The very starkness of these line drawings is striking.

Now, when I called these drawings fantastic back there, I wasn't just being enthusiastic. I meant fantastic according to just about all the dictionary definitions of the word. The work takes imaginative leaps well away from the grounds of reality; they are bizarre, grotesque and their method of construction is a touch eccentric (but more on that aspect later). The fantastical, organic nature of Di Genova's WunderKammer creatures draws them into conversation with the realm of myth, where composite monsters, such as Chimaera (whose name has become the umbrella term for this class of creature) are legion. And this engagement with myth and fantasy mates very well with the book's title and format.

Wunderkammer is literally German for "wonder chamber." Around the sixteenth century, Wunderkammern came into their prime. They were rooms in which the rich and powerful stored and displayed all manner of curiosities, everything from items of antiquity to works of art, artifacts of far-off cultures, and interesting specimens—both real and fabricated—of "natural history." The Wunderkammer was, arguably, the batty grandparent of the modern day museum. Displays in Natural History museums of great arrays of butterflies or birds or insects all make a yearly pilgrimage to place flowers on the Wunderkammer's grave (or they would were they anthropomorphized). But the chamber of wonders dates back well before Darwin was a half-fleck in his mum's fallopian tubes. Back then, collectors arranged their stuffed specimens and skeletal fragments however they saw fit—as does Di Genova. His WunderKammer is a smorgasbord of taxonomical illustrations, ignoring the distinctions between plant and animal, and lining-up images according to very non-evolutionary logic. At the center of WunderKammer No 1 is a two-page spread of butterflies. 702 unique butterflies, all unnamed, many probably fictional, that fill the pages in a grid, the only detectable purpose to see how they look when thrown in all at once and so close together. It is a very Wunderkammer-like collection. On other pages, animals and plants are placed next to each other according to a logic of physical similarity. A frog's open mouth becomes a flower with an elaborate stamen on either side: a grid of frogs' heads and a grid of flowers. On one page, Di Genova places a bear's head next to the head of a bat, next to the head of an ape, all with mouths gaping wide. Next to each other in this way, their physiological similarities come to the fore, and they seem to be jokingly illustrating a very peculiar kind of bogus evolutionary chain—as if to prove that the black bear is the ancestor of the ape. On another page, the faces of various rodents are mixed in with bats and felines. Mixed in this way the predator-prey hierarchy is ignored; order, species, and genus are ignored; logic is ignored, and the viewer is left to muse on the mostly formal similarities and differences in these animal drawings.

All images © Nicholas Di Genova 2009

While I'm on the subject of evolution, let me return to the word Chimaera. This term refers not only to a kind of fantasy creature, but is also the term for (warning: over-simplified layman explanation!) a kind of genetic hybrid, where an organism has DNA from two or more different embryos or organisms. It is something of a playground for modern science. So far I've been discussing WunderKammer No 1 in historical terms, but consider the Chimaera in all its forms, and Di Genova's menagerie takes on sci-fi connotations that are both humorous and troubling.

Di Genova's style of drawing is a peculiar fusion of realism and geometry. His tools are dip pens and the occasional felt-tip. He draws diagrammatically, describing volume in terms of small planes that connect and oppose each other through direction in shading. Nearly all shading is accomplished via thin rectangular sections, filled with fine, cramped hatching. As if that weren't time-consuming and carpal-tunnel-inducing enough, he stipples. This here is what I call a myopic approach to drawing.

Minute detail is privileged over the sweep of the whole form. The result is an incorrigible flatness, and an awkward lilt that's under strict control, as if wearing a suit a few sizes too small. Details add up to a whole that looks weirdly flat, mechanical, diagrammatic, and more often than not, a little awkward. And I really like it. There is a slightly stoned naivete to these drawings that I find endearing, and the awkwardness is itself visually interesting.

My favourite pages concern birds. Di Genova's approach is well suited their sharp and brittle angularity. Also, they do not have teeth. If I am to have one small criticism, it is that his method for drawing teeth is far better suited to his colour images than to black and white. Sometimes it works well enough, but more often than not I find these teeth distracting. These teeth are too deliberate, they ignore too much the natural shape in favour of the idea of a tooth. Dogs and bears and bats with wide open mouths appear to have antacid tablets and uncoated vitamin supplements instead of teeth. Yes, I am nit-picking, but that is one aspect that consistently throws me off, and I expect better from someone with an otherwise astute formal sensitivity.

To tie-off my analysis, I have one final observation: there is a little bear with cloven hooves and a snare drum!

I look forward to future WunderKammer numbers.

You can see more of Nicholas Di Genova's work at his website and blog.

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WunderKammer No 1 is published by Koyama Press. You can pick up a copy for $8 plus shipping from Di Genova's site, or from Magic Pony. Or, if you're in Toronto, you can save yourself the cost of shipping and pick up a copy at the storefront location of Magic Pony at 694 Queen St. West.

She's inspired by strange people, old hats, cars from before 1930, terrible movies, weird mythology, and eye-searing colours. She has found herself in such varied situations as a brief internship at the National Post, illustrating children's travel guides for Paris and Amsterdam, doing an animation for the United Nations World Food Program, and redesigning brochures originally made by a colour-blind engineer.

She's starting to get really uncomfortable with referring to herself in the third person.

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Check out more of Kim's work in the Spotlight Gallery.

After graduating from Sheridan College's Illustration program in the spring of 2005, Justin experienced three years of success as a freelance artist before landing a dream position as a Graphic Designer for Rue Morgue Magazine where he has been gruesomely creating, along-side Art Director Gary Pullin, ever since.

His success in the illustration and graphic design fields have won him praise from such notable names as Photographer and Digital Artist Chad Michael Ward and Film Director and Owner of Rue Morgue Magazine Rodrigo GudiÒo.

Like all creatives, Justin turns to a number of sources for his inspiration. His love for vintage art, famous monsters, and (predominantly) the bizarre world we live in have all fueled his desire to put stylus to tablet and produce some of the most charming pin-ups to ghoulish nightmares your eyes and mind will ever behold.

As well as the standard visual stimulus Justin has also cited musically charged inspiration from such bands as Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails. This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his images, which blend organic shapes and forms with the industrial.

Check out the spotlight gallery for a selection of Justin Erickson's work.

"So why write about the AGO in the season of spook?" you ask; or, less politely, "What the hell kind of article are you trying to pull here?"

But read on, dear readers. Read on! Trust in me, for I was once like you — unaware of the stores of ghostly and ghastly artifacts hiding in plain sight in Toronto's largest art gallery.

It is a popular opinion that one of the main properties of art is to get the viewer to see things in new ways. "Things" is an appropriately vague word that refers not only to "things" of the everyday world around us, but also, of course, refers to works of art. It prefigures this that a significant chunk of the art experience is in what you bring to it and so, in the spirit of art and Experiment, with Halloween on the brain, I went gallivanting through the AGO to see what I could see.

To begin with, there is The Grange: first home of the AGO which presently appends the gallery like a Georgian-style polyp extending into the thusly-named Grange Park. Bequeathed to the Art Museum of Toronto (which later became the Art Gallery of Toronto, and finally, the AGO) in 1911 upon the death of Goldwin Smith, an Oxford Scholar who used The Grange as his personal home and library, this house has seen its fair share of history and supernatural occurrences. The Grange was restored and reconstructed with period and original furnishings in 1973, and now hosts tours for schoolchildren and other visitors. It is said that a shadowy figure roams the library at dusk. A cleaner working late after visiting hours observed the figure of a man standing at the top of a staircase, observing her (she never returned to The Grange). And in 1990, a tour guide reported seeing a gentleman in a yellow velvet coat walk out of one wall in the Conservatory, brush past her, and disappear through the opposite wall.

To my knowledge, no such eerie phenomena are associated with the new AGO building, but I like to think that the glass umbilical from The Grange to its descendant gallery allows the passage of a geist of some sort...

It's a matter of mood. To set the timbre of my visit: as I walked up Dundas street, I spied a tall dark figure looming in front of the Henry Moore sculpture at the foot of the entrance ramp. This resolved into a monumental Anubis, approaching three stories tall in moulded black and gold plastic. To promote the upcoming King Tut show (which arrives in Toronto in late November, and questions such as why this show is not coming to the ROM where it wouldn't otherwise pull resources away from possible exhibits regarding artists who didn't die thousands of years ago shan't be discussed here) the AGO has erected a crass replica of an ancient Egyptian figurine of the sort that usually disgusts me with its utter disregard for the harmonious formal beauty characteristic of ancient Egyptian art. I say "usually disgusts" because while the upwards of $20 price tag on this kind of figurine in gift shops simultaneously fills me with the urge to play "hot potato" and enables me to resist the urge lest I be forced to buy it and live with that glued-together junk on my shelf, but when it's planted on the street corner for a few weeks in twenty-times life-size scale, I'm happy. In fact, I'm positively delighted that come All Hallow Eve, the AGO will be guarded by a campy icon of the jackal-headed usher of the dead.

Inside, I work my way down from the fifth floor in search of all things eerie, ghostly, ghastly and horrible. At the top, anyone taking the stairs is greeted by Juan Munoz's "Painted Hands," an unsettling, child-sized sculpture of a grey man who sits on a chair high up on the wall and laughs at everyone below. Or perhaps he is screaming; the tense, smile-like rictus of his expression is ambiguous that way. Next to him, continually surrounded by unnerved gallery-goers like a dead worm surrounded by milling ants, is Evan Penny's "Stretch #1," a terrifying trompe l'oeil sculpture of the bust of a man, stretched along his vertical axis as if in Photoshop. This sculpture looks impossibly real and physically impossible at the same time, and gets you in the gut — I expect that all of you who have already seen this sculpture know exactly what I'm talking about.

Also worth a look up there are a few pieces from the "Beautiful Fictions" photography show (which is up until January 17th and has no additional entrance fee, worth a look for anyone interested in the history of photography). In an astute curatorial move, "Portrait (Nine Faces)" by Yasumasa Morimura (after Rembrandt's "The Anatomy Lesson") is set  opposite two Janieta Eyre prints, and they echo each other on matters of the clone, the mask, and the grotesque. In another room, Cindy Sherman's gross-out "Untitled #315" presents a rectangular photograph of grey-green corpse-like flesh, punctuated by a small red gash and a human eye about to pop out of its socket. Genevieve Cadieux's "Illusion #6" is a beautiful, life-size sculptural photograph so ghostly it aches to look at it. Last but far from least, there are three wet collodion glass plate negatives by Charles Nègre, housed in a glass box like delicate revenants from the Paris of 1855.

On the fourth floor, seek out "The Butcher Shop" by George Segal. This 1965 tableaux in plaster has menaced the AGO since long before the renovation, and terrified me in the first AGO visit that I remember.

Allow me now to skip a floor, in the name of word economy and leaving a little mystery for all of you who care to try this tour yourself. The spirit of Halloween has two flourishing colonies on the first floor: Shary Boyle's mythological ceramics and David Altme Jr.'s "Index."

