Catch-update

I played a lot of Odin Sphere...

"Second impression: A gorgeous façade fronting a dated, repetitive triviality, simulating depth through overwriting and busywork.

"Third impression: Here I am, still playing it hours after Impression Two. Why?"

I wrote some preview bumf on NextFest, an unsatisfying experience...

“'The chief thing, I guess, is that I want the people I’m painting to look really good. Otherwise, I feel I’d be doing them a disservice. I only paint people that look good. That’s pretty important to me, ideologically.'"

I went to Fort Edmonton Park...

"One moment you’re strolling along with cranky families laden with modern plastics, slowly filing past roped-off exhibits of trade tools, exhibits that haven’t changed in 20 years, the next you’re treated to an honest moment of universal human history as the general store’s cute countergirl blushes furiously at the entrance of the handsome young Mountie."

I learned a lesson about robot monarchs and some other stuff...

"Apologies, Lizzie; you were right. I’ll never again undervalue the power of the sheepfold."

Also, I guess I know who I'm tele-psychically inducing some weak-willed american to vote for next November:

05-07-2007 – the 18th floor

The view north through the window of somebody else’s office: vast fields of real-estate stretching out toward the hazy brown band on the horizon, the worrisome dirty halo from which pour riches.

Nearer by, just across the avenue, is the construction site for what I’m told will be a Sobeys, a downtown-revitalizin’ foodmart to take the pressure off the Save-On where the post-work rush hour requires full-time traffic control and one can line-read both People and Real Simple in the time it takes to get to a checkout.

I can’t see it from this angle, but I know its there – mostly there, for now -- on the plywood hoardings surrounding the site: impromptu guerrilla artshow, sixteen artists, sixteen pictures, flash-organized by the manic Sheri Barclay and slapped up in the wishin’-Lord-that-I-was-stoned early hours of Sunday morning. Illustrated nursery rhymes and pop-culture iconography, notional space flags and curated Elvis tapestries, the streetshow actually lasted 24 hours before the builders culled their first piece, a shocking pink celebri-collage featuring Bill Cosby. I can’t see that, either, but it’s been blogged…

Behind me, muted by two or three layers of the padded grey burlap that defines our Team’s habitrail, a coworker mutters emphatically into his telephone, working his real-estate deals. This is a trick lots of people are picking up, the art of keeping one’s voice down while maintaining something of the go-go, for-sure-for-sure confidence required to wheel n’ deal, a necessary survival skill for Edmontonians playing Condominium Tycoon on company time.

“We’ll make the fi--… we’ll get the fif--… no, yeah, no we’ll get the fifty back in… in less than two weeks, no, yeah, no, right, absolutely.”

Even streety slackers are talking property these days, pierced n’ baggy Whatever types walking down Whyte, shrugging noncommittally about flipping condos. Sixty per cent of all conversation taking place in Edmonton at any one time is about house prices, round-robin comparisons of how many thousands in how many months, and through it all the one thing every Edmonite knows for certain: if you’re renting, you are retarded; you are completely retarded; it is retarded to pay rent.

No kidding. Questions of equity aside, the life of a renter in Edmonton is the life of a fugitive, chased from building to building by the advancing forces of condominimization, or squeezed hard if you stay put. The notice doesn’t come from your landlord or building manager, either: one day you simply find the shit-eating grin of a realtor slipped under your door, offering you the exciting opportunity of buying your shitbox bachelor suite for a quarter-million dollars, and a week later the lobby and hallways fill with loudmouth suits actually rubbing their hands as they discuss the money they’ll be making while you’re scrambling for yet another round of deposit/first month/hookups.

And the elevators fill with graffiti:

thanks for making me move AGAIN

I hope your happy

I hate you mother fuckers

Given these feelings everywhere, given a climate where even the bought-in moneymakers are getting scared shitless – “Sure, I could sell this place for three hundred grand, but what then? I still have to fuckin’ live somewhere, man.” – and a new fear and loathing overtakes traditional beer and loafing, it’d be easy to read a construction-site artbombing as some kind of antidevelopment protest. But that’s exactly what it’s not! The name of the project – “Make It Not Suck” – says it all; it’s about making this shit easier to look at. Makeup, if not a mask, for the skungy plywood Face of Progress.

