 Hi everyone. Can you hear me? Welcome to the visual art forums. Just I'm going to hand it over to Elizabeth in a minute to introduce our speaker for this evening but I just wanted to welcome everyone and mention that we are gonna have a break from the visual art forums for a few weeks and the next one will be on February 23rd with Peter Von Teasenhausen at 6 p.m. in this room again and a couple of other events I just want to mention this week we have a gallery talk with Trish Kelly on Wednesday at 6 p.m. and then Friday evening at 7 p.m. we have a talk with Jeffrey James in conversation with Michael Jackson who is not that Michael Jackson who is a prison rights advocate or prisoners rights advocate from UBC and they're gonna be talking about Jeffrey James' photo project on the Kingston Penitentiary so those events are all posted on the website but just wanted to mention what was coming up next so thanks for coming and I'm gonna hand this over to Elizabeth oh I just wanted to mention as well we're gonna be at the hotel bar after this for a drink with Elspeth if anyone wants to join us it's open to anyone to come and say hello so I'll hand it over to you I was just sharing with David McMillian my irrational fear of giving introduction so here you go it's all scripted Elspeth Pratt is an important artist and educator here in Vancouver she's being committed to making abstract sculpture for several decades has shown widely taught and influenced generations of artists including Emily Carzone, Kathy Slade and Patrick Anderson rumor has it that Patrick became interested in art after a friend convinced him to join Elspeth's sculpture class do you know where that was at SFU surprise with the recent spike of interest in abstraction her work is especially relevant to the current generation of young artists Elspeth's work demonstrates her interest in architecture and social spaces she uses a variety of prosaic materials from plywood to bed beverage containers to comment on how architecture structures our lives I first met Elspeth ten years ago when I moved to Vancouver and into this space adjoining her studio Elspeth and her work are a constant source of inspiration to me from watching her work over the years I have I have observed that she never settles into rote decision-making though she's consistent in her approach to materials and art making she's constantly inventing always with surprising and curious results her preference for wall-mounted work brings her sculpture into dialogue with painting recent exhibitions include nonetheless at the Cooley Art Gallery in Portland Oregon that was the second iteration of the exhibition she had here at Charles H. Scott second date a large-scale public art project at the Vancouver Art Gallery's off-site and outside in a Diaz contemporary in Toronto she was a 2014 recipient recipient of the Vancouver Mayor's Art Award in 2011 read books in conjunction with the Cooley Art Gallery in Portland published a beautiful catalog of Elspeth's work which includes essays by five different writers Elspeth is represented by Diaz contemporary in Toronto she's currently a professor and the director of the School of Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University please join me in welcoming Elspeth Pratt okay so I have to apparently I'm double-miked here for some thanks very much for that introduction pretty much said at all okay so I'm I prepared a paper sorry but I'm I'm not the most comfortable public speaker and I think if you're coming out at six o'clock you might as well have something prepared so I'll preface this presentation by explaining that for some images I will provide specific details for others only show the images as they relate to ideas and influences in the paper and additionally additionally the work does not adhere to a chronological order so you won't be able to say well I like her earlier work better than her late work you know so there's there's a reason for that when I asked to when I was asked to give this presentation I considered how best to sorry about that I don't think I'm okay how best to organize the talk that would elucidates my practice articulates and references the importance of the slow process which allows for ideas to develop through reflection resulting in the three-dimensional objects I heard Michael Talsik an unconventional anthropologist who is known for his provocative ethnographic studies speak at SFU several years ago there were several there were several ideas he spoke about that I share an affinity for the notion of the mastery of non mastery and ideas around slow I have my own understanding of these ideas however I will begin with an example he cites I swear I saw this drawings and fieldwork notebooks namely my own in this book he reflects on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through 40 years of travels in Columbia while traveling in a taxi in Madeleine Columbia's second largest city he sped into a freeway tunnel spotting a homeless couple at the side of the road caught between the traffic and the wall of the concrete underpass in that momentary glimpse it seemed as if a woman was sewing a man into a nylon sack when he asked the driver why they chose to be there he responded because it is warm Talsik drew a quick sketch and scrawled underneath it in red pencil I swear I saw this the rational explanation is that most likely these were peasants driven from their home by paramilitaries who under the pretense of hunting down terrorists in Columbia are helping the landowning cocaine barons and biofueled mafia get their hands on potentially rich agricultural land for Talsik this explanation is not sufficient for he is concerned with the significance of the vision the inexplicability of the woman sewing the bag and the absurdity