BeatRoute Magazine B.C. print e-edition - May 2016

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ONCE OUR LAND a fresh take on the end of the world A new graphic novel by Peter Ricq. It seems like there’s a surplus of post-apocalypse fiction in modern media. Television has The Walking Dead, last year’s Mad Max added to a long list of stories that take place in nuked dust bowls, and tons of novels and comics shock us with tales of wastelands not so far away. Most stories of this nature have similar setups and aesthetics, and while no one is knocking Mad Max (not even a little bit, that film was great) it’s refreshing to find any profound sense of originality in the case of a lot of these stories. Vancouver multidisciplinary artist Peter Ricq’s graphic novel, Once Our Land, sweats ingenuity from its pores with an extremely fresh take on the post-apocalyptic nightmare story. Ricq has long been a prolific force in art world. He co-created the animated television series League of Super Evil, lent his talents as junior designer on another animated series Storm Hawks, and was honoured with the jury prize for Filmmaker To Watch from the Canadian Filmmaker Festival for his 2007 animated short, Glitch. He’s also a gifted painter and musical composer/performer, the latter is showcased through his work with Gang Signs and recently Juno Award-nominated electro-pop group, HUMANS. Once Our Land is the latest in a line of accomplishments that highlight Ricq’s unique eye and irrefutable talent. Set in 1830s Germany, Once Our Land begins with creatures invading Earth from inside gift boxes that mysteriously appear on every man, woman, and child’s doorstep. The story then follows a young girl and an old man as they navigate through their devastated town while attempting to avoid the nightmarish creatures that have killed most of the other inhabitants. The artwork is gorgeous, blending ruined 1800s-style buildings drawn with stark realism and cartoonish, exaggerated characters. Speaking with Ricq over the phone, I came to realize the grand scope of not just the comic, but of how it came into existence. “I actually started it when I was 19,” Ricq reveals. “I had the first chapter done, it was black and white…I had a friend who started working for a Montreal based publisher…I sent them The Gift, which is part one. They really liked it, but they wanted me to add forty more pages because eighteen pages [wouldn’t] sell and there’s not that much dialogue so it would end up being too fast of a read.” Ricq then connected with local artist Sunny Shah and collaborated to finish the second chapter. “So, I told the publishing company from Montreal, ‘yeah I plan on doing it. Send over the papers so we can get an agreement,’” he continues. “They sent me something and it was the worst thing that I have ever seen.” Due to the lacklustre terms of the contract, Ricq decided to self-publish using Kickstarter and managed to raise roughly 15 thousand dollars through pre-sales. This month, Ricq will launch Once Our Land alongside an art exhibition that features work inspired by the novel by more than 35 international artists. Kids aged 16 and younger are encouraged to bring their own drawings of monsters, which will be displayed on the gallery’s walls, giving aspiring artists an opportunity to publicly exhibit and sell their own art for the first time. Once Our Land launches at ONLOK Gallery & Studios on May 13 by Reid Duncan Carmichael ARI LAZER the metaphysical man by Jennie Orton Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “If a man is at once acquainted with the geometric foundation of things and with their festal splendor, his poetry is exact and his arithmetic musical.” Ari Lazer is one such man. Lazer, a Vancouver-based artist and educator, is a scholar of sacred geometry — a concept that assigns meaning to numerical proportions. Through his work, he’s cultivated a keen sense of understanding of the world around him. “There was this pattern, these sets of patterns, that underlie all the phenomena in the physical world,” he says. “And it started to create a radical shift in how I perceived not only my work as an artist, but also my life as a human being. What really is important to me is emphasizing the interaction between great, well-grounded science, and profound metaphysical thought.” It’s the unifying makeup of the universe that Lazer finds most compelling. “It’s the way nature uses a finite set of resources in the most efficient way possible,” he explains. As such, it stands to reason this extends to human beings as well. In 2009, Lazer founded the Traveling Alchemists’ Outreach Society, a home base for explorations concerning the metaphysical world, and through which he conducts presentations to share his knowledge. “I’m really passionate about bringing together the right brain