Or a blessed weekend giggle, at least; these are getting fewer and farther between. Edmonton long ago lost its status as a Slacker’s Paradise – this used to be the Reverse New York: if you couldn’t make it here, you couldn’t make it anywhere -- but even as it becomes less and less possible to keep it together in Browntown without working like a slavedog while swinging mortgage deals on your bathroom breaks, we’ve got to honor our heritage as laughing dilettante stoner art punks… even if we can only honor it on slow Sundays.

It’s either that, or flee to Winnipeg…

The Munny Show, April 4

The Munny Show
Various (like, eighteen) artists
Featuring DJ Merk Muny
April 4, 2007, 7 p.m.
Syndicate Apparel – 10444 Whyte ave

Seen on the shelf, designer toy manufacturer Kidrobot’s Munny figurine – a featureless seven-inch vinyl manikin of vaguely adorable contours – looks blank, unfinished. And that’s exactly what it is; Munny is to toy design what canvas is to painting, its media-friendly matte finish and soft plastic body intended to be airbrushed, painted, drawn on, glued, carved, chopped up and remixed by DIY toymakers. In the three years since Munny’s release, Munny-modification has become one of the fastest-growing parties in the urban pop-art underground, and now Edmonton artists are gathering for this city’s first ever Munny show.

“The idea of Munny is new here,” says Lynda Vang, who got the ball rolling on the event with a few mid-February conversations and emails, “but from people who knew about it response was quick, and pretty soon replies were filling my mailbox. I’d never done anything like this before, but I’d heard and read that the art community in Edmonton is really supportive and tight-knit… and it’s really true!”

Munny shows can get pretty wild, that cartoonoid little statuette providing the basis for all kinds of killer space robots, monsters, adora-pop moppets, disturbing abstracts, satirical caricatures and… and anything else anybody could ever imagine. From coast to coast, Munny shows are wild places where individual weirdnesses are amplified by the echoes of each piece’s common commodity ancestor. Google it up or drop the “munnny” tag into flickr.com for something of preview.

Less than six weeks after conceiving Edmonton’s own Munny show, which hits April 4 at Syndicate on Whyte Avenue, Vang had a roster of 18 artists signed on to craft a Munny for the event. The designer/custom toy scene is closely associated with the street-art world, and many of the show’s participants come from that background, but Vang has put effort into getting artists from many different styles into the mix.

“It would have been easy to fall back on the urban graffiti scene,” she says. “I’ll have people from that aesthetic representing, but I wanted to be more diverse, and not just have strictly graffiti artists.”

One participant from the graffiti side of things is the mysterious bomber known as Steve-Dave, infamous for his celebrity-stencil work. Like most of the artists in the show, this will be Steve-Dave’s first toy project.

“It'll be an extension of the aesthetic I'm currently working with,” Steve-Dave explains, “just applied to a different medium. You'll have to come check it out to see. It may not be as much stencil work as I'd like, as it's tough to stencil an eight-inch tall, three-dimensional object. Either way, it'll most likely offend someone.”

For illustrator Cordelia Chan, whose Munny will involve “paisley and whales”, the high-speed grassroots – weedroots? – nature of the Munny show, nurtured in the fertile soil of MySpace, is one of its most exciting aspects.

“Edmonton holds such marvelous talent,” says Chan, but it all gets pushed underground because of conservative cliques. When smaller shows can get bigger exposure via different modes of communication, that's great.

“For example, look at the Art Gallery of Alberta. The "Free for All" exhibition that they have had for the past month shows precisely the excitement over and magnitude of all different types of art existing in this city… and that, even, was only a small portion. Normally, though, they don't exhibit the exciting local art like they've done this past month. Art is for everyone, and it's refreshing and encouraging to see people excited about a show such as this Munny one.”