of the taxi driver's explanation it is in the spirit of celebrating his non-mastery that Talsik spends some time considering his sketches but this is the point the sketch and the note are both in enigmatic testifying rather to the anthropologist's form of intention attention than to the scene itself like Talsik my research is informed by this quality of subjective attention and serendipity I was struggling with the work titled done deal which is constructed from cardboard plaster bandage and then covered with a concoction of hydrocal and wild weld bond glue and which is followed by paint while looking at enclaves of residential dent densification the solution for this project presented itself when I was speeding along a highway in Baja Mexico this area has undergone an unprecedented amount of growth each visit you are surprised by the significant changes that all are a result of densification for tourism local villages have been transplanted to make room for marinas and golf courses the practice of forcibly evicting people from their homes and settlements is a growing global phenomenon and represents a crude violation of one of the most elementary principles of the right to adequate housing as defined in the United Nations home settlements program which states that people should not be forced to move to housing that constitutes a worse situation the new replacement housing for displaced locals is often an outlying locations in the form of nondescript densely group three story developments surrounded by vast tracks of empty land the question that is left on the table is who determines what is better what caught my attention in one development was the use of the feeble gesture of introducing orange stripes on the buildings in the hope hopes of making the living situation more hospitable Michael Towsick describes interstices of notation that lie at the outer limits of order as representing this chance collection this is an app description for what happens in my sketchbook yet on the floor at this in the sketch which serves as a polymps for my research the sketchbook is open to chance random notes with the sketchbook each mark reflects a thought without one leading to another these notations writing drawing color start studies calculations are all part of a search or investigation without a resolution in mind yet out of all of this randomness I discover a continuity the research is critical to my process for without it I could draw and develop a model I need to start with something that is tangible it is essential that the decision-making process in the creation of the work is evident I understand this is not merely as the making marking of the form by the variability and texture of the process but as an overriding aesthetic it is a method that relies on an inquiry inquiring interpretive attitude premised on experimentation this process and the aesthetics of the work are as significant as the final work I have included some older work an example of an influences to help contextualize my practice this is really old this is a slide of the third exhibition of the Society of Young Artists from 1921 early inspirations include a fascination with the ethos that surrounded the Russian constructivist for a very brief period 1917 to 1923 the work contained on heroic building materials used in the raw state that were assembled in an idiosyncratic manner that suggested a distrust of sent of surgeries and centricities of authority importantly I was interested in the role they were accorded within society perhaps this brief moment may be compared with 1968 when throughout the developed countries student protest and the emergence of a counterculture appeared to announce the rise of a new class capable of grasping power this new class consisted of administrators scientists engineers educators social workers and artists this is the sitski's prown room for 1923 prown is a term coined by Russian supremacist artist elu sitski in the early part of the 20th century prown does not have an exact definition low says low the sitski stated that it was the station where one changes from painting to architecture while researching turbulent historical moments I learned of the situation is I was intrigued by their notion of the everyday and appreciated their desire to transform everyday life through a process of deterrent I have three different definitions each becoming more strident past and present here's a first one past and present artistic production were integrated to produce new and startling works the integration of past a present or past artistic production into a superior construction or a milieu or the theft of our test of aesthetic artifacts from their context and their diversion into context of one's owns to design devise I identified with their technique of the derive an engaged but indeterminate passage through public spaces a cycle geographical drift for its ability to map how the built environment particularly public spheres affects the emotions and behavior of individuals I just found this recently this quotation that I was kind of amused by in 1924 Winston Churchill said there is no doubt whatever about the influence of architecture and upon human character in action we make our buildings and afterwards they make us they regulate the course of our lives there has been a long-standing threat of recognition that the way people live their lives is directly linked to the designed environments in which they live whether the explicit intention to influence behavior drives the design process architectural determinism or whether the behavioral consequences of design decisions are only revealed and considered as part of a post occupancy evaluation or by social scientists or psychologists studying the impact of a development there