It is raining in Vancouver for the first time in many weeks. Most people don’t realize that the rainy Pacific Northwest goes through a two-month dry spell each summer. Bone dry. Great swaths of British Columbia are burning right now as hundreds of natural and man-made wildfires race through endless miles of standing timber; forests [...]
Last weekend Scott and I went to the Lion’s Gate Quilters Guild’s ‘10th Album of Quilts’. He brought his camera and I took my camcorder, and we drove through Stanley Park and across the Lion’s Gate Bridge to the Delbrook Community Centre in North Van. Now, I have to preface this entry by admitting that [...]
I discovered this local textile artist almost by accident last year and I return to her Flickr portfolio often to admire these bizarre and imaginative plush creations. This series is called “Choking Hazard Dolls” and incorporates components from old dolls that have been reworked with found objects and surgically precise stitches. Inspired by cartoons, comic [...]
Scott and I went to Europe in June 2007 and while sightseeing in Amsterdam, I visited the Reflex Modern Art Gallery. The gallery, small and several blocks from the Rijksmuseum, was exhibiting large photographs of women (and one man) variously standing and sitting alone in modernist interiors. The photographs were enormous and filled the walls. [...]
Between classes this fall I’ve been writing letters to Bryan Newson, the City of Vancouver Public Art Program Manager, about the hosted light installation by Diana Thater which stretches 149 metres up the side of Vancouver’s downtown waterfront Shaw Tower. It’s a column of LED lights that are computer programmed to dissolve from green to [...]
Land art or earth art has existed for millennia. Materials such as rocks, sticks, soil, plants and so on are often used, and the works generally exist in the open and are left to change and erode under natural conditions. Particularly large works are sometimes known as earthworks. In most respects land art has become [...]
A rhetorical contextualization of Brian Jungen’s art within the post-modern paradigm That the city of Vancouver, and the province of British Columbia as a whole, are promoted by our government both domestically and abroad as Canada’s Pacific gateway to corporate prosperity and profit is an unmistaken and unabashed truism in today’s economy of commoditization. That [...]
I wrote this after reading Greenberg’s seminal essay Avant-garde and Kitsch which was published in 1939. Clement Greenberg Hello Chris. Chris Hi Mr. Greenberg, it’s a pleasure to meet you and a little surreal since I was just sitting here in my lush garden on a lovely teak chaise sipping a gin and tonic whilst [...]
Click the red temple door to see pictures from my trip to Shanghai (Flickr):