Boyle's work adjoins the Christian art room and plays off of two Foggini bronzes, which dramatizes Greek and Roman myths. There are two ceramic sculptures by Boyle, "To Colonize the Moon" and "The Rejection of Pluto." These are beautiful, delicate and thoroughly creepy arrangements of blushing figures, mirrors, and the organic borders between life and death. The texts on the walls are interesting, but do not do justice to the complexities of Boyle's work. As an aside: these two pieces were commissioned by the AGO last year and in my view, evidence some of the very best qualities of the AGO, some of what the AGO should be.

"Index" brings me back to The Grange. Altme's piece cavorts at the back of the gallery, a bee-line from the front door of the AGO and directly in front of the short corridor joining the AGO to The Grange. On a key node in the traffic flow of the gallery, I'd be surprised if anyone who has visited the AGO has not yet seen this elaborate scene. This love-child of a museum display and a surrealist rift in space-time between our world and the universe of drive-in horror flicks happens to be a favourite of mine. This is how Halloween at the AGO goes: the werewolves from Ginger Snaps II contract a disease of alien crystalline growths that tear them limb from limb and transform the strings of their nerves into gold chains looped about an incomplete geological museum display by birds with human eyes and ropey coxcombs last seen rocking the national spelling bee. Meanwhile, chicken-headed men in suits look on and celebrate the victory of the crystalline life form.

In closing, a very arty (but not too arty) Halloween, to you all.

Source on The Grange:

Colombo, John Robert. Haunted Toronto. 1st. Toronto: Hounslow Press, 1996. 95-97.

Photography by Paul Walde

A lampshade covered with the caramelized bodies of a few dozen houseflies sends out amber-tinted rays to your left. Laura Kikauka has recreated one of those sticky, golden-brown ribbons that are used to catch pesky flies sans decomposing bugs. Instead of dried-out insect skeletons, images of doomed bugs are simply printed onto the faux bug-catching tape. A kitschy lamp is graced by the morbid shade.

This exhibition is filled with near biohazards and open flames—like any haunted house should be. Tony Matelli's piece adds the eerie glow of a faintly swaying flame to the show: a one hundred dollar bill, suspended in time, burns continuously in one of the back corners of the gallery. The piece achieves a graceful stasis at first glance—the muttering flame lends a stillness seemingly outside of time to the aluminum tin that it rests upon.  However, pretend money doesn’t make your heart leap like real money would if it were alight: God forbid.

The next piece I noticed sparked my interest most. Ooma Haru Mooma’s creepy bedside table seemed to garner such diverse reactions.  I was fascinated by the piece, and excited by the fact that Mooma had finally decided to show something after a long period of hiding her work from prying eyes. My fellow gallery-goer, Sarah, was all smiles after seeing Mooma’s work.  Her smirk went from ear to ear - quite a break from the solemn mood of the show.

Mooma’s piece comes in four parts: a bedside table, a lamp (a small brass affair with a green glass shade, like something you might see on the desk of a bank clerk in the 1930s), an envelope (complete with official Canada post markings, correct postage and address), and a pair of soiled white panties.  The lamp is installed with a black light so that the ejaculate adorning the tighty-whities glows toxic neon green.  I guess dirty laundry is funny.  Here’s what Ooma had to report about the reception her work recieved:

So have you heard about any reactions to your work at FCG?

Actually yes. Jason [Schiedel: the artistic director at Forest City Gallery] mentioned how a lot of women point & laugh at it.

Laugh?

I'm fine with it because it's supposed to be humorous. I suppose. They think it's funny, but have no idea it's based on true events.

Mooma’s work comes fully loaded with emotional baggage, but nothing that weighs her down in the slightest. Mooma bared all to me online. The flippancy with which see explains her work in the following interview has only come after a long period of thoughtful consideration about the online experiences that inspired the work:

So when I figured out what I was going to do, I had a meeting with Paul [Walde] & Jason [Schieldel] at his apartment. My proposal was seriously my stained panties in a kraft bubble wrap envelope and my verbal proposal, explaining the story behind the piece and what it symbolized.

Elaborate on what it symbolizes.

I am -- I was seriously running on a close deadline. My piece came together that day because i had to redo a few things. My piece is minimal, but every part is crucial, even though it took me a bit of time to get the things I needed. The panties had to be perfect, the stain, the glow, the lamp, the table, the light bulb. The envelope, especially.

Do they resemble things from the past exactly?

The banker's lamp represents the businessman I dealt with. The green lampshade depicts what he was; rich, powerful, he was all about the skrilla. It's not meant to be taken literally... I sent the panties, but I don't know what he did with them exactly.

How did he approach you for the panties?

He didn't approach me.

No?

We had this online exchange for a year. He brought up stained panties, even sent me a site where you could bid on panties Japanese women stained with their feces, urine, etc. and he'd laugh over the mugshots beside the auctions. So I half-jokingly asked if he wanted mine. He thought I was serious. And that's when he asked if I would be okay with it.

Did you want him to say yes to the idea?

Yes, I wanted to be part of his growing panty collection.

Do I detect sarcasm?

No. I wanted approval. I wanted to make him happy somehow. I was a naive 17 year old.

You said the envelope was really important to you. Why?

It was important to make it look legit, so I had to send them through the mail and get the authentic postage for the show. I had to do it a few times to get it right. Within the envelope, were the white cotton panties.. which represents me, a virgin, the envelope almost acts as my chastity; innocent, pure. The UV light was used to highlight the stain that the man left on me. It acts as a barrier, the envelope.

How does the envelope act as a barrier?

You can draw many conclusions that maybe I have repressed emotions, that maybe I'm hiding behind a screen, that I have a wall up, but inside are delicate instruments that long to be played with. Wow, that sounded kind of lame. For the benefit of others, I leave it to the viewer to interpret how they see it; there's really no right or wrong.

What is the stain left on you by this man? Isn't it interesting that the stain, the mark itself, was produced by your own body? Not the stain in the installation, but you were on the original panties.

The stain was the whole experience.. it was traumatic for me at the time.. this man stalked me, he hacked into my yahoo account, fucked with my online friends posing as me. I'm left with this memory. It did happen. I can't wipe it clean, but I can detach from it and observe it as an outsider and learn from it and draw inspiration. Almost becoming the sexual perpetrator... Owning it. But in a way, I am still attached to my past, because I wouldn't have done this piece if I wasn't, right?

Yeah that is interesting.

I did think that at first, but I came to realize these sort of people are drawn to me because I am like them in ways and I won't judge so harshly.

Do you feel the desire to keep exploring this other world of internet connections and strangers?

I haven't stepped foot into a chatroom in 2 or so years now, I think... I have no desire to meet people via online anymore, with the exception of random strangers adding me on Facebook and running into them on the streets of London, of course. I felt so fed up with never meeting people outside of the computer for the longest time my social life was online.

Does your art allow you to maintain a connection with your fetishistic side while keeping it real so to speak?

It's the only way I can churn out anything at the moment -- I have a lot of repressed sexual energy. I need to unleash. It's like masturbating for a lifetime and waiting to ejaculate onto the faces of bewildered looks, which is why I like to think of myself as a 'visual rapist.'

Following Mooma’s delicate instruments, I came across a fitting end to my experience of the show: Wyn Geleynse’s photo installation. This work comes just to the right of the entrance of Guided by Voices.  The faded pink polyester bedroom captured by Geleynse might as well be a morgue. Life seems to be a mere afterthought in this space where a cheap hotel room meets the guest bedroom from hell.  So still and achingly sterile is this place that I’d imagined the cheap carpet covering the floor probably had the itchy feel of fiberglass. Mounted in the photo is a small square that juts out slightly from the work. A red and starkly shadowed face, which looks on menacingly, is fixed in this little window or screen.  Lit from behind by a bulb that flickers like a fake candle, this presence doesn’t seem out of place in its bleak surroundings.  Seemingly at home, the image in the Orwellian TV is a face without a name: a trace of something distant only hinted at by the uninhabitable décor.

Geleynse’s work brought forward some common elements of the works in Guided by Voices.  Each work seemed lifeless and distant like Geleynse’s creepy bedroom.  But each work achieves the feeling that it is only a trace of another time in which some presence presided over these objects. Geleynse’s character remains vacant and shimmering like most TV images: not commanding any presence, but marking its absence. Laura Kikauka’s lamp, by bearing bodies compiled over a period of time, marks the passage of those moments, but leaves any notion of that other place and time empty.  Only the feeling found in the tinted light might suggest the resonance of that distant place. Tony Matelli’s work too, by capturing an instant, gestures toward some happening beyond the grasp of the viewer.  And finally, if it were not for Ooma’s outpour above, her work might find a visitor captured with the thought that a strange man once held the gaze that they now hold on such delicate instruments.

How did you get into comics?

Well, y'know, I used to love em as a kid and when I was twenty DC had a book called Big Talent Showcase and I went down to New York and I took some work in and they actually bought it, so my first story appeared... twenty five years ago? But then I didn't do anything for another twelve years just because I couldn't find a way to make a living out of it at that time. That's how I got in, but it took me forever to get back to it.

Why did you decide to both write and draw and do you prefer one over the other?

I much prefer drawing. It's a far more natural thing to me. Writing's a lot harder for me. I thought it was important because I had stories I wanted to tell. I also wanted to have as much control over the work as I could have. I knew from looking at the guys I had always admired that writing and drawing was the way to go.

So you just wanted something that guaranteed, for you anyways, some depth or power or meaning.

Well I think everybody's shooting for that. At my age I didn't want to get teamed up on things and take what I was given, I wanted to do my best.

Your projects are off the beaten path or at least outside of the comic book canonical, is it hard to get these projects underway?

Yeah, absolutely. The New Frontier took four years for DC to approve, movies get made in less time. It's hard.

Do you think these are the stories that will matter, the one's that are easier to access or at least don't get washed away?

I don't know if these stories are better but these stories do stand the test of time compared to the stuff that's in continuity today. There are wonderful stories being told all over the place but I want to make sure that ten years from now my work still seems relevant. So to me that means avoiding the continuity of the week.

Why did you decide to go with your nostalgically inspired style?

It's just the type of work I've always loved. I've always appreciated it, it's always been a good fit for me. I just never really thought of doing it any other way.

Why do you think superheroes hold such cultural potency?

Well it's a pretty typical answer but superheroes really are the modern day myths and legends. If we look at every great culture of the world's produced, they've all had their own superheroes. The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, they all had them, y'know, and now it's our turn. I think we've forgotten why they're there to be quite honest. They're there to give young people a rudimentary sense of what's right and wrong. It's hard for me to know what exactly they mean to me today anymore.

Do you like to think that the heroes in your story represent anything specific?

I like to think the heroes in my story represent the heroic ideal and the notion of people being the best people they can be.

Any tips for aspiring writers and artists?

Ignore print. Bring your own work on to the internet. Get it out there consistently and regularly. Believe me, if there's anything good about it they will find you.

You're not exactly the kind to captain a sinking ship then.

No! And why would anybody want to? It's an exciting time and it's an exciting new medium. It's an opportunity for everybody who's ever wanted to do this to just go out and do it. Think of the newsstand back in the forties, they were selling millions and millions of comics, that's what the internet is right now, just waiting for us. Everyone should very squarely focused on that, especially young people.

The ones who know how to use it.

Hahah, well said.

What got you into comics or at least into art?