are links between the design of the built environment and our behavior both individually and socially in my sculptural practice I have continued to explore how forms of spatial organization evolve into naturalized forces within the urban environment curiously I've been very reluctant to become involved with public art until recently and it was not an opportunity that I actively saw but I'll return to public art later on I investigate public spaces recreational buildings transportation centers and cities undergoing mass urbanization for example this is a really old lucky me draws upon the image of a roulette table that a commissioner was in the process of seizing during a period in history when gambling was illegal casinos as places for gambling delineate a connection between behavior and space their physical boundaries completely obscure the routine activities of everyday working life involvement occurs as leisure and during a time when one's basic physiological needs are satiated the participant independently and voluntarily selects the game as well as their mode of participation risk and uncertainty are always present and contribute to a cognitive emotional and physical arousal which can symbolically reclaim a sense of mastery over one's destiny for cultural cultural critic Norman Klein the scripted spaces of Las Vegas casinos are the epitome of urban design within a financialized culture he describes the slot machines as turning risk into a consumer thrill yet their main function is statistical control scar the um that's the name of that piece um the form references the game croconel the idea in forming the work is that events cannot always be understood in terms of causal links possibly there are fissures eruptions and then life proceeds from there this is arsenic and lace looking to mass produce puzzles that children play with i wanted to reinvigorate the idea that living is bewildering strange and sometimes wonderful another reading for this work is that the fake pearls are draped across the absent portrait of the precisely cut cardboard frame spin evokes camera apertures and specifically refers to the window treatment of Jean Nouvel's institute of the Arab world in paris thinking about who is shut out and by whom and sonnambulant this work reference the blank walled elevated enclosed walkways in mauled america um other scripted spaces that i'm interested in are spaces of containment prisons furniture architectural forms Michel Foucault speaks about security apparatuses effective security apparatuses is not to impose anything or anyone but instead to select the most favorable elements from the spontaneous behaviors of a given population and then shape an environment to optimize them still further until the very predominance excludes unwanted traits outright repression continues to exist but it is reserved for dangerous elements that could perturb the system for this group of work i considered what constitutes regulatory apparatuses i was not familiar with the people's mic or the human microphone until the occupy movement it is a means for delivering a speech to a large group of people where people gathered around the speaker repeat what the speaker says thus amplifying the voice of the speaker without the need of amplification equipment it was first used by the anti-nuclear movement in the united states during the 70s and 80s so as to make sure that a speaker's every word can be tested in one in one's own body i strive to assemble works that touches one physically through tenuous idiosyncratic assemblages abstraction enables my constructions to embody an act of uncertainty the work does not necessarily represent specific urban spaces or buildings but denotes a gesture that responds to the social dynamic that plays out in each space and how we comprehend through the surface materials we experience my work keeps the connections to us reference informal and material threads i want the viewer to have this uncanny sense of knowing what the forms refer to without being able to name them the production value of the objects is kept low through an emphasis on everyday materials and construction materials i prefer to engage in the production of three-dimensional objects in a modest quotidian and non-celebratory way i value the non-specialness of my materials they are everyday building materials we tend to think of these materials relevant to their ability to become something else and overlook their aesthetic properties what i like about these materials is that their meaningfulness comes out of a relation between their aesthetic properties their general use and specific applications for instance you cannot delete any of these qualities from your understanding of a two by four the universalizing characters of the architectural references that are drawn in my work are cast into doubt by the fragility of the building materials and the incongruity of their design it is essential that the industrial logic of production be revealed through the use of prosaic objects that are almost exclusively manufactured to be concealed when the construction process is complete i see them as a supporting cast necessary but overlooked objects existing for no other reason than to play a support role in the execution of the assembly logic of modern building technology i explore these quotidian objects in their most raw and utilitarian form to create idiosyncratic and tenuous assemblages gene randoff is a psychoanalyst cultural theorist critic art writer and performer describes the phenomena that arises from and defines the exigen exigencies of capitalist production as a blueprint for human activity or the technological ethos it is with this ethos in mind that i pilfer in glorious objects to engage with what i perceive as loose ends and