old trivia
Clare Yow is an independent visual artist working in a library in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
She is a fan of nightbirding and shutter depression,
heartthrobs, blueprints, and changes of scenery.
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Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery | MFA Graduate Exhibition 2010
The exhibition opened on Friday and the reception is on Thursday. It’s been wonderful hearing back from friends through email and Facebook after I made my various attempts to mass-promote our show. As well, we’ve received the first comments from the visitor kiosk (digital guestbook) in the gallery.. I think it will be a nice next few weeks.
Images L-R: Clare Yow, Maxine and I (detail), 2009; Zoe Tissandier, Home Away From Home, Away From Home (detail), 2010; Fan-Ling Suen, study for The Teeter-Slaughter (detail), 2010; Sydney Hermant, After Second Nature (detail), 2010; Keesic Douglas, Blanket #3 (detail), 2010.
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Still chugging along with my thesis papier. I have more to write and wrap up with, but it’s a slow process, to say the least. Two more months till exhibition and three until things come to a screeching halt. Gotta keep pushing. At least it’s sunny and getting warmer. Now, only if other things would stop being so trying..
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Man and Spam (installation view), 2010
.. This is a new piece I showed last Friday during the fourth and final Open Studios of my MFA career. It was a pretty good night. The video doesn’t do the piece justice because when you look down on the floor into the mirror to read the piece, there is a real sense of depth and wanting to plunge into the reflective surface. Man and Spam comes on the heels of Women and Song, which I showed at the Open Studios before this (it was a pile of 8.5” x 11” sheets of paper printed with uncut fortune cookie fortunes from popular songs sung by females).
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New piece I’ve been working on for the past short while (week and a half?). This picture was taken in the late afternoon, after I’d struggled to (at one point I had a tack lightly poking into the roof of my mouth..), and then finally, successfully, pinned the sheet to my studio wall. The whole paper is 12 feet x 48 inches, and this is only a fraction of the sheet covered (maybe 70%? I’m not so good at math). The work is tentatively titled “Women’s Studies.” I was getting excited at the prospect of maybe this piece appearing as part of my contribution to the grad show. But I think how I procured this work - or rather, the elements that make up this work - might be frowned upon by the institution; seeing as it is vandalism of sorts :|
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I’m going to try my hand at letterpress again tomorrow. The last time - which was also the first time since my demo from Marijke - it was difficult getting the ink to warm up and apply smoothly. That, and finding all the letters I needed was hard! I need something like 20 ‘O’s and 20 ‘E’s along with many others.. there’s such a wealth of letters and in so many different types and sizes I guess I wasn’t prepared for the task at hand. Next attempt, tomorrow.
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Am battling my Roundtables presentation paper right now. Abstracts are due to Audrey on Friday. Friday! Abstracts are abstract. Never forget. On the bus today, I wrote up a rough outline on my iPod. I was trying to come up with a title even before having written anything. I think it actually helped. Usually the title is the last thing, right? This evening, despite feeling a bit worn from the day, I actually made a small dinner and am eating a small wild salmon filet and steamed bok choy and potatoes. I used my new metal steamer; it was about time that I got one. For dessert, a slice of apple pie, grapes, and a fuji apple (or is it a pear? I forget) - all to go with my night of reading. Yum yum. A few days back, I was suffering from a few of my starvation-induced headaches. When I get busy, I really do forget to eat which I know is so unhealthy… I tutored this afternoon and made Jerry chat with me about his daily activities, summer plans, and Victoria, among other things. And then we played hangman, which he has now decided and declared that he hates (along with Scrabble), because I keep guessing all of his, while my words are all hard. But he did good today - sometimes he surprises me - as instead of me giving him clues, he asked questions. We laughed a lot. It has been frustrating at times because he is a thirteen year old boy who doesn’t like to do work, which I do understand because he already spends the whole day in school, but I think when we make it fun, it’s all right. Oh, I saw Nine and Pirate Radio last night at the Hollywood Theatre. I like them both, and the latter was surprisingly really good. Murray from Flight of the Conchords!