Well, I sort of subscribed to the Arthur Miller school, quote, whatever level of creativity there is that comics and artwork chose me, I didn't choose them. It's literally like I had no choice in the matter. I always drew ever since I was a little kid, I realized that in kindergarten that not everyone could do it which sort of felt like a real nice way to separate myself from the crowd. Especially when homogeneity is the rule of the day y'know? I told my father when I was seven years old that I was gunna do comics, you know when you're that old you don't even know what you're going to do for breakfast the next day.  And now I'm doing comic books, I just love being in comics. It felt like it had everything I loved, the drawing, the story telling, visiting other worlds.

With your unique style, what is your working process? Where do you start and what are your steps?

Everyone is different, a lot of times I'll not to start out with too much of an idea, just start out with an abstract idea or an abstract shape of some kind, and then I go from there. Something will reveal itself. Other times when I have to decide or go into finding something that's already there, like a climax they want to see, it's definitely something I want to try to get across, I'll go into and adjust it, work with it back and forth, always trying to work itself, the artwork itself. The process is one thing, the artwork, the piece that I'm working on always seems to have a mind of it's own. It lets me know what it wants to be done, what medium it wants to be done in and it's really more of a negotiation that I end up having with the work than actually having any control over it. Anytime that I try to exert control I'll either feel like I kill it or go overboard with it or end up having a really argumentative battle with it, I know it sounds kind of odd that I'm actually feel like I'm arguing with the piece but will invariably kick my ass.

Well when I came over here you weren't exactly yelling at your canvas.

Well no no, I'll just usually end up yelling at myself. I always feel like it's my failure, not the artwork's, the artwork knows what it wants to be, I'm just not good enough to get it out there yet. I'm not finding the right vocabulary or the right approach yet. Like anything else it's an ongoing process.

While you weren't the only comic book artist at the time to be experimenting with the medium, you were one to more often make himself home in more traditional series, like Moon Knight, The New Mutants and Dazzler. Did you experience any hostility from bringing some different visions into those properties?

No, not from the editors. Some of the fans would fall aside, but we would always end up getting other fans to come in, it actually works pretty well overall. There was always this consistent turnover of people who didn't like what I was doing while there was other people who came on board because they did like what I was doing and all the editors that I worked with were really great. They were completely supportive, any of the upper echelon types, they would have a peculiar way of responding, some of them would feel like, "You can't do this" though by that point I'd be on to something else, OR what would happen is that I'd work on a piece or work on a series and they would say, "Oh! This is selling really well, but we need you to fix this, this and this" but that's antithetical, I mean if it ain't broke, why do I have to fix it? A lot of them just didn't understand, as if it was going away from their, quote, "style". At that point I usually feel like it's time for me to mosey. And it's not like anything I was ever trying to do, was me trying to be weird, it was just me trying to tell the story in the most interesting way possible. I did want to try a number of little things, because I sort of felt like a lot of the rules about what could be done in comics was arbitrary.

You've done a lot of great illustration work on the side, Venture Bros. DVDs, album art for the RZA, what's the difference you find between illustration and sequential art.

Fact is it mostly comes down to financial. Advertising tends to pay more for one single piece than a lot of other clients in some fields. There is a higher degree in freedom, in exploration of the work to be able to play with stuff and other times it's a little more constrictive. It really varies, it depends on the client that I'm working with. A lot of the time, some of them are very open to experimentation and whatnot. Another difference is exposure, one will get you a lot more attention than other jobs. Like doing something along the lines of a CD cover or a DVD cover, they're always fun.

For aspiring artists, would you suggest they come in with their own style or conform a little to the medium?

I think people will want something familiar while they will also want something different at the same times. It's a really odd mix on how they want people to work. Things are so different now, I'd imagine that what works is that they really kind of want to see more personal kinds of work, more than ever. Something that's kind of idiosyncratic. I would say that's probably a nice way to go. Kind of goes counter intuitive, because certainly some companies, they will want things that are familiar, things that they can own, capitalize on, a continuation of a certain look, like the Marvel style or a house style, or something else. But now, especially now, I think when something hits, say on someone's website, it can hit really big, get a lot of hits, go viral and all of a sudden this style that was essentially out of nowhere becomes a big deal. It's really quite wide open, I think, more than ever. For different points of view and different approaches.

Silk screening, also known as “serigraphy” or more accurately as “screen printing” (now that silk has been largely abandoned in favour of polyester) has been around since about 960 AD, during the Song Dynasty in China. We can all blame Andy Warhol for popularizing it in the '60s, and firmly entrenching one of it's many feet in the land of Fine Art (by Linnaeus's system, screen printing must be a subspecies of millipede). Meanwhile, screen printed t-shirts have long evaded Fine Art status, lurking in the dual realms of assembly-line commercialism and D.I.Y. underground subculture; but signs say that is swiftly changing, and after all, why not? The surrealists had a good go at wearable art, and the t-shirt is just the user-friendly thing to bring this art form down below the hyperinflated level of haute couture. Artists in Toronto are increasingly trading in wearable silk screened art, from the likes of Mike Parsons, the street-vending genius of Hey Apathy, to Wes Loats with his HRS clothing line at Sleeping Giant gallery, to name two.

This summer, I thought I'd give it a go myself. After all, if basic silk-screening kits can be got at just about any art supply store for a modest sum, it can't be too difficult. Not to mention, the space-saving wonders of downsizing from canvases to slips of fabric that can be folded and kept in drawers! And so, I took advantage of an opportunity to learn from some pros at the L.O.F.T. program at the Christie-Ossington Community Centre, a laid-back and interdisciplinary space where small-scale commercialism and die-hard artistry shake hands and jam together. There, in the weeks that followed, I discovered that in spite of expert teachers, I've blossomed into something of an expert in mucking things up.

One of the basics of art criticism is that process matters. In order to properly understand the impact that a given work's process has upon the piece's meaning, it's necessary to understand the basic mechanics of that work's medium. Sometimes, the best way to learn how to do a given thing is also to learn all the ways in which one should not go about it; and so, in the spirit of missed-connections columns everywhere, I present to you my own personal reverse-guide to screen printing.

The process seems simple. The essence of t-shirt screen printing (for those non-art-geeks out there) is that when you squish (via squeegee or roller) ink onto a t-shirt, in between squishing implement and shirt you place a piece of fine mesh that has been deliberately clogged-up in a pattern of your choice, such that when you mash the ink onto the screen, the clogged areas keep the ink from reaching fabric, and colour only squishes through where you want it to. There are several ways in which to artfully clog a screen, but the one I currently specialize in botching involves a photo-emulsion. This emulsion is a light-sensitive goop resembling melted Skippy peanut butter and smelling much like silly putty. It congeals and solidifies into dark purple plastic when exposed to light for enough time. To use this method, you transfer (photocopy, print or draw) your design onto acetate, the blacked-out areas being those you wish to print with ink in the home stretch. You then place the acetate in between an emulsion-coated screen and a light-source (usually a light box of some sort, instructions for which may be easily obtained via google) weight it all flat, and wait for just long enough for the light-exposed emulsion to have solidified, while the emulsion behind the blacked areas of the acetate are still shielded from the light, soft and water-soluble. These soft areas on the screen will then wash out when hosed-down with water, thus making way for ink to be successfully, repeatedly mashed through the screen when you go to print your masterpiece.

That is screen printing for t-shirts. The rest is niggling details. Yes, it seems simple enough. Naturally the most high-art and skillful silk screening may be difficult, but otherwise just about anyone can have a go at a decent t-shirt print. It's just image onto acetate, acetate onto screen, screen on shirt and thus, image onto shirt. That makes for all of three transfer points at which to make a mess of things! So few the opportunities for disaster! But I have since learned...

For the mishap-prone, silk screening is one of the most creative ways to play a solitaire version of pictorial broken-telephone. As a mishap-prone member of the human race, when I've limped back from blazing a trail, covered in burrs and hopefully not having traded any toes for a shiny new bear trap, I consider it my duty to tell the world exactly how to avoid retracing my steps. In this combined spirit of Jacques Cartier and the three stooges, I hereby provide for your amusement and illumination, a guide in six simple steps to going about do-it-yourself t-shirt silk screening in entirely the wrong way. Try this at home if you want to make an expansive mess.

Step 1. Think in the moment.

Don't look ahead. If your design is to turn out badly, it's easy and effective to plant the seeds of disaster well in advance through pure and innocent carelessness. For instance, chose/design an image with an abundance of fine detailing. Super-thin lines, especially when close together are almost certain to clog with inconsistency and artlessness. That is, if the emulsion doesn't make a mess even earlier by melting over the lines at inconvenient and arbitrary junctures. Also, pay no attention to whether the t-shirt fabric you favour is light or dark coloured. After all, some images look smashing when printed in reverse values (and some don't).

Step 2. Small prints are for losers.

When you transfer your image, scale it to your wildest dreams. Four or five letter-sized sheets of acetate look fantastic when spread out on the floor; and think of how awesome it'll be on an XXL!

Step 3. Pay no attention to the smudges and the blurs.

Weird printer lines on the acetate? Think nothing of it. There's nothing quite like not knowing if the image is refusing to wash out because of muck on the acetate or because of some other mysterious malady. It may not look like much, but you can be sure it'll give you hell down the line. Now, speaking of mysteries...

Step 4. Leave your unexposed screens just a switch-flick away from 100 watt glory.

Wrap them in black plastic, but not well. Keep your emulsified screens somewhere out of mind, but not out of reach, somewhere a careless roommate can stumble in and flick an innocuous switch to bathe your screens in the surprise of warm incandescent rays, only to figure out this is just the broom closet and leave things as they were (mostly). The best part is fighting off that niggling idea that maybe this screen looks rather darker than it ought to, then coming to the slow realization while Step 5 scrubs on and on and on.

Step 5. Remember, scale doesn't matter.

For the dedicated D.I.Y.-ers, and those with shallow pockets, it's best to build your own screens. You can do this with just about any picture frame or canvas stretcher and a strip of screen. Alternately, you may purchase ready-made screens from any print or art store. Either way they come in a variety of sizes, and the important note for step five is: pay no attention to whether or not your frame will fit inside your rinsing sink. When it comes to rinsing out the unexposed emulsion, you're only having fun when you can't fit more than a corner at a time into the sink, when you're wetter than an eight year-old allowed to run through the sprinkler what with all the spray bouncing off your de-emulsifying screen and arcing to the floor where there is now a good half-inch of water sloshing hither and thither...

Step 6. Your ink only dries when you watch it.

Now that your screen is more or less rinsed, and the spaces through which you wish to print ink are clear (well, clear enough you hope) it is time to eschew any test-runs and print out the real thing. Now is the time to take all the time in the world. The longer you agonize over each print and allow the ink on the screen to dry, the more often it will clog with ink, and the more time you'll be able to spend back at Step 5.

Finally, oscillate between Steps 5 and 6 until the screen is hopelessly clogged or you run out of surfaces on which to print.

This guide is not comprehensive and it may very well be that you can go through all these mangled steps and end up with some spiffy t-shirts, but I'd like to think that I've set all you klutz-challenged folks out there on the right wrong track. I'm sure you can improvise your own mistakes from here!