exectrances in insecticities in the forms that define social convention as gene randoff states if the arts do not insist that technology be perceived as a found object malleable revisable unfinished culture will have abdicated its power okay um this is like one of donald jugg's works from 1984 where he referred to one thing after another as essential for minimalist work to reveal its logic of assembly it is almost impossible for a viewer to fail to understand how a work constructed according to the principle has been made he had made he had his works made in a factory in order to obtain a perfect finish without having to rework the material in this way the minimalist module can essentially be seen as a means of ensuring legibility avoiding this kind of certitude my work offers an interaction where an inherent part of the reading of the work is the subjectivity with which it is constructed where the provisional indifferent mutable construction borders on the observe and interrupt and interrupts legibility this is um cloistered and um the physical partitions function to reinforce social economic and professional hierarchies the image that i was actually looking at um was a cafeteria they're the cafeteria partitions that were designed by frank geary for the kondinast headquarters this is um this work is like a tiny proscenium is made from blue polystyrene and a cardboard canopy wood grain curtain panels are stitched together with a chain that is usually attached to your bathtub plug the wood laminate leans on the foam rather than hang suspended from above knowing the weight of the laminate we know we understand that the canopy cannot take the weight the private space behind is suspended in anticipation this one's called world traffic and while making world track traffic i discovered how extensive the theoretical writing is on airports i'm interested in how entry into an airport is an entry into a non-place where you relinquish control of subjectivity on one level airports can operate as buildings that facilitate escape an escape however whose terms of engagement are dependent on gender race class and which passport you're carrying i was interested in the way the wing shape informed architectural decisions worldwide from the inception of air travel modernist architects made the metaphorical connection between airflow airspeed the streamlined section of the wing and the determinants of functional design at the entrance to the airport there's a certain level of finish and architectural attention but as you proceed further into the airport as you lose more and more of your rights and your personal freedom it becomes bereft of any design humphrey osman primarily known for his research into interesting and useful applications for psychedelic drugs also explored aspects of the psychology of social environments he began a line of research into what he called social architecture to improve patient settings coining the terms social fugo and social petal to describe spaces which drive people apart and together respectfully our airports are often among the most social fugal spaces this project lucy house started when i saw a project that royal studio built in mason's ben alabama their challenge was to build low income housing using surplus carpet to carpet tiles they devised a technique to layer the tiles so that when compressed they form the walls of the house this work is lift and it is in it's informed by kibbutz's drawing of a house intended to be mass produced of inexpensive standardized materials the structure consisted of six slender pillars standing on a broad flat base and supporting two other floors or areas that may be interpreted as an upper floor and a flat roof the stories are connected by a free standing minimal staircase the ground floor is raised on six blocks this is a movable feast a can a pellegrino pellegrino can holds the components in their spatial position although fixed for the moment it still relates the object to instability and informality the use of these items for everyday life embeds the reference to social reality into the symbolic poetics of the object it is provisional or does it belong to the object the precarious moments within their making are revealed alongside architects and other artists i became interested in projects that focused on informal economies and modes of living self-organized communities in urban areas of developing countries in the global south at the time i was able to travel to um several south american countries the interest in informality was premised on the assumption that models of urbanism based on modernism had failed interestingly the term precarity has surfaced in recent years in both academic and activist circles to describe the unique conditions of employment specifically the prevalence of part-time work temporary contracts self-employment the absence of union representation and at the most abrasive edge of precarity informal work by undocumented migrants in a neoliberal economy by contrast to classic forward disemployment conditions where you had the same job for life a stable identity rooted in one's permanent employment pierre bourdeux a socialist anthropologist and a philosopher refer referred to precariousization of employment as a mode of domination of a new kind based on the creation of a generalized and permanent state of insecurity aimed at forcing workers into submission into the acceptance of exploitation precarity in art is political in that it signifies a kind of resistance through its very form rather than exclusively through its content it is not to be confused with something immaterial or ephemeral rather it signals a fundamental lack of stability and this indeterminacy is part of the structure of the work um and some of the definitions around precarity