*Film still from Adam, dir. Max Mayer, 2009
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Some images from after it got a bit quieter at the opening reception of Sights/Sites of Spectacle. These pictures aren’t so good but I’ll be back to properly document it better this week. It’s been a hectic but enjoyable couple days of the Symposium and I’m happy that the piece has been received well and I quite liked that people were taking pictures of it on their camera phones. Congratulations to Shaun Dacey who brought all these artists together. It’s been so fun getting to know him and the other artists (Shaun is also from the same area of Mississauga and went to school at Erindale! a couple years before me though).
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Hi! I am participating in an exhibition as part of the 29th Annual Art History Graduate Symposium: Sights/Sites of Spectacle, running Wednesday, 27 January to Saturday, 20 February (which happens to coincide with the Winter Olympics festivities). It is my first official showing in Vancouver so I am very excited and anxious, but it is also the first time I am exhibiting a sculpture (and it is the first sculpture I’ve made). Installation day is mere days away and I completed the painting of the wood panels this evening. Hard parts are coming up… wish me luck :) Images to come…
“Sights/Sites of Spectacle ponders the ubiquitous nature of spectacle within our everyday lives through the work of contemporary artists. Spanning broad conceptual and thematic grounds each artist approaches spectacle from a different entry point. At times disparate, contradictory, and confusing, this collection of contemporary sites of spectacle considers how our culture is engaging or disengaging with the concept of passive consumerism and mass media control.”
“Since the release of the seminal book Society of Spectacle by Guy Debord in 1967, the concept of spectacle has informed the practices of many artists. Sights/Sites of Spectacle ponders the ubiquitous nature of spectacle through the work of contemporary artists. Spanning broad conceptual and thematic grounds including 1960’s new wave cinema (Claire Hodge), gay pornography (Jade Yumang), Chinese immigration fantasies (Clare Yow), technological and public displays of affection (Laiwan), Las Vegas Marquee signage (Kristi Malakoff), the death of analog television (OMG TV), optics (Jon Reed and Christina Gray), the contemporary art market (Mo Salemy), newspaper headlines (Zoe Tissandier), Olympic branding (Katie Brennan), and binning culture (Eleanor King), each artist approaches spectacle from a different entry point. At times disparate, contradictory, and confusing, this collection of contemporary sites of spectacle considers how our culture is engaging or disengaging with the concept of passive consumerism and mass media control.”
Opening Reception: Friday, January 29th, 5:30pm
Artist Talk: Friday, January 29th, 12-1pm
Location: University of British Columbia - Gallery, Located in Room 112, 1st Floor of Koerner Library, 1985 Main Mall
Artists: Katie Brennan • Claire Hodge • Eleanor King • Laiwan (I.K. Barber) • Kristi Malakoff • OMG TV • Jon Reed & Christina Gray (Lasserre Building) • Mo Salemy • Zoe Tissandier (I.K. Barber) • Clare Yow • Jade Yumang
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If you are in the city, the rest of the Symposium schedule can be found here.
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I am on Musqueam Land, 2009
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Yes, yes, crunch time is most certainly underway. Ten days until my interdepartmental critique. It’s mainly people from our department (from the three streams of visual art, art history, and curatorial studies) who attend these but it’s open to the public as well. I’m not really nervous [yet] I guess, more of trying to get my pieces finished. I have my sculpture (“Gold Mountain”) which I put together last week in order to take pictures of it for my submission to the Art History Symposium, but it will be dismantled and installed some blocks away in another building for the crit. It’s still being added to. And then I have a small series of four black-and-white negs that I’ll be making 20” x 24” fibre prints of. Series tentatively titled “Invisible Minority.” Aside from that, my English paper is due the day before my birthday which is the day after the critique.
