Kauai Starburst (Phyllis Schwartz)
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In British Columbia, where vegetation is abundant, the symbolic meaning of plants’ life cycles is ceaselessly reflected in artworks. Lipoint Place (4211 Number 3 Road, Richmond), Formulation of Time is an exhibition that showcases the interpretation of this theme in the experimental photography of Phyllis Schwartz, Edward Peck, Desirée Patterson and Sand Wan.
Phyllis Schwartz and Edward Peck are artists whose practice contemplates the full cycle of natural growth, transitions and regeneration. They use plant-based materials to create photo-based works of art that speak to issues of permanence and impermanence. Their work has the capacity to engage viewers to contemplate ephemerality, change and transition in the ever-changing natural world. Phyllis Schwartz will exhibit plant-based Lumen Prints, and Edward Peck will exhibit high-resolution, plant-based, abstract Scanograms.
Desirée Patterson’s Point De Fusion series depicts natural landscapes and plants that appear to be melting into abstraction. With a high aesthetic value, the series aims to connect viewers by evoking a sense of awe and wonder, with a prophetic underlying current. The title, Point de Fusion, references the melting point of an object at atmospheric pressure; the moment when its physical state changes and it becomes a liquid. As the landscape begins to thaw, the idea of motion is implied in an image that once was still.
Sand Wan’s large-scale, black-and-white Immortality series emphasizes the seemingly tranquil but everchanging forests along the Pacific Northwest coast and Fraser River. With black-and-white photography, which lends timelessness and classic quality to his images, he captures the forests in their prime time and the trees’ last resting place along the coastline where they lie as driftwood.
Saturday April 6, 2019 2-4pm: Public Opening & Book Launch
Exhibition hours: April 6 – 30, 2019 Free admission
– Monday – Friday 10am-5pm, weekends by appointment.
– Also open during Art! Vancouver on the weekend of April 27 – 28, 10am-5pm.
– Closed on Good Friday April 19th.
Lumen Print Workshop by Phyllis Schwartz
Saturday, April 13th, 11am – 3pm (12-1pm beak for lunch)
Admission $15/person
Registration is required: https://lumenprints.eventbrite.ca
The workshop is participating in the 2019 Capture Photography Festival and supported by London Drugs Printing Grant.
Forest Family (Peach)
Art 4 Life at the Port Moody Art Centre is an annual interactive exhibition curated for a young (and young at heart) audience. Intended to raise curiosity, inspire imagination and invite a life-long love of art appreciation and art-making. Art galleries offer unique community spaces where an audience of all ages can experience the power of art to transform how we understand our world and ourselves.
I am honoured that five of my mixed-media sculptures are included in this exhibition dedicated to a young audience beginning the habit of art for life. These sculptures, five members of the Forest Family, are hybrid critters born from the union of the plant, animal and geological realms. They are quirky, humourous and friendly life forms awaiting names and biographies, inviting viewers to connect with recognizable features, an adoption process of sorts. Like pets, the members of the Forest Family are intended to invite curiosity and affection.
The benefits of an arts education affect every area of life, and Art 4 Life is one such event in a lifelong journey of art appreciation. “Exposure to the visual arts, especially in these creative ways, expands a child’s awareness of the world and is a tool that can be used for learning in science, history, math, and more,” says Robert Frankel, director of museums and visual arts at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC.
Art 4 Life opens 22 September (1-3 PM) at the Port Moody Art Centre (2425 St. Johns Street) and runs thru 01 November.
Port Moody Arts Centre Society celebrates their 20th anniversary with In the Blink of an Eye, an exhibition featuring artwork and stories by artists who have been a part of their history. Sassamatt Collective artists, Edward Peck and Phyllis Schwartz, have had solo exhibitions at the Port Moody Arts Centre are each showing two new photographs in this anniversary exhibition opening 03 May (6 – 8 PM) and continuing through 31 May 2018.