that relate to art is that the work is conceived without an end in mind into relationship between the viewer and the object held by a doubtful tenure precarity is a tactic to open up a space for questioning and to respond to a dominant culture that cananizes that which is stable complete fixes a means to corral and contain difference this precariousness is based on alternative forms of spatial organization and on a spatial concept that links the understanding and experience of space with a subject's agency recently my focus has shifted from actual spaces spaces that propose social conventions to areas where precarious alternate structures of power lie in seeming opposition to this existing hegemony that something like architecture or social spaces and cities is precarious implies that its future is hinged on unknown conditions that are neither certain nor stable favelas burials are communities that are built and organized from the ground up we're buildings and public spaces are founded on principles of assemblage and alternate social organization this research informed a body a work that focused on the seams where internal economic and social systems collide through this indeterminacy i question what is suggested embodied and represented in our constructed environments it is a challenge to the integrity of constructed space a means to destabilize a to destabilize singular readings and question his power to regulate this was a project we recognize the contemporary art gallery beginning in the eighties with an exhibition in an unsanctioned church in Rome I have actually sought opportunity to exhibit in spaces that did not conform to the white white cube the challenges allow for possibilities that would not have occurred otherwise um Godford Semper a founder of modern architectural theory is known for theorizing the relationship between structural and representational concerns through the idea of tectonics in his book style in the technical and tectonic arts he argues that architecture's most fundamental fundamental task is to resist gravity and that is primary aesthetic goal is to represent symbolically the drama of this internal struggle for Semper architecture possesses a visual language of structure that is purely symbolic and entirely independent of material conditions through the deployment of new technologies buildings that appear to defy gravity entirely emerge in the form of spectacular gestures that are so complicated that one loses all sense of structural integrity I view this as a resurgence of ornamentation based on material developments and technical agility where ornamentation is integral to a building's construction and is not based on external references as a movement to substitute standardization with the celebration of the unique according to how I've defined my practice through process experimentation gesture that responds to the social dynamic that plays out in space and precarity and precarity you can foresee the challenges that public art presents um so I'll talk about one of a project that I did with have your campbells and we worked on this project for the Richmond Olympic Oval the project was sponsored by the city of Richmond to create an integrated art design landscape piece that would operate as an integral component to a larger art and landscape experience across the entire Richmond Olympic Oval site our site was along the bank of the Fraser River between a walkway in the Oval it sparked our interest for we observed that the path was heavily used but provided no reason for people to stop and enjoy the space it kind of resembled a conveyor belt for efficiently moving people along site works responds to the fact that unlike the other two arms of the Fraser River the middle arm was not industrialized due to its relatively shallow depth accordingly the iconography of the project is an abstraction of the geological processes of the middle arm of the Fraser River the the deposition of alluvium as well as the inexorable slow downstream flow of material and accumulation in the form of logs and debris along the water's edge the project is comprised of four main elements a long low alluvial concrete wall and three viewing platforms the 385 foot alluvial wall is oriented along the edge of the pedestrian walking path mimicking the deposition of the pattern of alluvium and prospectively distorting the measured the measured distance as it diminishes gradually in both height and width over its entire length and then the viewing platforms are oriented perpendicular to the walking path and have been constructed to reflect the decretion of material that accumulates along the riverbank each of the three platforms bridge river and shore have been oriented to focus on the component parts of the middle arm of the Fraser River so and then um this this was um the project that Elizabeth mentioned called second date that i when i was invited by the vancouvert gallery um it's kind of an interesting it is public art but yet it's like exhibiting within a gallery and it's a much more it's kind of interesting because you know of the duration it's only there for like four months or six months or whatever unlike there's so much pressure with public art over you know that it's going to last forever or at least 25 years so in two in 2011 i was invited by the vancouvert gallery to propose a project for this offsite location beside the Shangri-La this architectural space is of special interest as the surrounding forms embody our relationships with societal power as well as expressions of the industrial logic invested in the material production that underwrites our society i recalled an image that depicted a luxury high-rise apartment in i can't find the image so it might have been in Rio or could have been in Sao Paulo