Out of the many ways to measure a great artist, there are two that work together in a pushmi-pullyu tug-of-war on the artist's process. These are: 1) their technical mastery of the medium; and 2) their aesthetic and intellectual use of mishaps and mistakes that, when used by any lesser artist, are indicators of mere carelessness and incompetence. In spite of the supposed ease and mechanical efficiency of screen printing, there are so many little things that can and do go wrong (even for those far more skilled than I) that silk screen presents a fertile ground for these two forces to engage in dynamics that are subtle, tactile and immediate. The quirks to the process and a given artist's strategy for dealing with these quirks bring an irrepressible human element to the fore. Should an artist choose to fully mechanize and automate his/her process, that decision says much for the ideas behind the work.

Even excluding those flukes unique to D.I.Y. equipment, there are a great many surprise junctures at which the artist must exercise creative control, a great many accidents that strike at the wary and unwary alike, and all demand immediate attention and creative remedy. This supposedly commercial and repetitious art form no longer seems so cold and mechanical to me. Talk of Andy Warhol "distancing the artist's hand" starts to sound a bit poorly thought-out.

Every smudge, every misalignment, every little inconsistency from one print to the next, all speak of that artist's actions – and to top it off, he lined-up his prints in grids for easy “fluke” comparison! All signs point to the active uninterruptible creativity of production, all signs point to the work of an artist's hand. Now I know Warhol may be getting on in age. His name, like the Mona Lisa's rather tired smile, may be a bit creased and crumpled at the corners from being passed around so promiscuously, but while there are a great many brilliant young artists in Toronto, in Canada and around the world working in screen, I must say there is still something to the ironic quirk of calling an artist's studio "the Factory" that just can't be beat.

I was born in Cayuga, a small town in southern Ontario. I am currently completing a Bachelor of Arts in Art and Art History at the University of Toronto Mississauga and a Diploma in Studio Art from Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning.

When I came to the Art and Art History program I was (like many first year art students) mainly interested in drawing and painting, but that quickly changed as I began to realize how much potential there is in so many other mediums. Currently my heart is set on audio art and installation. That may change in a few months.

My work has not been concerned with one particular subject, but is more a manifestation of my need to understand and connect with the world around me. Every work stems from a passionate interest in a particular subject and expands from there.

Living in Mississauga for school I have been interested in the dynamics of the city and the people within it. Smithissauga (2008-09) is a project that involved the documentation and contacting of every person with the last name “Smith” listed in the Mississauga phonebook. This project included maps, video, mail art, photography and audio tracks. The culmination of a year of research was installed in a U-haul moving van. My interest in this subject came from a need to interact and connect with the people in my community. I felt disconnected to the area, having only formed connections within the university, and was determined that if I took the time to know a little about the people around me perhaps I may come to value this area and my time within it a little more.

What I know about you (2009) is an ongoing collection of information I learned from strangers through conversation. Parts have been obtained while waiting in line, or on public transit. Others are encounters with people I have once had a connection to but those connections have since become lost. Currently it is in text form on a blog (http://onlywhatyoutellme.blogspot.com/), however I am working on a couple of installation possibilities for this information.

Now my concern has transferred to the anxiety that is already building about the life after university that will begin within 8 months.

This was the motivation for a current spandex project that involved building a shelter in the forest surrounding Sheridan College. It was an opportunity to get outside as well as allowing others the same pleasure as they scaled through the underbrush to get to the structure.

I am interested in testing my own capabilities, another aspect that is reoccurring in the ideas that I try to develop. I believe that if a concept or idea makes me nervous it is worth investigating and often it is an indicator of something powerful. In my silkscreen 4 to 17 (2008) I was interested in layering, the predominant characteristic of the silk screening process. I then created one image through 17 layers of figures in photographs that were taken from the time I was born to the age of four. It was at the age of four that major changes occurred in my family dynamic and the memories that I have from before that time are simply a muddled combination of photographs, stories and my own imagination.

Horror piece (2008) tests my own intense fear of horror films. I placed the video camera on top of the television, recording myself as I sat in the dark watching The Ring.

All in all I am doing whatever I feel passionate about, exploring what I need or want to explore in an effort to make sense of my world and understand myself a little more. For now I am happy to continue to learn, experiment and occasionally fail at what I love to do.

I got started doing the things I do two years ago when I thought trying to focus on my creative side would be a good project. As a programmer by trade I don't usually come into many situations that allow for creativity but I've always loved doodling in the margins of notebooks. I have an extremely active and vivid imagination so there's a lot in terms of resources up there. What really gave me a push was a gift my wife gave me. It was a pair of felt robots mounted on paper and hung with ribbon and I just loved it so much that I wanted to turn some of the images swirling around in my head into something physical.

I started really working on my drawing skills. I'm all self taught mostly from books and getting feedback from those vastly better than myself online and I've made considerable progress.

My work is mostly collages. Collages of junk and miscellanea made up my robots and collages of paper and ink to make more traditional visual art. Those are the two areas I excel most in but I'm still feeling my way around the creative world. I got a beautiful case of pastels as a wedding gift and I'm slowly teaching myself colour theory and how to draw with shades and shadows rather than lines. I'm even wetting my feet in photography!

It's the most indescribable feeling when you create something beautiful. To look outside of myself and see these images usually confined to my mind is just wonderful. It's an even better feeling when people take interest in your work. I've sold the bulk of the things I've made over the past two years on etsy.com, to friends and locally in Toronto. I don't do it for the money (but I'd love it if this could be my full time job), I just like passing that feeling of whimsy on to other people.

Taking time away from all the screens in your life is great. You can just sit back and let your mind go wild. The more you do it the better you feel.

I spend a lot of time playing video games. They've been my passion since I was very young. I'm very into the independent games community because they make games that really break the mould. I too am an amature games programmer with nothing really interesting to show just yet, but it's a hobby. I also enjoy building my personal website (www.imaginarythomas.com) and coding experiments that rarely get finished because I have so many projects on the go at the same time.

In the future I hope to start doing more elaborate work with my junk collages. Living the apartment live doesn't allow the full array of tools I'd like so I make due now with what I am allowed. I've also taken on a few custom commission jobs which I'd like very much to do more of.

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• November 4, 2009, An Interview with an Imaginary Friend | A Couple of Gamers writes: [...] to Steel Bananas, the catalyst that turned Girard’s vivid imagination loose upon the unsuspecting world of art [...]
• December 5, 2009, Today In Gameplay writes: [...] to Steel Bananas, the catalyst that turned Girard’s vivid imagination loose upon the unsuspecting world of art was [...]

STEEL BANANAS IS LOOKING TO HIRE A VISUAL ART + DESIGN COLUMNIST

THAT'S RIGHT!

If you possess:

• extensive knowledge of and/or experience with contemporary visual art and design
• awareness of the goings-on in the art scenes of Toronto/Montreal/Calgary/Vancouver and/or other major Canadian cities
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...then we want you to send a small writing portfolio to karends@steelbananas.com along with your resume and any other applicable or impressive information.

Compensation will be discussed during in-person interviews.

Direct all inquiries to the Editor-in-Chief.

Surrealism is ultimately indebted to Freud, which the group [the Surrealists] credits solely for enlightening people of the unconscious mind; Surrealists love psychoanalysis, which posits that the conscious mind does not merit the primary position that the layman allots it and that the lower levels of the psyche certainly require release. The surrealists further corroborate that a human cannot operate optimally without the recognition of this oft-uncharted mental area.

The recently $276-millionFrank Gehry renovated Art Gallery of Ontario is home to the new Surrealism exhibit. Photo/Matthew Filipowich

“The unique difference between immortal Greece and the contemporary epoch is Sigmund Freud,” says Salvador Dali, the most renowned surrealist, “who discovered that the human body, which was purely neo-platonian at the time of the Greeks, is today full of secret drawers that only psychoanalysis is capable of opening.”

Such Freudian praise is commonplace amongst the Surrealists, who acknowledged this in their Manifesto, but none of the group was as vocal as Dali himself. Similarly to the difficulty Freud has had uniting a single voice in regards to the expression and temperance of Michelangelo’s famous sculpture of Moses, the Surrealists believe that no one man can hold a entire answer to the meaning of a particular art piece, and to any discernment of a definite “meaning” whatsoever; not only is every opinion subjective, but each singular opinion can often be interpreted as a subjective conscious opinion, which as Freud purports, the conscious identity cannot possibly hold the only truth.

As this is my first visit to the newly renovated AGO I feel it is my banana duty to briefly neglect my surrealist needs and check out the new digs: after wandering past the illustrious curved stairways and the giant teepee adorning the entrance hall, I walk through the Thompson Collection of European Art, perusing the plethora of ceramics, gold work and still lifes scattered throughout these rooms, in addition to the multitude of various religious scenarios, including the gratuitously gruesome Massacre of Innocents by Peter Paul Ruben that shows a particularly brutal scene of violence from ye olde Bible.

After a full circuit of European impressionist art, I make a brief stop at the sculpture atrium filled mainly with the graphic mirror death, several birds, as well as the occasional creepy birdman. Yet I cannot hold off the insistent pull of Surrealism much longer, so I make my way to the first floor Dada exhibit first.

When I first enter this portion of the exhibit I’m met front and center by one Dr. Heinrich Stadelmann, a portrait painted by Otto Dix that uses bold colours and particularly unsettling eyes that pierce the surface image, alluding to the underlying tumult of the subconscious mind. As I walk through this first room I see the notoriety of Dali making an appearance with an excessively phallic chess set of his design that is comprised chiefly of fingers: the bishop is an index finger crafted with an obvious slit on the top and the rooks oddly take the shape of saltshakers. Quite a smattering of photography scatters throughout this preliminary room, including Phillipe Halsman’s "Dali Exploding," a two dimensional image of Dali with rivulets of skin separating from his forehead moving into floating drops. Josef Sudek is also featured, his "Surrealist Composition" consists of a heavily shaded photograph of the whorls of a shell sitting on a vague object in the dark, at the base of which an eyeball ominously stares up into the distance.

Heading into the next room I begin to explore the Dada arts, primarily those of Angelika Hoerle, commonly known as the "Comet of Cologne Dada." It is through the collective Cologne Dada that I witness the early development of a surreal movement, particularly in the adept Dada artist Max Ernst who serves as a central figure of both movements, featuring art in both sections of the gallery. However, my favourite Dadaist at the exhibit has to be Gerd Arntz, a printmaker whose images are often highly sexual, always politically charged assemblages of images representing different buildings that juxtapose the lifestyles of the high and low classes. Arntz comes across as a well-educated idealist that abandoned his cushy middle class lifestyle in favour of an artistic drive to convey the neglected struggle of the lower class. After Dada, I finally ascend the second floor to Surreal Things, an exhibit I have been slavering over since early May.