Edward Peck is showing Tulip in Vase and Finn Slough Swan. Tulip in Vase is a selection from Arrangements, a series of photographs capturing flowers as they transition from bud to bloom to death. The symbolism of flowers in combination with their fleeting beauty is a poignant reminder of our own beauty and frailty. Finn Slough Swan is a selection from a series that explores a century old Finnish fishing village, which has been transformed into a community of artists living among the last remaining descendants of the original fishers. The buildings are the traditional sheds, houses and boat house buildings some over a hundred years old.
Phyllis Schwartz is showing Peony at Sunrise and Peony in Moonlight. Both are recent Lumen Prints inspired by a peony that began as a tight bud in a simple vase on a windowsill in a New York City hotel room that came to full bloom by the end of the week. For the next two weeks, more peonies budded, blossomed, bloomed and shed petals onto photosensitive surfaces, some of which were X-Ray film with emulsion on both sides. These Lumen Prints render smaller ambiguous pareidolic artifacts that engage viewers on a primal level to look again, to make their own meaning from ambiguity. In a larger sense, this peony series is a poet’s inquiry into the nature of permanence and impermanence. It asks, “What remains?”
In the Blink of an Eye, a 20th Anniversary Exhibition opens Thursday, May 3rd, 2018 (6-8pm) at the Port Moody Art Centre (2425 St Johns Street, Port Moody, BC) and runs through May 31, 2018.
Finn Slough: Ancient Memories
Art About Finn Slough Show, sponsored by the Finn Slough Heritage and Wetland Society, includes work by Sassamatt Collective artists Phyllis Schwartz and Edward Peck. This unjuried show features work inspired by late Fall visits to Finn Slough, a small historic fishing village at the junction of Number 4 Road and Dyke Road in Richmond, one of the last tidal communities of the West Coast.
The Lumen Print series by Phyllis Schwartz was made from plant materials gathered at Finn Slough, a tiny fishing community in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada where approximately 30 residents live in wooden houses along a marshy riverbank. The indigenous and cultivated plant materials used to make the photograms reference a community that is inextricably connected to the environment and persistently adaptable to the encroaching built environment that challenges its existence. Of particular interest are the ginkgo leaves and horsetail ferns, both ancient plants that have adapted to environmental transformations or thousands of years.
Tidal Zone is a series by Edward Peck made from persistent observations of Finn Slough as Fall transforms the landscape from colour to the spare elements of winter. His series captures the marsh habitat on the Fraser River that has been lost to human settlement and industrial development. This struggle is reflected by the contrast of a dynamic landscape in full colour and the austerity of black and white structures endure the elements.
AAFSS is held at the Richmond Cultural Centre located at 7700 Minoru Gate, Multipurpose Room. The show is open on Thursday, April 9 from noon to 9:00pm, Friday, April 10th from 9:00am to 9:00pm, with an evening reception and guests speakers, Saturday, April 11th from 10:00am to 5:00pm and its ends on Sunday at 3:00pm.
Art 4 Life at the Port Moody Art Centre is an interactive exhibition curated for a young (and young at heart) audience. Featured artwork is meant to inspire and engage young people while raising opportunities for active participation, discussion, cultural awareness and lessons on art appreciation.
The benefits of an arts education affect every area of life, and Art 4 Life is one such event in a lifelong journey of art appreciation. “Exposure to the visual arts, especially in these creative ways, expands a child’s awareness of the world and is a tool that can be used for learning in science, history, math, and more,” says Robert Frankel, director of museums and visual arts at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC.
Art galleries offer unique community spaces where an audience of all ages can experience the power of art to transform how we understand our world and ourselves. I am honoured that two of my drawings and three of my clay sculptures are included in this exhibition dedicated to a young audience beginning the habit of art for life.
Art 4 Life opens 30 September (1-3 PM) at the Port Moody Art Centre (2425 St. Johns Street) and runs thru 01 November.