i can't quite remember the location was particularly egregious as it bordered alongside a large favela each floor contained a single apartment with a swimming pool on its balcony in order to ensure sunshine for each floor at the balcony supporting the pools were staggered on the face of the building studio gang used a similar strategy to provide premium views for their aqua tower project in chicago so with this architectural in mind i built this model for second date the programs used to design the buildings are referred to would have been algorithmic in conception i disrupted the process by maintaining the regular hand cut edges in the machine fins the mirrored surface proposes a psychological and physical form of spatialization that is at once open to all and uniquely privatized this is a slide of users that actually meet so the viewer in this project were encouraged to participate but at the same time understood that their participation is not entirely necessary and then there's more a couple more images okay so public art funding through civic programs ensures that there are artworks included within new architectural developments yet these projects are often viewed as primarily cosmetic in contrast to the logic and construction methods that create architecture i propose deceptively simple architectural or simple sculptural gestures that reorient our perception of urban space and simultaneously work against the imperative to stand to standardize our built environment and the proliferation of the seemingly unique that belies us very logically so it's currently well it shouldn't be currently because it's supposed to be finished but it's not i'm working on a project in richman for a senior residence owned by koanis so the more i looked at the plans i realized that this public art space is really not intended for residential space or for residential use there are many more there are many kind better alternatives within the development and only the rare individual individual would choose to sit amongst the fumes and enjoy the traffic sounds so this space is not about providing outdoor living for the residents the space has several access points and they're all fire exits um so um so this is um like i'm now working with an architect because i'm really only interested in the conceptual stage and then i'd just like to walk away from the whole process which doesn't make you popular necessarily but um so this is how the project has kind of evolved um and interesting are you things have been flipped a little bit because the piece originally that i envisioned that would be cast in concrete was going to be like prohibitively expensive so we flipped it around and so what was originally going to be made in wood is now concrete but i'm kind of fine with in fact i thought it was probably a better solution that's the one thing that's fun about public art is you get to work with lots of different people sometimes they have better idea often they have better ideas than you so um so this public art opportunity is on the east side of the development far away from where residents enter and exit from the buildings so and i wanted to resist the kind of anality that historically frames decisions with respect to a senior's residence and then here i think there's some architectural renderings and um what the pieces are kind of looking like now at first of all i was in trouble because they were convinced that everyone was going to think this was a blade like like some kind of like weapon but we seemed to have we've seemed to got that one by um okay so um the work is so the work is oriented yeah so the work is oriented to address the residents on the inside and on the second and on the second story outdoor area and on yeah on the second story there is a really quite nice outdoor area so the the tips you'll they'll see the tops and um so um with public art you're continually challenged by formulaic solutions that the city and the developers adhere to and that do not address the particular conditions of the site the city of richmond has agreed to pull the trees to the edges and to clump them rather than you know how they like in the city to evenly space them and leaving the space in the middle open to kind of a wilder raw kind of garden with year round experience that that it will have potentially evolve through the seasons with color texture and form so okay so i explore aspects of architecture that go beyond function and the generation of spaces it is the possibility of rethinking built forms as symbols and models of organization and the body meant a political demand that interests me can i get rid of at least one of these so if anyone has any questions we're just going to pass hi elisabeth thanks thanks for your talk um i have a question about color sorry about the color oh and and my question is i guess how do you how do you make those decisions and how do you see them functioning in relation to the structures that you're building because i would suggest that your choices are quite i was going to say eccentric but subjective and how does that come about in relation sorry to the structures well they're subjective in that whatever i'm thinking about it in terms of the the spaces or the architectural reference that they definitely have reference to what i'm referring to in order to conceptualize the work and i mean it's interesting that i um don't really mix my colors i rely on benjamin moor quite heavily and um because um i used to think and i'm you know elizabeth's influence is coming through but i used to always apply color so that it there was no evidence of me as if i was painting a wall you know what you try to do as perfectly as possible so i was really thinking very much in terms of architecture but more recently i have been uh