The first room contains a large Surrealist contribution to Romeo and Juliet for director Nijinska, decorated by many surrealists including Max Ernst, who was denounced by Andre Breton when he crashed the opening of a show, distributing pamphlets that stated: “ It is inadmissible that ideas should be at the behest of money.” Following the ballet, I am greeted by an assortment of furniture and surreal objects, a practice that Dali highly recommends. His contribution to the collection is the "Aphrodisiac Jacket," hanging multiple small plastic cups that attach to the front and arms of the dinner jacket with a miniature straw placed in each. When first revealed, Dali had supplied a bottle of crème de menthe so that the viewers could drink directly from the cups during the exhibit, inviting them to directly participate in the artwork. Marcel Duchamp adds his famous "Why not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy" to the collection, a birdcage that appears to be filled with sugar cubes that are in actuality pieces of marble filed down to the appropriate size, a piece that has Duchamp reveling in his deception of the viewer. The furniture takes the form of the Corset Chair from Leonor Fini, which explicitly explores a powerful masculine fetish, as well as the Table with Bird’s Legs, considered Meret Oppenheim’s ode to the bird Loplop, the alter ego to Max Ernst that he considered a literal extension of himself.

Further down the hall the exhibit has assembled a small room decorated with some of Dali’s furniture: the May West Lips Sofa and the Lobster Telephone reside in a room with rather eccentric wallpaper. Across the wall Apparition of a Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach, the first painting that makes use of Dali’s paranoiac-critical method, that creates multiple images, containing the image of a bowl of pears, the outline of a face, as well as a standing dog which I had never recognized before, made from the amalgamation of all the smaller individual images on the canvas. The development of techniques that assist the artist in drawing upon the ideas of the subconscious are very popular among the Surrealists; the technique of frottage was invented by Max Ernst when he rubbed a pencil against paper laid upon a piece of wood, using the accentuated points that appeared as the starting point of a fresh piece of art.

Following the small room, a small three-walled room shows images of the Beistegui apartment projected onto each surface, owned by Charles de Beistegui, an avid collector of surrealist arts and his many other various whims. The layout of the exhibit has allowed many wall projections, featuring Surrealist shorts "Le Sang d’un Poete" by Jean Cocteau and "La Daphne" by Jean Painlevé. However, the apartment is not greatly appealing, so I continue into the next room, the largest of the exhibition that contains the majority of the exhibit.

This large room contains perfumes of Surrealists, Surrealist advertisements based prominently on the art of Surrealist Rene Magritte and clippings from the Surrealist publication Minotaur. Some of Dali’s famous pieces of jewelry are also on display: the sexual Ruby Lips as well as the Starfish Broach, which has fully articulated limbs that can be arranged to the owner’s personal will; the owner of the broach used to attach it suggestively to her breast. Some provocative fashion is also on display, my favourite piece a collaboration of Elsa Schiaparelli with Salvador Dali resulting in the Shoe Hat, designed to create a phallus to placate the female castration complex; a man could wear this hat and double his masculinity in an instant! And although I obviously concentrate heavily on Dali, my favourite Surrealist by far, there are many other surreal artists on display, including a generous helping of Max Ernst, a very prominent figure throughout the Dada and Surreal movements that I had known relatively little about before the exhibit.

During the height of its popularity, through all available mediums, Surrealism attempts to follow the line of thought from the unconscious before it becomes yet another fleeting eruption, dissipating into the images and symbols that constantly overwhelm the conscious mind:

"The world needs more fantasy. Our civilization is too mechanical. We can make the fantastic real and then it is more real than that which actually exists."

Dali asserts that dreams, fantasy and whim all find validity in life, which is something I too deeply admire; surrealists attain nothing less than the very height of self-knowing. Call me a subjective sonofabitch if you must, but I’ll continue to eat surrealism up with a silver spoon with a Dali crutch for support. The man believed he could do anything with a healthy dose of Freud and Nietzsche and evolved into one of the most confident men in history, he had to be doing something right! The exhibit runs until August thirtieth so dive right into that subconscious and prepare for a barrage of repressed imagery!

With all of the happenings happening on the sidewalk, the event was pretty crowded and I’m sure that driving through Whyte today must have been even more treacherous than usual. I think I personally must have been nearly hit by at least six cars, but fortunately for everyone, I made it back to write this here thingy you’re reading right now. Somebody up there likes me.

Street closure or not, this year’s event appeared to be at least twice as big as last year with a wide gamut of artistic talent represented here from a bevy of genres and media. All of the requisite categories were filled, from the edgy, provocative and unique; to the kitschy and tasteless; to the angsty fourteen-year-old girls peddling their tragic emo masterworks. Yes indeed, Art Walk’s truly got something for everybody!  So, for everything interesting like Michael Germann’s Yellow and Black mixed-media scenes of modern life, there was something to the extent of those very dramatic realist paintings of forest wildlife in the snow that everyone’s grandparent’s always seem to have at least one of. Conversely, all of the colorful abstractions of Denise Lefebvre were matched by cheery paintings of flowers that might as well have had “You’re invited to Sally’s 8th Birthday!” scribbled next to them.

Indeed, the Whyte Avenue Art Walk was a bit of a mixed bag; oddly, however, I found that the vast majority of the artists that I did think interesting seemed to be located on the North side of the street with most of the adolescent girls holding their ground on the South. I wonder if the Art Walk organizers are aware of this, and if not, if they should be notified. Perhaps it’s a good thing, though next time I recommend putting up signs: WARNING, COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF ANGST ON THIS SIDE OF STREET.

Another plus was watching a great deal of artists actually working on the street, though, in keeping with the exaggerated polarities of the event, many of them squandered their opportunity by drawing caricatures of shirtless men. Overall it was an enjoyable afternoon, and I did see a lot of stuff that I did like, however, there was one thing about the Art Walk that struck me as being very unusual and profoundly tasteless: expensive paintings of celebrities.

At least three stalls I saw were selling paintings of celebrities for unusually high prices. I’m not sure what’s worse: a portrait of Heath Ledger, a portrait of Heath Ledger as the Joker or the prospect of someone actually buying a portrait of Heath Ledger as the Joker. Needless to say, I was utterly mystified, especially when it became very clear to me that aside from the subject matter, it was actually a pretty good painting. Later on a saw a guy who was selling a series of individual portraits of the cast of Pirates of the Caribbean and I’m just going to leave it at that.

Sarafin first showed the signs of a young artist after a concussion at the age of two, when she began drawing a series of anthropomorphic traffic light people. Growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she was often found sculpting with foam rubber and a glue gun, painting with acrylics and watercolour, and even making crude animated films with a borrowed video camera. She eventually moved to Toronto, where after spending five tedious years at the Etobicoke School of the Arts and deciding to forgo pursuing art in a post-secondary institution, she went to work as a propmaker for film and theatre.

Her webcomic, Asylum Squad, is a remake of a remake.  The first version was available in printed format under the small scale publisher 'Open Mind Comics' - the creator considers it a sort of rough draft... copies are still available out there, but it is very different from the current version. The second version was to be a graphic novel published by a reputable company, but in recent times was put to rest as anything more than a lesson in artistic development and discipline. The webcomic version (her latest) came out of two and a half years of psychic torment from the paranormal, wounded pride, neglect, homelessness, rape, long term hospitalization, overnight jail time, being stalked, and suffering from what some psychiatrists would call schizophrenia. Sarafin, however, does not like psychiatric labels, and instead describes her illness as psychosis partnered with a spiritual maladie. An optimist, Sarafin defeated depression after her life became so arduous and bleak that having hit rock bottom, she saw humour to it all, and learned to laugh at misery, and turn it around - she expects to make a full recovery. The first chapter, entitled "A Tale of Four Split Minds", rotates its cast as their stories individually unfold... each character's beliefs and experiences borrowing from those of the creator's life during bouts of psychotic illness.

The strip was started on the grounds of the Queen Street West psychiatric hospital as a means  for the creator to keep active creatively while working her way out of psychosis. This series is an attempt to describe to the saner populous, what life with psychosis feels like. Without a healthy mind, you cease to care about people with great minds if they don't also have great hearts. Great minds seem easier to find than great hearts in this city.

Check out our feature of Sarafin's work in the Gallery.

***

Sarafin's webcomic, 'Asylum Squad', can be found at http://asylumsquad.rampagenetwork.net - its temporary subdomain.  Rampage Network, its server, will in two months time be transferring the series to a private domain, to be announced.  Updates usually come at a rate of about once or twice a week.  You can reach Sarafin at: splitminds@gmail.com

Comments

• June 19, 2009, Sarafin writes: Hey Steel Bananas crew! Article looks great! The only thing I'm kicking myself over is that I made the autobio so dark sounding - I must have been moody that day! (Normally I'm cheerfully ambiguous.) Oh well! Thanks again! :-) -Sarafin

My first Luminato experience this year – or ever really as I was scarcely aware of the seminal arts fest until this year (my bad!) – was an installation from New York City-based artist Tony Oursler called Forty One – Five, a collection of three (though I only saw two because I couldn’t find the flippin’ Young Gallery) large multi-media pieces that were at once low-profile and difficult to ignore. Really, though, when I say "low-profile," I mean that two of them you wouldn’t see unless you actually went looking for them, which as per my understanding is not typical for displays of public art; but this is provocative, contemporary-interdisciplinary stuff we’re talking about here so you can go looking for it, son! On the other hand, the least discreet piece was placed in all of its frantic busyness right on Dundas Street in front of the AGO... I guess going off in all directions is what Luminato is all about.

When I say that they were difficult to ignore, this is because the pieces were gigantic, colorful and made a pretty ferocious racket. Essentially designed to look like transparent houses, these behemoths of glass, aluminum, electronics and household junk offer the viewer a look into the unseen fears, obsessions and compulsions of ordinary citizens and the simultaneous attraction and revulsion they display for their possessions and environments. Adorned with several televisions, Oursler, a man with an already formidable reputation for being extremely intense and shocking in his art, filmed a number of performers in continuous full-body shots alone in blank rooms, screaming paranoid epithets. Their actions within the barren soundstages are displayed on the screens in sharp juxtaposition to the cluttered spaces, suggesting a pointed alienation from their material surroundings, which in the case of the piece displayed in Grange Park, is filled with wall to wall junk. Furthermore, their fearful howling is cranked up to blissfully obnoxious levels through an elaborate sound system that utilizes each of its speakers to play the sound track in staggered time which makes for a chaotic cacophony of primal screaming and bouts of tragic self-loathing.

The result of this insanity is rather unsettling, but less so when you see the installation as much as when you think about it afterward. Oursler, who has completed installations in cities all over the globe and is noted for his unique blending of mediums and use of the human body in his work, here creates a collection that is viciously provocative, brutally sincere and psychologically and socially probing, the true power of which is not immediately clear. Forty One – Five is one of the more haunting features one would be likely to see at this year’s Luminato, a shockingly honest portrait of the secret life of everyone in their relation to their living spaces and it was just sitting there on the street naked for all to see.

Comments

• June 17, 2009, fruitlet | home of karen correia da silva writes: [...] Spy on your neighbors with Tony Oursler [...]

© Rodrigo Bravo

Arriving in Canada in 1996 to join with the rest of his family in London, Ontario, Rodrigo attended H.B. Beal secondary and self published a comic book series called "The Sublimes."

He studied and graduated from the Tra-digital Animation program at St Clair College and after some exploration and desert trekking in the Atacama valleys in 2005, landed a sweet job at Spin productions in Toronto, where he is now a lead designer.