Open Studios is on December 7th and this year I’ve had to do quite some prep as the MFA rep (compared to little effort last year). Our evening reception is joint with the BFAs and so planning has been heightened. We put an ad out in a publication that has a readership of 70,000 (which includes that of Artforum). It’ll be tiring but hopefully enjoyable-tiring (12-9pm). I’m trying to put together another piece for then - three is a good, solid number to have. “Year of the Ox” has been a work in progress since January and is due to be completed next year. I showed some of the actual 6” x 6” sheets in the last two Open Studios but this year I’m going to try - in the next however long I have before the 7th - to present them in a more finished form. I came home this evening to eat dinner after tutoring Jerry, then left for studio, only to return home before 11:30. Tomorrow I meet with my advisors.
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I am presently actually extremely excited about my studio practice. It usually takes me a while to get going because I have all these ideas and it makes me frazzled a bit. I have four ideas I want to concentrate on and have been developing (this is from a list of probably ten). But I’ve been speaking to people and asking for help and advice so it’s been swell. Okay, so now you be my soundboard..
I started work on what I would call a sculptural piece this weekend. Because I haven’t really worked in a studio,I always forget I should really be wearing shoddy clothes but I don’t own any! I got paint on my jeans because I sat in a wet patch but at least it wasn’t a great pair. I hope for this piece to be done in maybe two weeks. It involves lots of fortune cookies and a reference to ‘land art.’ I painted fifty or so on Sunday and they are still drying as we speak. Better ventilation is necessary, I have to remind myself.
My other idea is a text piece, and I’d mentioned wood carving previously. It’s going to be a lot of work and for someone with zero experience, I’m simultaneously dreading and am excited about starting it. I envision thirteen or fourteen text panels with words/phrases made via relief carving. The phrases are related to borders - national, physical, imagined.The next piece is a photographic series - to do with land, and in particular Vancouver and the school campus and the land it is on. The rain is starting tomorrow and continues for a while apparently, which is unfortunate because I need it to not be wet out. I think I might need help with this work as it is a self-portraiture series, but I think it’s do-able to make on my own with some creativity.
My other ‘final’ idea (I use that loosely) is initially not really related to my present practice at all but I have ideas as to how I’m going to relate it. I was very fortunate to get a tour of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum on campus yesterday because I helped run a pilot project for elementary school students in the spring. The museum isn’t opening until next year and it’s still under construction, so the few of us saw the hundreds of empty cabinets without any specimens yet. Really amazing. A blue whale skeleton will hang in their great hall / lobby area and we were told that schoolkids will be able to lie down underneath it to see if they can match its length. Where the real goldmines were, were in the backrooms. Some of you might be aware that for my undergrad major thesis project, I’d been photographing natural history museum dioramas for months — Toronto (ROM), Ottawa (Nature Museum), Montreal (Redpath), Washington D.C., Pittsburgh (Carnegie), Buffalo (Science Museum). I have this magnet attraction to stuffed animals, you could say. Anyway, I’ll leave it at that because I don’t want to give too much away!
To add as well, I’ve been doing an overhaul on my website, particularly the Portfolio section to include newer works. It’ll be finished shortly and I plan on eventually moving the site to a more professional domain name as much as I love the current one.
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Working on this picture again, for a specific reason. I renamed it “On the Hill,” from what originally, I can’t actually remember. I said during my seminar introduction a few weeks back (we all had to present our own work but I decided I wanted to focus more on my influences) that I wanted to make a return to photography because that is what I’ve done and know best / better than any other medium. I wasn’t lying, but I still haven’t done that. Well, MFA-wise at least.
I was sweetly given a Leica camera, which I had fixed at the shop for a small amount. It’s a 50mm lens, which I love, because it reminds me of my father’s old Pentax which I used up until over a year ago when the film winder stopped working. The bokeh is pretty sweet too (f/2!). I have some slide film in it and was shooting with it this weekend. Ohh beautiful sunshine. I wanted to work on a series today before going to my Thanksgiving dinner. I’ve been developing the idea for it over the past two days. I hope it works out. It calls for non-rainy weather though, and I’m afraid the rain is really starting tomorrow.