interested in in my presence like leaving my mark and like this is a fairly recent piece and you can see like there's some really nice brushstrokes in there so i'm learning to paint i i noticed just to follow up for example in the off-site maquette you had one color on the ground on the water where the water is and then in the actual final version my memory is the it you shifted it to yellow and yeah i what would lead to those kind of decisions um i mean for i've been quite interested in works that are sort of acidic and colors that are acidic and so yeah i can't you know i to be perfectly honest i can't actually remember why i made the ship but it was it was driven by the ideas around of the kind of of that particular space why i made the ship from the orange to the yellow it was it was a pathetic there was like you know a reason i have a question about the the forms that you use in your work and um how you arrive at them and whether or not there's elements of perspective or like perspective perspective space that inform the shapes that come up even in this in this one here it seems like it references depth or some sort of architectural space well they're always referring back to i think pretty much definitely referring to used to be more so to a particular architectural space but i'm not so much interested in that maybe anymore but i'm more i have things as i've been quite obsessed with prisons and different ways of containment and so um and then by um first i i use perspective quite a bit because i my um sculptures are really the right low relief and so um using perspective is a is a great tool in order to manipulate the space but it's not using perspective in any kind of you know two point or three point way it's kind of it's invented but it takes for me to figure out the pieces that they're built many times starting with the drawings and then moving to cardboard and then they often um they'll be in quite a few different scales in the studio before they can make sense for me did that answer your question yeah thanks i have question landed thank you for that talk um it's interesting where you decided to start for instance you didn't start with a lot of the objects that i've known in the past that had like styrofoam or tin off the side of a building type of things where you really seem to always have a lot of really privileged the um sort of unusual building material so that people always look twice when they're at Windsor plywood again or that that kind of thing often was very influential i think in my experience of your work early on but tonight you decided to start the talk with a narrative about columbia making sure that we didn't enter the work thinking formally that you you brought a very strong very heavy sort of narrative of people and distress and complicated um relationships to an underpass as an architectural or urban form why do you think that that kind of narrative beginning of a talk which serves i think to derail us from thinking of your work formally or in terms of any kind of formalist discussion might be useful um yeah no it's a definite strategy because it's really sometimes in the past i found it's really easy to oh yeah um yeah step in and obviously it was a definite strategy because um sometimes in the past i felt when i've given a talk that it's really easy to just try to pigeonhole the work is only it was being purely formal which for me it's it's not you know it's about all of these other ideas and so i thought it was kind of a more honest way that it might kind of what the way that i really approach the work which isn't necessarily obvious to the viewer when they come at it cold though i have to say i'm always like pleasantly surprised that when people actually are standing i mean there's one thing to look at sculpture up there and another thing to stand in sculpture in a gallery and people are pretty amazing in what they do understand when they're actually physically standing in front of the work yeah i mean you know when you give a talk you try all different strategies hello um thank you for your talk i had a question about uh your material choices and you had mentioned halfway through your talk about the uh aesthetic of materials being overlooked often because of their function or the way that you use everyday materials because they have sort of multiple layers and um there's a narrative i guess that goes along with that and my question is how important is it to you that someone say viewing the work kind of on formal terms sees the connection between um where those materials are derived from or or perhaps the reference for site or location and use does that make sense um so how like you're wondering how important to me is that that a person reads the materials as like a two by four or they read it as a piece of plywood that and and how you kind of go about making that decision i mean is it important for you that the materials are viewed as building materials or if it's or if it's more about their aesthetic qualities um no it's important that they're viewed as as everyday materials and that these are the kind of materials that i think as i said that are normally hidden or used in multiples you know like you know if you see plywood it's you know when it's brought out of the building site you know it's brought in by the crane you know they're they're bringing it in whereas i'm using it kind of lovingly and very kind of carefully um in a singular way so so i'm kind of interested in in uh yeah breaking apart those kind of notions because i think it's maybe it's symbolic of like other things within our within our culture like if we have the same kind of care and attention to lots of things that we just sort of take for granted or like yeah so that's that's that was part of the early rationale