and the left brain,” he says, “Because I think, intuitively, in the right brain we already have this predilection to these ideas; we enter a room and it just feels better to be in there, we see a person or a tree and it just strikes us as inherently beautiful. But the left brain is struggling at this moment to catch up; how is it that looking at a six-fold pattern on a sheet of paper can make me feel this kind of emotion? So I am really fascinated with how we as human beings interact with our environment and learn from it, utilizing the same principles to create a culture where we are much more balanced.” This month, Lazer hosts a multimedia experience called Dream Journeys; an event he calls “a visual narrative journey that takes us from that first circle to the emergence of the pattern in our world.” “When we look at these simple geometric relationships that describe the vast majority of all life on this earth,” he maintains. “That is a vastly empowering and enriching thing.” Dream Journeys is held at the Vancouver Planetarium on May 19 Ari Lazer’s Dream Journeys is a live experience to behold. 20 CITY May 2016
LAWRENCE PAUL YUXWELUPTUN a colourful dialogue of art as activism Writen by Yasmine Shemesh Photo by Sarah Whitlam It’s a warm spring day and bright light is streaming through the windows of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s East Vancouver studio, dancing upon the colourfully painted canvases propped up against the walls. Yuxweluptun is leaning forward in a chair and rolling up his t-shirt sleeve to reveal a tattoo. It’s an image from his painting Night In A Salish Longhouse — a sacred spirit drummer — inked onto his arm by his friend and fellow artist, Corey Bulpitt. “I’ve kind of become one of my own humanoids in my own painting,” he grins, slowly scanning his eyes over the lines etched on his skin. It’s a statement that, though uttered casually, is truly defining of the artist. The bond between Yuxweluptun and his work goes beyond the surface of the skin; it’s something that ventures further than a person and his creative outlet. Yuxweluptun and his art are very much entwined at the core. With a career than spans more than 40 years, Yuxweluptun has made a distinctive imprint generations. Yuxweluptun was there from kindergarten to grade three, when laws were changed, allowing First Nations people to live off the reservation and attend public schools. “To me, the residential school was like throwing a stick of dynamite into somebody’s culture and then you get to go pick up the scraps of what’s left of your identity,” Yuxweluptun says. “I lost my language at residential school. My dad lost it. My mother lost it. My grandmother lost it. There was this loss of being. I was in a Longhouse and they were talking their own language and I’m sitting there and “MODERNISM PAINTING WAS A WAY OF DEALING WITH THIS STUFF TRADITIONALISM DIDN’T ALLOW FOR,” it was very —” He pauses. “Sometimes I get very depressed about not having language. It’s very hard to think of what colonialism means and how it can destroy somebody’s culture.” Yuxweluptun doesn’t shy from administering a tongue-lashing to the Canadian government, particularly when it comes to protecting the environment. His concern for the natural world runs parallel to both his heritage and his character as a self-proclaimed “tree The manner in which Yuxweluptun achieves this produces an inimitable aesthetic where, stylistically, he plays with the abstract — applying humanness to the metaphysical and adding a melting effect to tangible terrain (the latter, a nod to surrealist Salvador Dalí). The visual integration of more formal Northwest Coast designs assist to illustrate a spiritual understanding that conveys a “real” and “lived” experience. “Modernism painting was a way of dealing with this stuff traditionalism didn’t allow for,” Yuxweluptun explains. More traditional forms of First Nations art, he maintains, “did not allow the dealing with the modernity of colonialism.” But his crusade is armed with a sharp wit. Yuxweluptun leans back in his chair and motions to the wooden easel behind him holding a large canvas. Against a royal blue background are four men in suits, their faces masked and their mouths filled with pointed teeth, twisted in sneers. The painting, titled Fish Farmers They Have Sea Lice, is part of his Super Predator series that depicts corporate CEOs, bank cartel, and oil barons as dangerous beasts, jaws and all. A visual concept that is indeed “nasty,” he smirks, “but it’s funny.” Another painting, Red Man Watching White Man Trying To Fix Hole In Sky, casts a satirical light onto the destruction and loss of land. In Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Michelangelo, getting acquainted with various definitions of what art could be. In 1983, Yuxweluptun graduated