Artist Property is protected in Canada by Access Copyright, but recently several larger Canadian educational institutions have chosen to read fair use in such a way that they do not feel obliged to pay to reproduce copyright protected material for educational distribution. The impact is huge. I’m a small scale writer and artist, but still, over the past two years, I’ve come to see a 30% reduction in my yearly residuals.
In today’s Access Copyright Newsletter, you will see that the “Federal Court of Canada upheld the rights of creators and publishers with its judgment on fair dealing, which has helped to clarify its application in the context of the educational system.” In August, York University has chosen to appeal the court judgment against a recent decision in the artists’ favour.
This newsletter is clearly focussed on offering info about where this case is now and what you can do if there is an interest on the part of you/the reader of my post. Along with 3,100 Canadian writers, visual artists, actors, filmmakers and musicians, I have signed a public letter that asks Mélanie Joly, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, to keep creators central in upcoming changes to Canada’s cultural policies. It was also forwarded to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and my own Member of Parliament. In my additional comments, I point out that if artists’ property rights are not protected, there is no Canadian culture and artists cannot afford to make the art the makes Canadian culture.
If you follow my work, you know that much of it asks, “What remains?” Hence, without the protection of artist property rights, what remains? A propos, you have also read two frequent blog endings: The artist must get paid. Buy more art.
http://mailchi.mp/accesscopyright/bk3m7sxkmi-1116289?e=d83fef81fc
Announcing the publication of Seeking the Nuance (second edition).
Glenn Lewis, Phyllis Schwartz, and Debra Sloan present the second edition of Seeking the Nuance with new essays, photographs and glaze recipes. In this second edition is new historical information and discussion about how the Leach/Mingei philosophy continues to influence many studio practices within the BC ceramic culture.
The 2010 edition of Seeking the Nuance was based on Glenn Lewis’s 1970s glaze recipe card files that had evolved from his early 1960s apprenticeship with Bernard Leach. One of the main outcomes of this publication is an academic research written by Alex Lambley, a doctoral candidate at the Leach Pottery in St. Ives, Cornwall.
According to Debra Sloan these recipes not only demonstrate the numerous influences imported to British Columbia, but also they convey how information is utilized, especially in the constructed and geographically sequestered cultural environment in BC. Phyllis Schwartz believes that sharing these recipes will continue conversation amongst potters as they seek to nuance these heritage recipes work within their own practices.
Seeking the Nuance will be launched at the Best of BC (Gallery of BC Ceramics, 09 March) and the Canadian Clay Symposium (Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, 18 March). It will also be available for purchase at the Gallery of BC Ceramics (Granville Island, 1359 Cartwright Street) for $25. A portion of the sales goes to the Maureen Wright Scholarship Fund (Northwest Ceramics Foundation).
Recently, I had an opportunity to reprint a series of photographs I made when the Right Honourable Pierre Elliott Trudeau spoke to the students at Point Grey Secondary School in Vancouver on 19 May 1974. It was easy to mark the day because it was the day after Operation Smiling Buddha, India’s first nuclear weapons explosion. In his address to the students, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau shared his thoughts about the global impact of this nuclear test and affirmed Canada’s commitment to Peace Keeping.
At the time of Prime Minister Trudeau’s visit, I was a new Canadian who had just signed a continuing contract with the Vancouver School Board. It was a new beginning for me in a chaotic time, and Canada offered both opportunity and a sense of social order. As well, I could not only afford an SLR camera but also my own darkroom equipment. The Prime Minister’s visit to Point Grey, along with a press entourage, was probably my first event photo-shoot. I had no experience working with all the lighting added by myriad photographers and videographers, but perhaps you will find that part of the honesty characteristic of 1970s artwork. Jay Currie, President of the Student Council, and son of G.B. Currie, Chairman of MacMillan Bloedel, introduced the Prime Minister to the student body and staff.
Phyllis Schwartz, Longevity (pigment ink on cotton, Lumen Print process)
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