“There's obviously a growing interest in this sort of thing,” says Steve-Dave, “so I think it'll go over well. There's a ton of creative people in Edmonton, and shows like this just fuel the fire of underground/DIY art. I'm stoked.”

image: Scott Scheidly's TikiMunny, via UberBot

7-24-2007 – Latitude 53

Even after all the wonderful gifts he’s given me, even after Manimal, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive Glen A. Larson for ruining whole genres and numerous subgenres of music for me with his Knight Rider theme. Ever since that hypnotic staccato riff was sampled, remixed and bhangrafied in the late ‘90s, I haven’t been able to hear Indian music – or any of its Romani descendents that came paintwagonning over the Carpathians – without seeing a vision of David Hasselhoff, head to neck in black leather, neck to crown in glossy black permcurls, leaning against his robotic Trans-Am.

So there he is in my mind’s eye as Tza and Zza Gabor, the Slavic Sibs, spin their ass-moving gypsy beats for the arterati filling the room for Latitude 53’s “Love Bytes” fundraiser. Art and Hasselhoff… the combination wanders my thoughts back to my longest period of sustained work in a single style, in elementary school, painstakingly drafting elaborate KITT-inspired control panels, sometimes five sheets of paper taped, stapled – or “tapled”, for extra security – into wraparound panoramas of buttons, dials, joysticks, switches and screens. I remember making one that had three ejection buttons, one for each passenger seat – as the imagined driver, I knew I would gladly perish in whatever southern Californian pyrotechnic cliff-plunge claimed my beloved futuristic ride…

“Have you tried the mini-cupcakes?!”

I have indeed tried the mini-cupcakes... and the cream-cheese rollups, and the spring rolls, and the bruschetta, and the rosemary/black-pepper spread that’s basically herbed butter; a beautiful spread illuminated by “LOVE” spelled out in fairy lites, perfect for sopping up all this generously-poured wine. I hadn’t planned on “doing the alcohol thing” tonight, but… but it’s for a cause! It’s for Art! This place supports emergents and wayfinders, and if Latitude is to survive and thrive, it is every art-lover’s duty to make the scene and get as buzzed as possible without lurching into the walls and pulling down the pictures. Note, also, that beyond a certain point of unreliable glass-handling it’s considered polite to switch from pigmented reds to non-staining whites.

The silent-auction pickings are, you know, kind of just there. A few interesting pieces sharing wallspace with some terrifically dire material, same as it ever was in this unpredictable Freeport of a gallery. Not that a night like tonight is about the pictures, really; it’s about the laser-intersection of people and scenes, the meeting and chatting with the people you last met and chatted with at some similar event a season ago. All around me sparks of conversation, ideas, plans, “email me!”… and the place a showroom of beautiful people, every type and style of fox, like the Shopkeeper of the World has lined up all his samples for our perusal. It’s the kind of scene where you have to consciously control the creepy threesome-troll impulse:

“Um… my wife and I think you’re very beautif-- UWAAEEEAAAKKKK!”

Jesus! What’s that noise? I thought this was a “silent” auction? No such luck. Our glamorous emcee, “charmingly neurotic culture snob” T.L. Cowan, has taken the stage and begun the hour-long process of shrilling out the results of the chance-auction draw. All our hopes and dreams for donated art and miscellaneous middle swag are nestled in those draw-baggies, our numbers destined to come up – how could they not? We put ten dollars of tickets in there, and we know how odds work. Slowly, the lot-drawing process screeches its ear-splitting way around the room…

Does everybody love a winner? Not so in this case, friends; in a random-draw situation, one person getting multiply lucky draws whispers and suspicions. When it’s just wine and t-shirts and gift certificates, OK, whatever… but there’s a darling blue handbag up there, the object of many a young lady’s covetous ticket-stuffing… and when one of the Lucky Buddies is announced as its proud new owner, and she has to carry it hung on her arm because her hands are full of all the other junk she’s carting away, the rhubarb boils with more conspiracy theory than a JFK convention:

Overheard by the canapés: “It’s gotta be a fix.”

Whispered by the wine bar: “They had a system! I totally saw them signalling!”

Out with the cigarette smokers: “Did you notice how she didn’t actually announce a number?”