with an honours degree in painting from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. “My interest became in painting in a modern way and seeing things that was a very interesting way of presenting my work,” he says. “I seem to make symbolism come to life and, more or less, they become new symbols in new formats and they become very surreal.” The nonfigurative nature of Yuxweluptun’s work exercises his right to have an existential thought. “I can relay things in a different way other than on a mask or a drum or a regalia or a totem pole,” he warns. This is exhibited prominently in a style that he calls “ovoidism,” where he uses the hollowness of the ovoid shape to make its own statement — a deconstructed presentation that recalls the dismantling objective of residential school. “I liked the idea of what it could represent,” he says of the form. Through his life experiences and innovation, Yuxweluptun has played a vital role in shifting the perspective of what modern First Nations art can be. He is certain to not leave the value of traditionalism behind, instead utilizing it to cultivate a fresh and paramount discourse. And although his brilliance has been exhibited in the world of contemporary art through his searing and sometimes controversial work. His Coast Salish and Okanagan heredity is a fundamental component of his craft, in which he vividly melds traditional iconography and modernist styles with polemic representations of the ongoing struggles of First Nations people. Subject matter like colonial suppression, land rights, and environmental degradation provoke a difficult yet exceedingly important conversation that reflects Yuxweluptun’s unapologetically caustic views — convictions that stem from battles he has fought since birth. Yuxweluptun was born in Kamloops in 1957. Due to segregation laws at the time, his mother was forced to deliver in a separate hospital for First Nations women. As a young boy, he was sent to a residential school — a systemic tragedy that reaches back through hugger.” Clear-cutting, pipelines, and the consumption of natural resources, he insists, are debilitating an already fragile system. “I grew up with songbirds when I was a kid,” he recalls, his voice wistful. “And in the last couple of years, I went up to the Okanagan and I woke up and I realized how quiet it had gotten. When I was a kid, five o’clock in the morning the sun would come up and the whole valley on the reserve would chirp of songbirds. I knew what it meant and when I went there recently it was quiet. Silent. What are we doing as human beings?” For Yuxweluptun, art offers a means to congruently document these issues and provide a commentary. “To me, that’s part of my job as an artist. To be a part of the social fabric of life and record history in a way that is possible,” he says. it, two men outfitted in lab coats, clutching a withered piece of sky and balancing on an arm that’s pierced with junk, reach upwards to repair a gaping tear in the blue. The ground beneath them is barren; a nearby mountain is emblazoned with spirits, whose faces are warped in pain. To the side, a “red man” observes in horror. He is striking in a rainbow of tones, built from formlines (a Northwest Coast two-dimensional style) and ovoids (eggshaped forms), but see-through — invisible. Art was always a means of expression for Yuxwelptun, a gift that was bestowed to him naturally. He began carving when he was just five years old and later gained an interest in modern painting when he became part of the public education system. He’d spend stretches of time at the local library with his father, engrossing himself in the works of at prestigious spaces such as The National Gallery of Canada, the first true retrospective of his life’s work, as well as his first major solo exhibition in Canada in 20 years, will open this month at The Museum of Anthropology. Comprised primarily of his paintings and drawings, Unceded Territories will present a survey of Yuxweluptun’s most significant pieces over the last four decades, alongside the provocative timeline that exists within them. “I think I’ve taken a look at the world and I’ll take my run at it,” he says. “It’s just fun. That’s for history to decide later on where they’ll place me. The history book may have room for an Indigenous person.” Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories is on display at the Museum of Anthropology from May 10 to October 16 May 2016 CITY 21
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Page 16 and 17: THE REBEL SPELL finding affirmation
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Page 22 and 23: THE HEATLEY a place for the people
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BeatRoute Magazine B.C. print e-edition - May 2016

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