© Rodrigo Bravo

While at Spin, Rodrigo has worked on feature films and a great variety of Broadcast Design projects for clients such as MuchMusic, Globe and Mail, Rona, TVO, Discovery channel and Home and Garden Television amongst many others. Rodrigo has done comic book work for the upcoming Beginner's Guide To Endings feature film, the 24 Hour Comic challenge (which was published along 10 others from a selection of 1200 participants world wide).

Also Rodrigo's feature/broadcast design with Spin Productions has been awarded with 2008's bronze BDA Award for Much Music's Holiday Wrap campaign. Rodrigo is currently working on Teletoon's upcoming show, Majority Rules.

Check out the gallery for Steel Bananas' showcase of Rodrigo Bravo's work.

© Nancy Situ

The exhibit started off with biographies of Yoko Ono and John Lennon on opposite walls, describing their roots and displaying childhood photos. The next room contained more photos, including a striking full-length portrait of Yoko, making her much more intimidating than her 5’4 stature suggests. There was also a looped video of one of my favourite performances by Yoko, “Cut Piece”, where audience members were requested to go on stage and cut away a piece of her clothing.

Just as the exhibit is somewhat a recreation of the original Bed-In event, many of the pieces within the exhibit were also recreations. Yoko Ono’s “Apple” (a green apple atop a Plexiglas podium), “Ceiling Painting” (a magnifying glass, the word ‘YES’, and a ladder), “Painting to Hammer A Nail In” (a white board with nails stuck in it), “Play It By Trust aka White Chess Set” (a chessboard with only white pieces) were all originally displayed at the Indica Gallery in London, 1966 and recreated for the Imagine exhibit.

© Nancy Situ

© Nancy Situ

The interactiveness of the exhibit was mostly embraced by museum-goers who were typically of the “shh!” and “don’t touch!’ variety. I saw visitors gently hammering in a nail or two in “Painting to Hammer A Nail In” and sheepishly climbing up the ladder to read “YES”. In another room, there was a blur of iPhones and digital cameras as people climbed into the Bed-In display, eager to preserve the moment. Near the end of the exhibit was a semi-circular set of bookshelves that contained everything from the philosophy of Lao Tzu to some outdated, more-than-a-little-racist copies of Tintin.

© Nancy Situ

Now, I know what one unnamed friend of mine would say to pieces like “Apple” and “Painting to Hammer A Nail In”. She would say “I could have done that”. This is actually my favourite complaint about avant-garde art because it’s not really a complaint at all, it’s sort of a strange combination of arrogance and self-disvaluement. “I could have done that” is an arrogant enough statement that suggests she is comfortable comparing herself to the great Yoko Ono yet is a complete defeatist because anything she is capable of doing can’t possibly be valuable enough to be shown in a gallery. So no, I’m not going to deny that there is nothing inherently remarkable about putting an apple on a pedestal. If you say “I could have done that”, I completely believe you. Now stop complaining and go out and do it. We’ll both be happier.

But back to the exhibit ... The most visually striking room by far was the one with little television boxes and a backdrop of “WAR IS OVER (if you want it)” posters.  I will admit that it was a little intimidating, even Orwellian at first. Compared to the other rooms, it was significantly dimmer and all those boxes just made me feel like the government was after me. Honestly, if the museum ever wanted to do a dystopian exhibit, all they would have to do is replace the peace conference videos with scenes from Equilibrium and the posters with “Four legs good, Two legs bad”.

© Nancy Situ

But no, it wasn’t a dystopian exhibit, it was a utopian exhibit. In fact, here is the Lennon/Oko declaration of Nutopia (which I can only assume is some delicious combination of Nutella and Utopia).

The Imagine exhibit will be displayed until June the 21st, 2009. Admission is FREE so if you find yourself in downtown Montreal, I highly encourage you to pay a visit. Otherwise, check out this virtual tour  MMFA set up.

© Nancy Situ

Sure, Batman, Ironman, Watch... Men may be out there making superheroes and graphic novels look cool to the masses, but if anything it’s just making it harder for the comics that inspire these social phenomena to live up to the cool quota. Well, maybe for most, not for artist/writer, Paul Pope. He makes cool look easy. His rich style, both blazing with the inspirations of Kirby’s foundations while spiraling into its own vibrant urban look has made Pope impossible to ignore over the years he’s risen. And not only does his visual style turn heads but subject matters and stories stand on their own as triumphs. Pope’s created his own sci-fi universe, one that while riddled with futuristic imagery still feels eerily familiar to contemporary culture. 100%, tales about a future strip club and Heavy Liquid should be required reading on any comic/sci-fi junkie. Pope is currently working on his most massive project yet, an epic titled Battling Boy, already picked up to become a film before it was even near completion. Two years ago we talked about Flash Gordon for five minutes resulting in a doodle of Ming the Merciless, this year I got an interview (and a photo because I am a dork.)

How did you get into comic books and working in comic art?

I've always read comics, since I was a kid. I was interested in drawing and fantasy, I was into film making and special effects, into music. Comics-- especially the stuff I read in Heavy Metal, which was at the time publishing a lot of great European comics. The material had lots of attitude and fantastic elements. Plus sex.

I studied studio arts-- drawing, painting, printmaking-- in school, with a strong secondary emphasis on history and Western/Near Eastern art history. So I could see some context for the fantasy worlds and I learned some useful processes. Later, when it became necessary to consider a career, I shied away from the gallery route and academics, preferring the craft-oriented skills required to be a professional cartoonist. I was turned off by what I saw of the gallery and academic worlds-- looked like a lot of kowtowing to the hegemony and building relationships on "who you know". Comics was attractive for those reasons among others.

No matter if it's in the future or on another planet, you revolve around a very familiar urban setting. What role does the city play in your stories?

I use a city as a metaphor for the realm of human action. Often, the stories I want to write deal with humans interacting with each other, wanting something from someone or trying to resist something another wants to put upon you. I see a city as a microcosm for society as a whole. Also, I love living in a city and so it's a natural environment for me to choose for a setting for fiction. "Write what you know," as they say.

If you could create a comic book with sound, would you?

I don't know. Meaning, a comic book which somehow has a sound element? I think I would tend to fall on the side of purism or tradition with this personally, although I wouldn't exclude the idea or dismiss it in others' hands. I like something Brian Azzarello said to me one time, which always stuck with me-- "Fuck with the form, not the format."

Where in the world did you come up with the idea for Gastro club stripping?

From a jaundiced view toward pornography, or maybe, the limits of pornography, and in a wider sense, the inherently cannibalistic nature of media. Overtime, it seems to me, media does desensitize people if you're not critical and sceptical of it. A lot of the more extreme forms of porn seem to touch on what Freud called the "fascination with abomination". I also predicted something I conceived of as "the Carcrash Channel", which would be a cable channel which broadcasts nothing but horrible car wrecks, interspersed with very subtle product placements and subliminal advertising. Cynically thinking of ways to appeal to the most prurient, puerile appetites. I couldn't have known then about Youtube, but it's essentially what you'll get if you type in "car crash". Hours and hours of horrible footage of just that, all framed by blinking banner ads for the latest feature film or some pop star's latest hit single. A million dollar idea I thought of long ago along the same lines is simulated snuff film. If somebody hasn't already done it, I'm sure somebody will.

You're currently underway with Battling Boy, which from what we've seen so far is not only a departure in subject but has also been slated to be a movie before even hitting shelves.

Well, we have a long way to go with the film, there are an incredible number of steps along the way. But it's looking very good so far and indeed, the book and film may well appear within 6 months to a year of each other.

Does the process change when you work on a project already knowing it is going to be adapted?

The short answer is, yes.

I wrote a 56 page story treatment, which is acting as the basis for both the book and the screenplay. I am not writing the screenplay but I am consulting on it. In the end, both mediums are inherently different. The book and film would to have the same spirit, but they will be different. It will be impossible to literally adapt the film form the graphic novel, because I am drawing it as the film production moves along. I am mostly interested in the story being adapted for film, in the language of film itself. I mean to suggest that so far as the film is concerned, I am primarily interested in seeing the story itself translated to film, rather than the graphic novel version of the story adapted for film. I think it's often a mistake to try to skin-graft one medium's strengths into another, you often expose many weaknesses. In the end, it's the graphic novel Battling Boy I will be mainly responsible. Film requires a team of literally hundreds of people, spread out all over the world, and the producers, the studio, the director, etc. all have their hand in it. And so, I would want primarily to see the team staying faithful to the source material, in this sense, in terms of the story. What comes of the book will be for me the purest expression of the story's ideas. But it's an undeniable fact that film reaches a much wider audience. So we're trying to find a way to bridge the two in a new way. I am working with a good team and so far, everyone is sharing my vision for what the story should be. We'll see what comes of it.

What advice do you have for any other aspiring artists?

I'd say, be generous to yourself and realize it takes a long time to get good. Be patient. Learn your process, and learn to have a process, whatever that might be. Study the lives and works of artists and other people you admire, try to figure out what it is about them that seems so great to you. Work your ass off and stay curious, stay critical. Try to find people who share your interests-- it helps having a sense of community. Stay away from people who drain your energy and stay away from heavy drugs. Find ways to relax and get calm so you can tap into the deeper resources of your inner life. Don't let anybody tell you you're wrong for wanting to do what you love. Try to honour your agreements and don't fuck people over.

© Jakub Tywoniuk

© Jakub Tywoniuk

Check out our Photo Gallery for more examples of Jakub's work.

How did you start working in comics?

I backed into comics. I did everything wrong. I literally left my portfolio at Marvel without any contact information, no name, no phone number, nothing. They wanted to get a hold of me, I got the job, I got the sword in the stone. From here I proceeded to do everything wrong. To the point where I had to leave the business after being in it for two years, going out to South Jersey to sell vacuum cleaners door to door and by the way I was really good at it. It was actually my wife who I had been dating for six months before she even knew I could draw, she had no idea I ever worked in comics and when she found out one day, I just came home and she just says, “I called Joe Orlando, go in and have a meeting with him.” I had blown myself away from DC viciously, I left on really fractious terms. So if it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t be standing here right now had she not made that phone call. Then I kind of learned my lesson and realized, you know, maybe when Gil Kane, Joe Orlando, Carmine Infantino, Alex Toth and Wally Wood are trying to teach you stuff, maybe you should listen.

You’ve worked on just about every kind of book imaginable, from space dramas to super teams to manga, what’s made you this jack of all trades?

I bore easy. No really I bore easy and nothing bores me more than myself. So eventually I have to reinvent myself or try to find a way to make it interesting or choose a project that’s diametrically opposed to what I did before. I don’t want to come from a humour book and move on to a humour book. I don’t want to do a science fiction book and move on to another science fiction book. Which is why I’ll do a horror book, I’ll do a super hero book, I’ll go on to do something like “I Luv Halloween” which is sick humour, it’s really just... Boredom! I wish I had a fancier answer about art or being devote to my craft but I just get tired of doing the same thing.

*The PA announces something unintelligible about some old actor*

Nobody cares!

So is this boredom the same reason you switch between working on art and writing?

Actually no, I broke in as an artist. I was eight years old when I wanted to be a comic book artist and then somewhere in the early eighties I had this epiphany that it’s a lot easier to write “Charge of the Light Brigade” than it is to draw, so I just started doing plotting and writing. I’m just beginning to pick up the pencil now for the first time in years. I like writing, I like the flow, I like being in control of the story. I mean even as just a penciller I was changing the story and arguing with the writers, so I think it’s better off this way.

