WE’RE MOVIN’ ON UP TO THE EASTSIDE CULTURE CRAWL
Event is a heaping helping of art before the holidays
It’s great timing that Vancouver’s Eastside Culture Crawl happens just as we head into the holiday season.
The annual event, which ran last month, saw over 500 artists, designers and makers open their studios to crowds of over 30,000. It gave Vancouverites a chance to find out about the fantastic painters, sculptors, ceramicists, glassblowers, furniture-makers and others who are operating locally, and to consider them when looking for gifts or one-of-a-kind pieces for the home.
Here are some studios worth a visit:
Nathan Wiens is principal designer and owner of Wiens Studios, at 304 Dunlevy Ave., along with Chapel Arts across the street. Stepping into Wiens’s studio, you are struck by two things: Vancouver’s history — he works out of a huge, historic warehouse — and his latest creation, a 400-kilogram table that he’s made for Westbank’s 1550 Alberni tower, designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma.
“We did Japan Unlayered, in the Molo exhibit at the Fairmont Hotel,” Wiens says. “And then we got asked if we could make this and I said that we could indeed do that, and so we prototyped and made two of them, and I believe we’ll be doing 42 of them. I believe we’ll be making them for the whole tower.”
Woodworker and furniture designer Marty McLennan works out of the Vancouver Community Laboratory at 1907 Triumph St. Included in his latest work is a piece he’s named III, which comes as a bar stool or dining chair.
“III questions what is light,” he says. “Similar to the trees in my family’s Okanagan orchard, pruning improves life. Remove a limb and the sun finds its way into areas previously bound by shadow, the trees and gardens grow stronger. Likewise, III offers an elegant solution to our crowded homes by removing vertical supports and members from the backside, and leaving a pleasing arc to the viewer. Simultaneously, the loss of a leg means improved stability. III will never wobble like the woeful quadrupeds with which we do daily battle. It is a perfectly balanced tripod.”
East Vancouver’s Parker Street Studios, at 1000 Parker St., and the neighbouring Mergatroid Building at 975 Vernon Dr. house hundreds of design studios and are always worth a visit. The delicate, quirky ceramic mice and rabbit creations by Supatra Huangyutitham found in the Mergatroid Building were a fun find this year. Bought individually or as a group, they’re an unexpected decor item for a bedroom wall.
“They were part of a bigger installation that I did,” Huangyutitham says. “There were all these little mice that attached together into a bigger, giant installation at Emily Carr, and then people really responded to the individual features (the mice and rabbits), so I just started experimenting with different colours.”
Also found in the Mergatroid Building were the glass-blown creations of Maria Ida Designs.
“I start with molten glass,” Ida says. “I collect it at the end of a stainless steel pipe, and once the glass cools, I shape it and add colour and blow it out, and then I add a little ornament top and then it goes into a kiln overnight, which slowly cools it down, and then it’s ready the next morning.”
For those interested in good art, Kari Kristensen (Studio 204) and Carla Tak (Studio 310) in the Parker Street Studios are worth a visit.
The inky blue and brilliant red linocut prints by Kristensen drew quite a crowd at the crawl this year. She says she has built them over the past six years, with many repeat customers. She says her latest work is a continuation of her reflected landscapes series, which features mountains and imagined landscapes.
“I always tell people they’re all completely from my imagination, with the exception of the one over there that has the two lions,” she says.
“That one was done because it’s going to be on a pair of shoes for a local shoe company called 604.”
Tak’s artwork is unmissable. She paints six days a week and never names her work — “because I don’t have names for them,” she says — and says everything is new to her.
“Everything is fresh, and new, always,” she says. “I always wanted it to be that way, so it has live energy, and feeling in the work. That’s why when you look at my work it’s not all the same, it’s very different.
“There’s oil, and there’s these crazy paintings, and then there’s these quite ones because that’s how I paint everyday — never in a series.”