emily carr grad show:: scaling up

Another year and another round of peaking art students presented their final flourishes before dispersing into the all-knowing world at large - with their fame-inflamed aspirations, or more humble hope to practice the skill set and art doctrines impressed into their spongy young minds - perhaps doses of meticulously cultivated talent is enough, perhaps a web of auspicious connections will propel some, perhaps just being true to their artistic authenticity will stand the test of time...

At this year's usual sprawling show, there is more than a whiff of sophisticated whimsy in the air, more of an upscale polished quality that can grace the most discerning gallery - abstracted symphonic forms floating in white space as well as starkly powerful works that are minimalist yet saturated with cryptic orders.


One installation by Parvin Peivandi is a multi-media dance of convoluted metal rods upholding ceramic "heads" of partial Persian motifs, all purist white and untainted by the slick pool of black oil they spring from - a work loaded with geo-eco-political metaphors and yet its lightness of being does not confront nor confound...

Wood scraps thoughtfully assembled and formulated by Angela Smailes into sculptural maquettes present as miniature sculpture in their own right - the compendious delicacy of each piece holding its own - and despite their constructivist abtractness, some read as vaguely familiar creatures in various states of composure. Isolated from each other on their individual perches, each is accorded a relevance unto itself and yet floats together in the general display as part of a giant discordant puzzle...

Long titles seem to fixate one's attention to certain work - ones that are purely descriptive in an overtly wordy mouthful such as Eric Miranda's "Five Ways of Transporting a Sphere on Three Ways of Displaying Five Ways of Transporting a Sphere" where pretty pink and lilac and lemon nippled rubber balls are attached to, bound with, and hung from various appendages in a playful and wholly inarticulate manner...

Michelle O'Byrne's descriptive narrative of "young man and woman embracing as a romantic couple on a tropical beach destination" for a wall installation that has no such wholesome image depicted in full and yet the delicate combination of the framed print, the finely strung horizon line dropping down to an ephemeral strip of sea/sky blue panel resting on the floor below all play to the heightened sensuality shimmering in a sanitized and magazine-glossy beach resort where one should always question one's true motives for being there...

 

Good old school painting wise, this pair of garages convulses in waves of gooey paint - the banal subject portrayed in prowling darkness, one spotted with a bright sensor bulb, the other lit by neighbouring windows, both depicted with such insouciant yet assured brushstrokes that only raw and ready talent can beget...Gillian Richards, you rock my paint can!

Wei Cheng's grouping of black glazed urns festooned with gilded strands of rough-edged clay asserted themselves in stately glamour - in a piece called "Zen", the vessel is tilted downwards as if surrendering to the binding embrace of its ribbon of gold, in another called "Convergence", the tall upright urn is spewing writhing golden snakes over a faceless Medusa already turned herself to stone...

These exquisite and mysterious pod vessels by Aileen Arduin convey a Georgia O'Keeffe-like essence of erotic benediction - at once eerily beautiful with their secretive folds retreating into darkness and immaculately executed in their conceptual other-worldliness...

The primal-potent effect of this sculpture by Porowski S. Jacek is in your face immediate and technically hyper-controlled - implications of transgression in the splitting of the wood and of intransition in the binding and holding in place - a subscribed violation as naturalist as the silk smooth cherry trunk and as brutalist as the cold hard cement wedge...

Sometimes downspotting yields the most intriguing rewards, and as such, "Architecting Absolutes" by Madison Killough trips the mind in an unassuming game of cornered disregard - and sometimes art should just simply imitate perception at its most base level in order to raise awareness of a more intuited state of cognition...

In the darkness of a narrow closet, the small screen flickers with splotchy black moons, mesmerizing in its randomness and in its constancy - what could be more purely universal than rudimentary particles flashing in isolation and somewhat into perpetuity... "O" by Hannah MacAulay

Emily Carr University of Art and Design
Graduation Show 2014
ended May 18

powell less

Their world never coagulated again after the war. They were interned and then scattered, losing all that they once had in a vibrant community that was 50 years in the making across the wide ocean from their island home. They came to log and fish and cultivate and build, and within a few tumultuous months in 1942, they were all gone.

Walking along Powell Street today, there is not much to indicate that this was the main street of a once bustling Japanese community. A few buildings with Japanese names of long forgotten owners leave a faded memory of more enterprising and prosperous days. The Japanese Hall on Alexander Street was the only property redeemed by the few Japanese who returned in the 1950's and it still operates as a language school and cultural centre to this day.

The Maikawa family built their dream department store with an au courant art deco facade to house the newest and the latest - it was the largest and most modern department store in Japantown when it opened in 1936, but would all too soon be forfeited to the government. Now it sits neglected and slightly decrepit in silent resignation to its fate.

These buildings bearing the weathered and damaged signs of "Lion Hotel" and  "King Rooms" were once rooming houses above storefronts that included a traditional Japanese bath house, an archery club, an athletic club, a restaurant and even a rifle gallery. The name of "MORIMOTO" set in tiles in front of the main door has remained as a humble legacy of the mysterious namesake now long gone.

*****

The header image for savage states above is a detail of the entrance wall to the "Hotel World" built in 1912 by S. Tamura, a merchant and speculator.