How important is humour to character development?

Critical. When I hang out in the bar with some buddies, it’s not like it’s a wake. You goof around, you joke around, it’s an integral part of life. Even soldiers in combat develop a sort of macabre, morbid sense of humour. People always live in tragedy with humour, to me it’s just a part of life. Even Shakespeare had the fools in his play, there’s always comic relief. If comic books ever start taking themselves so seriously that there’s no room for humour, I’m going to move on.

You definitely have one of the sharper tongues in the industry, have you ever received much slack from the higher ups?

Yep. Not just what I write but sometimes I got a bad habit for answering questions. If someone asks me a question I answer it, even if it’s just “no comment”. Yeah, I’ve had some moments where some of the stuff I drew did not meet with the higher up’s approval but as long as it sells they’re willing to cut you a little bit of slack. You just have to be smart enough to realize that when they come and tell you, “Don’t ever do that again” that maybe you should never do that again.

The industry has changed immensely over the years and now as there’s more focus on comics by the media, by social culture and popularity what do you think has altered the most?

Comic books used to be the console for creativity. Wacky creativity. Outlandish creativity. There was no holds barred. Film and TV came calling, now there’s a lot of people doing comic books just for the purpose of turning it into a movie. You have hamstrung Hollywood, hamstrung TV and when you start pulling back on the creativity it’s going to hamstring comic books and eventually we’re not going to be that box of ideas. That’s what’s changed the most. You used to see people saying, “I want to be a comic book guy!” now they just want to use comic books as a springboard for a movie career or for a TV career. I’ve dealt with these people, stay away from them. I mean really! You’re better off in comics where you can hear your voice.

Speaking of looming shadows, is it hard working with continuity?

I don’t like continuity. I’m not a big fan of continuity, I think continuity hamstrings. However, with that said, I believe in consistency and I’ve had this argument millions of times before about them being the same thing. No they are not. Consistency means that Thor is Donald Blake, you know what his powers are, he’s not a redhead, you don’t go screwing with the basics of the book because it’s not your book, you are a caretaker of the book until the next guy comes along. Continuity says, “I’ve gotta figure out where Thor is at 12:40 on a Tuesday afternoon because in The Avengers he’s going to be on Mars.” And that kills me. So no, I am not a big fan of continuity, but I believe that consistency, in character, is important. If the character is going to change, it has to be an organic growth of the book. It’s like how you might say, “How is it Blue Beetle used to be a serious character and now he’s a humorous character?” It’s gradual, it grew out of the character.

So familiarity over semantics?

Uhhhm... Respect over semantics. Respect for the characters that you are just making your mark on before you move on. If you’re on Superman, it’s not a creator owned book. There are just certain consistencies to Superman’s mythos. I still think the worst thing they had ever done was have Clark marry Lois because then it just became the adventures of your parents! No kid wants to read that. Continuity binds. I think continuity should be something that the fans should do for themselves, so at cons or even online they’ll connect the dots. When it bleeds open into the industry, we’re in trouble. I’ve had lots of good stories strangled. Forget it. I don’t want to deal with it.

And now the most generic question I can ask. What steps would you suggest to some aspiring kids to longing to get into the industry?

Well first there’s one way to tell if you’re going to make it right off the bat, and that is, if you want to be a writer, are you writing? Do you spend all your spare time writing? Do you have to do it every day? Is your social life suffering because of your writing? Art is the same thing. Look at the corners of your pages, are they covered in doodles? Do you draw when you don’t have to draw? Is this something you would do even if you weren’t being paid? If the answer to any of those questions is no, don’t bother. This is a volume business. You gotta be there every month. It’s a little easier for artists. There are portfolio reviews, learn your basics, learn your storytelling basics, anatomy basics, don’t go in there looking like an amateur because first impressions last. Writing? I couldn’t tell ya. I came up through being an artist. I have no idea how a writer would break into the business but I know it’s one of the hardest things to do. My take on it is if a writer says, “I’m considering a comic book career!” I say, “Reconsider.” There’s a lot more money to be made elsewhere. This is a fixation, we do this because we really have no choice but to do this. Stephen King gave a great answer one time to “Why do you always write horror novels?” “What makes you think I have a choice?”

© Marlee MacLean

While I enjoy photographing almost anything, having people as my subject is what makes me happiest. Being a very social person, I feel as though I’ve managed to capture the best of both worlds when I photograph people. Visually and verbally, it’s the most amount of communication I can have at once. If not taking candid portraits, I’m usually setting up imaginative scenes to produce the images I want. Exercising my creativity is almost the only thing that prevents me from utter boredom.

© Marlee MacLean

I feel very lucky to live in a country as diverse as Canada. Residing in Toronto, I’m regularly introduced to new ideas, cultures and personalities and everyone is at liberty to express themselves: an example of this is my photograph, “Sunflowers & Lights.” A few years back, I stumbled upon a convenience store amidst a quiet neighborhood and made an unusual discovery. What caught my attention was a patch of sunflowers growing out front of the store that were brilliantly lined with a string of lights. Surreal and yet beautiful, this is only one of the many illustrations that exist within this city and country. A unique exhibition, it exemplifies the freedom we as a society are granted and I can only feel fortunate to have captured a piece of that.

© Marlee MacLean

I’ve yet to figure out exactly what I’d like to do with photography, I tend to live day by day. I’m slowly becoming more aware of the multiple opportunities in the photography world and am attempting to keep as many doors open as possible. At the moment, I am enjoying life as a photography student - for the first time, I’m learning my craft formally and not relying entirely on self-education. It’s a change of wind, and a very good one at that.

Photography is what I do when I’ve run out of things to say. I rely on social interaction to get through my days, so when I cannot find the words to express a feeling or thought, photography finishes my sentences. Whether people understand it or not is of little importance, the fact that I let my feelings surface is what means most. It is my outlet, and something I plan on doing for the rest of my life.

Check out more of Marlee's work in our Photo Gallery, and on her Flikr.

Comments

• April 3, 2009, Cristal Moon writes: What a beautiful article and sample of your work. I'm so glad that your Aunt Deidre shared this with me. I am a high school teacher and I am definitely going to share this article with my colleagues and students. Keep reaching for your dreams...making them a reality.
• April 28, 2009, Jennifer writes: Great shots. I've seen your flickr. Your stuff is spectacular. I think you have a bright future ahead of you! All the best.

Between industry parties and By-Invite-Only runway events, there will be more than a few great collections that will surely be notice-worthy, most-notably the runway groups on Tuesday and Friday. 

Tuesday is featuring a powerful runway lineup with Ula Zukowska, whose ULA:SHE Spring 2009 collection of muted blues, yellows, cremes, golds and greens in distinctly modern shapes with sparing use of feminine bows, cropped lengths and graphic prints, was beautifully executed in stiff linen and iridescent heavy silk. Her designs, while being decidedly angular, maintain a soft aesthetic, keeping the edge of her concepts feminine, playful, and warm. What she promises for Fall 2009 is a show of soft and optimistic edge, keeping her late-century 70's throwbacks in check while using modern design concepts to create a collection that could very well make a rather large contribution to the movement of post-millenium fashion.

Also on Tuesday is Zoran Dobric, who incessantly reminds me why the boatneck is by far the sexiest neckline for any woman. Oh, the outline of thin shoulders with just a flash of collarbone as she moves; really, what is sexier than a neatly veiled collarbone? What could possibly intrigue anyone more than the image of a beautiful woman in a boatneck dress, only giving slight and playful glimpses of the beauty of her chest beneath the thin veil of soft fabric? This is exactly the type of sex and intrigue that Zoran Dobric creates and inspires; a classic picture of the modern woman in both soft grays and bold bright blues and greens, with short lengths and high-necklines a clear homage to the youthful maturity of modern femininity. For Fall 2009, I can only imagine his colours dark and warm, with the women of Manhattan in mind as much as those in Paris, with mid-century shapes finding their way into new interpretations, all championing the futuristic-bohemian aesthetic that is uniquely Dobric.

Friday's runway shows are equally interesting, featuring Carlie Wong, who channelled 40's glam in her Spring 2009 collection, adding modern sensibilities, cascading ruffles and playful high-waited shapes to create an image of a modernity influenced greatly by the past. Her designs are undoubtedly young and sexy, with a  markedly urban flair. Her Fall 2009 is anticipated to be in keeping with her movement towards contemporary class, with classic shapes taking on new forms with modern tailoring.

Also on Friday is the ever-elusive Evan Biddel, who, after winning the Project Runway competition, has thrown out collections that are both urban, and inventive. His love of dynamic and exuberant shapes will definitely dominate the second-last day of LG Fashion week, with the crowd - myself included - expecting something angular and nouvelle.

If I didn't have class I would totally be soaking up every minute of the high-end ambiance, perusing the couture marketplace and shmoozing with the Fashion elite.  But alas, with Friday my only free day for fashion-frolicking, I concede (with a sigh) to the fact that I'll just have to wait to watch all the podcasts so I can bash all the collections I hate.

Peruse the schedule at http://www.lgfashionweek.ca/.

Comments

• March 19, 2009, Cassandra Sivic writes: I love Zoran Dobric, too. I'm so sad I don't get to go this year :(

© Landon Speers

© Landon Speers

I work with various media including sound, digital and analogue art, and photography and projection.  I like having my fingers in a bunch of different pots and letting the influences and creative ‘juices’ spill over from one to the other.  Currently, as a student here in Edmonton, I’m able to have many of the resources required to explore and experiment with new things.  I think for me, working with film is one of the things I find most exciting.  I shoot mostly medium format with a healthy dose of large format thrown in there too.  I’ve got this fascination with old things, age and decay.  All my favorite cameras are older than my parents and have more cracks than the old streets I used to ride my bike on as a kid.  I’m charmed by their simplicity and ability to really strip down a ton of the bells and whistles that modern cameras come with, (although I realize they’ve got a time and place too! I’m not crazy).  Professionally, I’m interested in shooting commercially and enjoy the opportunities that that environment provides.  Personally, however, I’m interested in everything from 35mm slide projections and manipulations to alternative printing and methods from the 19th century.

© Landon Speers

To be honest I think that it’s only been within the past year and a bit that I’ve really started to identify with Canadian arts and culture.  I think the more I put forth myself and the further I get into my own work, the more I’m able to connect with those around me who’ve done or are doing the same in theirs.  Whether acclaimed internationally or celebrated locally I find a lot of inspiration and motivation from other artists in this country.  If I can explore, create, experiment and produce things that feed my passion for the rest of my life, I’ll die a happy man.

Sites / Sounds Found :

www.landonspeers.com
www.myspace.com/headacheswontstop
www.myspacecom/stgillesandthehind

Comments

• February 21, 2009, Lyle & Leiha writes: We're your biggest fans, Lanny and our favorite artist. Go Lanny Go!