why i started to use the building materials but you get you know it's really with like with everything in art making you're so particular about like every kind of decision so now it becomes like very particular about i mean i fell in there's a you know the maple ply what is it i think i oh it's a baltic birch that wins or ply wood that artists have been using quite a bit and it's really nice because of it's doesn't have a lot of grain like it's pretty so you get very particular but depending on the piece of what kind of grain you want even you know and like i was looking at someone's work today and i think i asked you about your plywood your source of plywood because i saw oh yeah the the gridded paintings because like i'm really want that kind of plywood you have they caught my eye you know because they're the piece that i want to cut out next i want that kind of because it and you'd found it in the back lane but it has uh it's it's red it's kind of reddier and it and it kind of seems rougher like it has a less finished yeah so it's all kind of everything has a very particular decision and even with the painting you know like if it's and i know this is like so obvious for a painter but for for me to have to start to think about it you know if it was like if i was using a stain or if it had glossy or if it's flat you know like all those those are really quite important for me building like kind of building elements that i have to think about no like occasionally i make one because it just makes sense about the drawing or whatever but originally like when i went when i went to school like a little while ago um there was a very particular way about how sculpture was taught and sculptured and there was all these rules and so i kind of methodically went through breaking all the rules and one of the rules was that sculpture had to be in the round you could not so i didn't understand and and the color didn't need there was just i mean it was just ridiculous so at first you know i had the wall the wall i sighed a little work up to the wall and i wouldn't even like screw it in or take the liberty i felt that it wouldn't be called sculpture if it actually couldn't be free like freestanding on its own which is like it's so bizarre like so many so but then i i found that once that i kind of sidled the sculpture up to the wall that the wall then started to be this kind this like the picture plane and and because the sculptures always read a little bit like drawings it just it increased my vocabulary and also having the picture plane of the wall to play against it really increased the prospect the ability to use the perspective in the work so yeah my preference it does seem to be to still to use the wall they they used to be really big they used to be you know quite quite large and i couldn't make them small and it was sort of a nuisance to tell you the truth um and they were always falling down and and and then i i i don't know i just learned i wanted to have a scale there's something more it's like ridiculous but when you're making really really big sculptures really limits where they can go or who even can actually have them right so i wanted it to be more democratic in a way and not limited that so yeah they are quite small now or medium size so yeah i should try to make a big one again hi um yeah actually my question follows up the last question about scale mostly in terms of public art in opposition to pieces that are in a gallery space it seems like they obviously scale changes a lot of things and it seems like some of your pieces in the gallery seem a little bit more flimsy and fragile and kind of um you know they're kind of balancing and you talked about i don't know if you talked about the ephemeral but about some things like that indeterminacy and it seems like in your public art pieces these things are not as present or something has changed would you agree or or what has changed or what changes between those two kind of scales well i think the one at the vancouver art gallery still managed to appear not as um not not flimsy you know you disagree it looks solid oh yeah it was just gator board yeah yeah and if you were standing in front of it you could see um because the way that when i cut the model in the studio with just a knife that was all translated into the gator board so it wasn't machined or anything it had the look as if i'd just been at the site carving it with you know my little knife it's pretty difficult given the limitations of public art within north america to make anything that really is flimsy because they just they just won't they won't fly right but then does your approach changes or does it's just not really not because like i'm really spoiled i make i put the idea together and then i walk away and my partner's an architect it becomes his problem and and then um the vancouver art gallery introduced me to these amazing people local people who actually built built the piece um i mean i i work closely but they actually machined it the piece that was installed at the shangra law and they're working they're actually making the project for richman as well and um they actually are all architects but they actually prefer to to make things and it's actually it's pretty amazing to work with them because they try to get into they don't try to impose upon you the right way to do things they try to figure out what you were thinking about and why you made those kind of decisions so yeah i'm not sure i would be interested in public art if i had to take it from beginning to end some people do things better than me you know i didn't show all the public art projects that i haven't won i only showed you the successful ones any other questions for elspeth thank you for your off the hook thanks so much elspeth