Galleries West (Canada) Fall/Winter 2008

You can find the Fall/Winter 2008 PDF here

"Win, Place, Show; The Ever-Growing World of Art Competitions, What Does it Mean to Make the Shortlist?" by Heather Ramsay. The article looks into what these competitions mean to artists and how it affects their lives. Ramsay mentions my 2005 national award in the 1st Art Invitational Student Art Competition. She goes on to explain Eric Metcalfe's position on becoming an artist. Ramsay wrote, "Art schools across Canada are graduating thousands every year and at a recent ceremony in Alberta [Metcalfe] told the grads to look around. 'Only three of you will become artists,' he said. 'That’s how tough it is.' "

I've been asked "Why would you want to be an artist. The pay isn't good and you work too hard for what you get back. Why not just give up?" But I just want to continue, there is no reason, in fact reasons are practical things and this is not a practical decision. Financially making art can be a waste of time, but that's why we depend on the kind of people who can help fund making art.

On November 1st I photographed the installation of a work called Playroom. by ICHIHARA Hiroko and YANAI Shin-ichi. The photographed is published on the MOMAK (The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto) website in the news section.

The room the work was installed in completely changed once the elementary school students and high school students arrived. The piece was transformed from a static collection of objects into something spontaneous and carefree. These are not always the kind of reactions we want to have in an art gallery — or so it used to be, a group of people quietly contemplating a Rodin sculpture without more than a whisper. Children are not so distant from art. They enjoy jumping right into it. Playroom. is the kind of piece where you can see this transition because it was built for children and teens to interact with.

Finally the 1st Art catalogue has arrived from BMO. It shows the artwork of the winning artists between 2003 and 2007 from all across Canada. I'm happy to see that there are more winning photographs from Emily Carr Institute. The original project I submitted that was chosen as the national winner in 2005 is described in this entry. You can see more detailed images here as well.

I worked for the Vancouver Art Gallery Photo-imaging department from 2003 to 2007. I started out making scans of the artwork documented on film. Later I began to photograph artwork and installations digitally. I also photographed some events for the gallery when the event was big enough to be photographed. Here is a selection of the kind of work I did for the Vancouver Art Gallery and other freelance work in the art community.

The main image for this series is 350 cm wide but you will be able to zoom into the faces of the harvesters in the photograph with a special viewer the works right from your browser.

This way you can enjoy the images almost like you are standing right in the gallery.

The largest image in this series is a work in progress reaching 14 meters across but due to the difficulty of working with hundreds of files it will take me probably two years to fully complete the image.

このシリーズのメイン写真のサイズは幅３５０cm。しかしブラウザーから
直接動かせるビューワで写真中の収穫者たちの顔表情までズームして見ることができる。
このブラウザーでの見方はまるでギャラリーの中であなたが鑑賞しているかのような楽しませてくれる。
このシリーズの中での一番大きな写真は幅１４mにのぼり、現在製作中。何百ものファイルを使っての作業のため、
完全に完成させるまでにはあと２年を要する予定である。

After my move to Japan I realized I still have material I haven't fully processed from Vancouver. Here are some large panoramic photographs that are complete. This time they are shown much larger than I've been able to show them before.

日本へ移ってから、実はまだバンクーバーで進行中であった素材があることに気づいた。
ここではすでに完成済みのいくつかのパノラマ写真を紹介する。今回は以前よりもさらに大きなスケールで
ウェブ上にて見られるようになった。

I thought I'd show some more from this series. When I was working on this series I was thinking a lot about borders and boundaries because we're always surrounded by them. My Dad recently reminded me about how borders are changing with his example about the Schengen Area. The Czech government is notifying people that soon it will become part of this border-free zone in Europe. More on the Schengen Area.

When I was a child, I once had to stay behind while my parents went to visit relatives in Germany. This was just in case they thought of escaping from the Czech Republic. The borders were very strict and travelling anywhere meant you needed to have permission to do so. When we moved to Canada we were all so happy that we could just drop by the border and go the the United States. These days the situation is changing in Canada.

I shot the brothers series on film using an old studio camera. I had this idea to mount a camera in front on my brother Nik's car. So it took forever to shoot it but the results are worth it. We planned each shot carefully but then the moment was still spontaneous. Eventually we were pulled over by the RCMP because he wanted to know what we had attached to the 2x4s bolted to the front of Nik's '69 Beaumont. He must have thought it was cool, since we took a photo together.

In 1996, I visited the Czech Republic for the first time after 16 years. I was hanging out with my cousin Martin and his friend Mamut in the town of Žatec. It was enough time after the Velvet Revolution that we thought the Soviet flag was pretty funny and I ended up finding one in an old storage shed at a camp. I thought, “people actually had to fly this flag.”

But what about the college students willingly wearing the hammer and sickle logo around Main Street in Vancouver? And the one clothing shop on the same street using the Soviet hammer and sickle in their window display. Our generation of trivially-worried North Americans is bombarded by symbols; these kinds don’t mean anything anymore.

Even though Josef Stalin starved 11 million people under the same flag, the symbol only remains to show that the wearer is “not taking life too seriously.”

By 2006, I added 12 more flags to this series but it won’t be finished until I can bombard myself with symbols until they don’t mean anything to me anymore.

１９９６年、僕は１６年ぶりにチェコ共和国の親戚を訪ねた。　このソビエト国旗はその際、従兄弟であるマーティンとその友人、マモットとたまたま行ったジャテツという小さな町のキャンプ場にあった古小屋で見つけた。　この旗を見た時にはビロード革命からかなり時間が経っていたので僕の目にはおかしなものに写った。 　だが実際、過去には人々はこの旗を揚げなければならない時代があったのだ。

では、バンクーバーのメインストリート周辺でソビエトのシンボルである槌と鎌ロゴのシャツを喜んで着ている学生たちはどうなのか？　

そして同じメインストリートで槌と鎌をショーウィンドウに飾っている衣料店は？　 われわれの世代は北米人たちがこれらのシンボルによって本気で受け取られると心配することはなく、 もう何も意味しないようになってきている。 たとえ、かつてスターリンがこの同じ旗を使って一千万人もの人々を飢餓に苦しめたとしても、このシンボルはもうロゴを着用している若者たちにとっては真剣に受け止められていないのであろう。

２００６年までに僕はさらに１２旗をこのシリーズに追加した。　だが、これらのシンボルが意味を無くし、そして僕自身が受け取れるまでは、まだこのシリーズは続いていく。