Curated by Emese Varga with the intent of bringing "contemporary Canadian artists and a composer together under one roof to juxtapose perspectives and expressions of what music/sound is to them", Permeate features visual artists Katie Pretti, Scott Everingham, Amanda Clyne, Ezra Gray, Margaret Nieradka, Sarah Fardon-Choi and Christopher Wong, all inspired by the intersection of visuals and sound. When I initially caught wind of the concept of this exhibit, I figured it would explore the intersection of art and music through new media and video, but I was pleasantly surprised when - as composer Ted Dawson stood up to speak about his work - I realized the limits of each artform were maintained. Instead of a typical pomo-boundary-breaking-fest, an experimental sense of collaboration between such distinct artforms was the key focus of the exhibit.

Ted Dawson - a well known name in both the Montreal experimental/ multidisciplinary music scene of the 70's and the modern/postmodern academic music world - used his revolutionary work in the visual notation of avant-garde music as a launching pad for describing how the visual and the auditory are intimately related. His visual representations of dissonant and wildly emotional avant-garde pieces explore the nature of communicating the auditory experience via a visual medium, and vice versa. With tables and walls lined with his revolutionary visual notations, I couldn't help but be inspired by the refreshing and transgressive nature of his multidisciplinary work.

Juxtaposed with the modern visual art of young Toronto artists, Permeate offers an interesting comment on the boundaries between artforms and senses, as well as the ability to move beyond classical interpretations of such. I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

The exhibit is on until March 26th, 2009.

Check Out

The Music Gallery
Ted Dawson and the True North Foundation

Comments

• March 23, 2009, Ted Dawson writes: Many thanks for the review. Glad that you enjoyed the material. I foundSteel Bananas by chance online. If you would like to cover other programs that we offer at the Foundation, please drop me a line. Re the material presented at Permeate, I also have my own site at www.teddawson.truenorthfdn.org Thanks and regards.
• February 25, 2010, Ted Dawson and Avant-garde Notation | >fruitlet writes: [...] met Ted Dawson a just over year ago in February 2009 at the opening of the Permeate Exhibit at the Music Gallery, exploring intersections between music and visual art. Before then, I knew [...]

Since 2001, Chris Onstad has been producing an online comic that has inspired, confused, enlightened and enriched lives en masse. Achewood, with Onstad's unique brand of humour has labeled him a cut above any other webcomic with praise from even Time Magazine. The adventures of Ray, Pat, Téodor and very special boy Philippe have kidnapped the hearts of internet savants, and will not give them back until a ransom of 20 000 beers and 8 high fives with FEELING is payed. Recently Achewood has graced us with it's first major published release, The Great Outdoor Fight, which chronicles Ray's epic struggle to live up to a family legacy in a three day, three acre brawl among three hundred cats. I caught up with Onstad on the night of Obama's election. So to say the least that was a pretty magical evening dawg.

Hello Chris.

Is this to be transcribed or is this for a podcast or something?

No this is going to be transcribed, so if you want to sound awkward and dorkish go right ahead.

Oh, so it's going to be edited later. I always appreciate that (said as he galloped upon a mighty steed and struck down several hideous beasts with an golden axe).

Do you write like you talk or talk like you write?

I write like I write and I talk like I talk. Achewood is called out as something that has a lot of different characters, dialects and languages in it. I don't speak that way I speak like a normal white guy from California y'know? I don't have these intense ways of speaking or people would be annoyed with me but they work in the comic strip and it takes a long time to write the way those voices are, you cant just whip it out or... or at least I can't because I don't have 11 different ways of talking.

How did Achewood get started?

Well I was working in high tech in silicon valley in the late 90s and early 2000s and I had been going on walks in the afternoon writing down, you know, everyone has a funny idea every day, probably, and it's worth writing down so I'd go home at night and set it to little drawings that I had made to some stuffed animals we had around the house. I got the pinch when the bubble burst in silicon valley, I got my little severance package and I thought well, maybe we can have a go at this. I started printing t-shirts and collecting our stuff with photocopies and copy shop books and started selling them online and to my surprise people were actually picking it up, we had a bit of a following, this was about four or five months in around Feb of 2002. Gradually we would re-invest here and try to live off a little bit of the profit there, I was working freelance and my wife was working at William Sonoma as a retail analyst so she knew how to run a business and I could create stuff and 7 years later here we are.

You run one of the most popular webcomics on the net, but what separates you from most others is you refrain from focusing on politics, feminism, Megaman or all of the above, why do you continue to take the path less traveled.

I am actually not one of the most popular webcomics there are because I don't talk about video games. I don't... hate them I don't play them I don't know anything about them, totally foreign to me, like a foreign language. The most popular webcomics are based on video games and make scabs of money.

Maybe I'm just talking to the wrong people

Well I'm glad you are talking to the wrong people. The reason I don't follow topics is because when you do a political comic it has a shelf life of about a week, and then it doesn't matter to anybody. In 2004 I did a comic about the vice presidential debate, and while it's funny for me because I know what its about it was totally stale for anyone who wasn't watching that televised debate or didn't know who John Edwards was. I want to do this so that it lasts, I didn't want it to be too timely referenced, there are too many timely movies, too many platforms out for people to twiddle there thumbs over, I want it to last because I'm putting all my work into it

Speaking of lifespan you are just now releasing a volume of your work with The Great Outdoor Fight, where most topical webcomics wouldn't be able to do so and still keep it's poignancy.

Right, The Great Outdoor Fight is the story that I wanted to be because it could have occurred at any point, it doesn't matter that it occurred two years ago, it was just a story about mono e mono, three thousand e mono. I want it to have shelf life, I want it to matter. In 20 years can you look back at the Doonsberry of right now and care? It's great now but it's too... topical. And I don't want to do topical. I think it's too easy.

You keep on top of a lot of content, updating the comic often on almost a daily basis not to mention the blogs of the individual characters. How do you find the time to manage all the material and is it easy?

At this point right now, I do the strip about three or four times a week, well, that's a stretch, it's more like two or three times a week but I'm still putting everything I can into them. The blogs don't get updated as much as they used to, although I try to put as much effort into them as I can when I can. I'm branching into other things now, I have a weekly piece in The New Yorker on their cartoon lounge, part of their website, I still call it The New Yorker because it is under their masthead and I get to say "I'm a regular contributor for The New Yorker." I do it not for pay but because it reaches an awesome audience and it's a point of pride as a writer. I really admire those writers, I admire the level of excellence that they maintain in that magazine. They have a new subscriber service where you pay like 2.99 a month you can get regular updates from Achewood, its automated and its sort of chipping away at the micropayments so that I can make money directly from what I'm writing rather than... You like what I write, I sell you a t-shirt or I hire a guy he ships it to you it gets returned we ship it back and we make a dollar you know off of 25 dollars being spent. An artist should make money off their art, not by a product or peripheral, that's how I feel after 7 years of trying to make money in the traditional channel. And now I have book deals! Which is another great way to directly profit from your work.

Speaking of publications, you were recently praised in major publications like Time magazine. How does it feel to suddenly get props from someone so high up on the ladder.

I didn't know what was happening, in 2007 Time magazine awarded us their number one graphic novel of the year and I wasn't sure what that meant because I had not published any graphic novels. I was only a webcomic at that... Sorry, I was only an online comic at that point and I didn't really get it, I was like, "Oh! How awes.. Time... wow!" I had been reading Time my whole life, that really means a lot to me and the award is totally a feather in your cap. But I only got it recently, when they say "graphic novel" what they mean, their critic, their writer who awarded that was making a point. A graphic novel doesn't have to be on paper, Achewood exists on the internet, very sprawling, all over the place, with the blogs, old archives, new archives, 1500 strips and songs and photo contests you can find here and there. It's sort of the embryonic form if there was a new generational concept of graphic novel.

Your story arcs seem to have a natural flow, though it's hard to get a sense if the grand scheme of things was plotted out ahead of time or just made impulsively as you go along. When you write these chapters, is it on the fly or scripted out?

No, no, I belabour this point. And I don't deserve to use this author's quote but Tolkein said, "The tale grew in the telling" and for me that was good enough to justify working on a day to day basis. I write late into the night and maybe at 3am I get the thing that really makes it interesting so I add that in into the day's strip, I post it and the next day I go, "Okay, wow, how do I work with that now?" Because now I'm starting with a fresh mind... It's really the only way I can work, I never did that in college, I was a terrible student, terrible expository writer, terrible persuasive writer. If I were to outline I would just pick it apart, I would go back and edit and debate it. I just try to capture whatever inspires me, made me laugh and get it down. When I do (write with an outline) that's when I'm unhappiest with the strip. I'm not trying to solve the world's problems so for a comic strip that should be good enough.

What do you want Achewood to be in the future, what would you like it to become?

I really respect the model Matt Greoning charted, he started out doing five dollar a week alternative comics, Life in Hell, in local papers in LA I think it was and he over time morphed that into the entertainment entity that has made the most money and entertained the most people in the world. I think there is a place for Achewood to do something like that, to branch out into a richer medium because the comics medium is so information poor, there's no sound, no timing, it's a really hard thing to craft in three or six panels.

I can actually.. Like, with your comics, and I don't want to sound crazy but I do feel like I can hear what they say and they way they say it. I was just looking over the comic where Ray is prank calling Garfeild and then whispers into the phone...

"...Up yours Garfeild" It's an enormous challenge to craft that in a static silent comic. It would be so much more fun to work with actors, casting voice actors, working with animation whathaveyou. I really feel like we are ready to branch out. There will be whining about that from the old fans who just want it to be the way it was but that's, y'know, selfish. It's really fucking hard to make money with a comic, even online with all these awesome new ways of monetizing which don't bring in that much. Y'know, there's a reason TV is still around. I would love to entertain people like that if I had access to richer media.

The Simpsons do make a lot of money don't they?

Yeah... They make the most money.

Of course for the general inspiring question, what advice do you have for any aspiring whippersnappers to, not even say start a webcomic but to use the internet as a medium for their art.

Be patient, stick with it, have no expectations of what you will benefit by it. I don't know, I've been really stubborn, stupid and dogheaded in the last seven years and it's finally paying off. Believe in yourself, learn to take criticism and don't give up. That's the long n' short of it. That's all I can think of because... That's how I do it.

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The Great Outdoor Fight, a collection of the Achewood epic has been released by Dark Horse Comics and is out now in any bookstore badass enough to carry it. Though if you just ain't cool enough to step in the door to such a joint in person, Achewood is always available online at http://www.achewood.com. But you're still a puss if you don't. Puss.

When first asked to write an article about being an artist in Toronto or an art student trying to make as an artist in Toronto, I realized that I was neither. As of November I decided to take a year off in my final year of animation (Seneca College). I do live in Toronto and I do make money from my art, but it isn't specifically from being located in Toronto. As a visual artist, I've been most successful just from posting my art work on websites and being hired by people who come across my artwork who need designs for t-shirts, tattoos, logos or album art for Toronto bands.

Advice for other Indie Artists:
I couldn't count how many times I have met someone in the industry or a fellow student from drawing on the TTC or even drawing in a cafe. Whether your making it or not, its a matter of being confindent with your artwork and knowing that not everyone is going to like it. Don't get easily discouraged when someone turns you down. The art industry is enormous, tightly knit, and more often than not, based on word of mouth. So to all aspiring artists I simply say, get out there! Post your artwork on the internet, go to art conventions or gallery openings, meet people and always carry a copy of your portfolio. Bring spares if your going to a convention or gallery and most importantly, keep drawing.