Such excitement! To be fair, it really was an adorable little clutch… I’d be sour-graping it, too, if I’d been denied some congruently desirable treasure – a new-in-box Dreamcast, maybe, or a case of Yellow Label. But, really, in the end, everybody wins: it’s drama like this that makes the art world go ‘round, right? Drama… plus the cash money we’ve all, win or lose, freely showered upon our beloved 53, long may she live.

Catfight!

Don't forget, the Catfight! still rages at ArtsHab...

Aaron Paquette -- Trickster

Trickster
New work by Aaron Paquette
Bearclaw Gallery
March 3-15

The Trickster figure is a near-universal element of human mythology. Noble, craven, generous, greedy, wise, ignorant, creator and clown, hero and deceiver, the Trickster is the eternal shapeshifter, the primordial power of chaos and change. In his new exhibition, painter Aaron Paquette deals with this ancient force as a real and present power in his own life -- and in our modern world of constant change and shifting identities.

"Just because we get the concept of the Trickster from our shared mythology of long ago doesn't mean it isn't a current and applicable figure in today's world,” says Paquette. “In fact, I would say that it is even more important to society now than it has ever been. Among the many facets of the Trickster myth is this idea of adapting to changes, of looking at the world with curiosity and humor. Tricksters are, in essence, problem solvers.”

Paquette’s own encounter with the Trickster’s invitation to change came, as it so often does, exactly when it needed to. “Early this fall,” he recalls, “I’d made the decision that I was going to be diligent, I was going to be disciplined, I was going to paint every day. I was going to get serious.

“I soon realized that I had nothing. I was good for about a week, and I was out. I was like, ‘What’s the purpose of life?’”

Retreating for recharge and re-inspiration to the woods of the river valley near his northeast Edmonton home, Paquette soon afterward found what he was looking for in a series of vivid, demanding dreams of the Trickster in his mythical identity of Raven.

“I started really dreaming about the Raven about six months ago, and then I started getting all these images in my head, all these ideas for paintings. Of course, the process takes so long that I've only tapped the surface, but I find it really interesting how this exploration is affecting my typical style… the technique itself is slowly becoming a bit more immediate, a bit more raw. I'm loosening the reins a bit, letting more come out than I have in the past.”

Those familiar with the style Paquette has been noted for – a luminous blend of Pop art, Native painting and Christian iconography; dark, fluid lines and bold fields of color – will immediately see this change. The new work is indeed looser and more organic, some of it seeming more conventionally representational/narrative and some more impressionistic -- but all of it showing its dreamscape origins in terror and power.

“I’d wanted to help be a part of a new symbology,” says Paquette, who is of mixed Native and European blood, of the orgins of his older style. “Many young people growing up have lost their symbols, their rituals that tell them what it means to be human and a functioning member of the community. I co-opted some of the stronger iconic concepts of European religious culture in a way that I hoped would make sense to the viewer. It was my hope that if I continued to work that I could offer a few new ideas to people, a few concepts that they had never considered. It worked, and that's the path I assumed I would remain walking… until these dreams began intruding.

“Now, any ideas I had -- which I admit were rather hefty, but you can't blame youth for idealism -- flew out the window on those charcoal wings of the raucous squawker we call the Raven. Now, I just basically paint what I see in what I would describe as flashes of images burned into the front of my brain for scant seconds, usually right before sleep, or just on waking up in the morning. I have only a few moments to either sketch out the scene or burn into memory before it's gone, or else it really is gone.

“Some of my best stuff has evaporated back into the ether because I didn't act on it immediately. But this happens to people all the time. Remember that amazing moment, so profound and full of meaning that you swore you would never forget? No you don't, because unless it's in your top ten, you've probably lost it along the way, not even remembering enough to miss it.That sounds kind of sad, doesn't it?”

Though his painting is moving in a less literally iconic direction, Paquettte remains committed to transmitting the power of myth through his painting.

“Mythical art reminds us of our origins,” he says. “It reminds us that we are not history's orphans, that we really do come from somewhere and something, and that the wisdom that will help us to live good lives, or at least happier lives, has been painstakingly earned and collected by generations passed, basically for our benefit. “We only have to listen and keep ourselves open to it and it will speak to us.”