Any how, what I’m working on now… trying to realize a series of text-based pieces. They’re to do with borders - real, imagined, national, cultural, social. Or at least that’s how I see it. And I’m set on learning how to carve wood, or perhaps cutting the text out of metal, I don’t know which yet. I just want to take on way too many things - many of which are foreign to me - which I’m excited and nervous about. Working in my studio yesterday, just me alone with a pencil and my two notebooks (big and little) - it was refreshing to cycle through my ideas and attempt to make them clearer on paper.
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One more sleep before Sir Ken Robinson’s talk tomorrow. The Dalai Lama has been in the city.. would have been neat to hear him speak. Last week Rita Wong read some poems from her new book as well as some older pieces and even a work in progress. It was really good to hear a poet live. I think I’m really lucky that some great people have come to Vancouver and I’ve seen and/or interacted with them.
Last year…
- Sep 17 Dieter Roelstraete “Thing Theory: “Thingness” and the Origin of the Work of Art”
- Sep 21 Eric Santner “Reflections on the Somatic Sublime”
- Oct 6 Mary Kelly “On Fidelity - Art, Politics, Passion and Event.” (brief studio visit, public critique of my work)
- Oct 10 David Claerbout at Emily Carr University
- Oct 14 Akira Lippit “Spectral Life: Derrida, Autobiography, Experimental Film.”
- Oct 31 Dan Graham | 2 (actually didn’t hear his talk but did a studio visit with me)
- Nov 25 Dana Claxton (she also came and participated in crits during our seminar)
- Feb 12 Jeff Wall (he came to do a talk with the fourth-year art majors)
- Feb 23 Laura Mulvey “Between Film Theory and Film History: The young modern woman and the ‘flapper film’ of the 1920’s”
- Mar 3 Mark Boulos (did a talk, led our seminar class, and we all had lunch)
- March 14 Jin-Me Yoon at the Vancouver Art Gallery
- April 21 Liz Magor (had studio visits with us all, was external critic for MFA show)
- May 4 Webb Keane “On Spirit Writing: Materiality, Words, and their Magic”
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Clare Yow - Shame and the Prospect of Positivity and Productivity (2009)
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A piece I made for no reason in particular in May. It’s based on my paper of the same name. (0:06:48)
![Yes, yes, crunch time is most certainly underway. Ten days until my interdepartmental critique. It’s mainly people from our department (from the three streams of visual art, art history, and curatorial studies) who attend these but it’s open to the public as well. I’m not really nervous [yet] I guess, more of trying to get my pieces finished. I have my sculpture (“Gold Mountain”) which I put together last week in order to take pictures of it for my submission to the Art History Symposium, but it will be dismantled and installed some blocks away in another building for the crit. It’s still being added to. And then I have a small series of four black-and-white negs that I’ll be making 20” x 24” fibre prints of. Series tentatively titled “Invisible Minority.” Aside from that, my English paper is due the day before my birthday which is the day after the critique.
Open Studios is on December 7th and this year I’ve had to do quite some prep as the MFA rep (compared to little effort last year). Our evening reception is joint with the BFAs and so planning has been heightened. We put an ad out in a publication that has a readership of 70,000 (which includes that of Artforum). It’ll be tiring but hopefully enjoyable-tiring (12-9pm). I’m trying to put together another piece for then - three is a good, solid number to have. “Year of the Ox” has been a work in progress since January and is due to be completed next year. I showed some of the actual 6” x 6” sheets in the last two Open Studios but this year I’m going to try - in the next however long I have before the 7th - to present them in a more finished form. I came home this evening to eat dinner after tutoring Jerry, then left for studio, only to return home before 11:30. Tomorrow I meet with my advisors.](http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/oldtrivia/250619574/1/tumblr_kteflxiJFi1qzoz7o)
