It’s fair to assume that the majority of people in Vancouver like being outside during the summer. Besides being an ideal time to appreciate the city’s many outdoor amenities, the summer also happens to be a wonderfully generous time in the sense of yielding opportunities to appreciate local artwork. Each of these warrant our support and appreciation I would argue (and I encourage you to investigate as many as you have occasion to), but one such opportunity is perhaps in particular worth getting excited about. That is, the currently debuting ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ exhibition, showing from now until September 7th at the Ayden Gallery (88 W. Pender St., Suite #2103).
Billed as a visual exploration of pleasure, the exhibit showcases an impressive range of original illustrative works independently conceived and curated by eight local female artists of varying artistic backgrounds. The combined collection aims to evidence a diversity of different artistic meditations on the topic, and can be expected to offer an intriguing look at some of the impressive works to recently emanate from Vancouver’s emerging class of enterprising young female artists.
Over the weekend I caught up with the chief curator of the exhibition, Pandora Young, to quickly glean from her some further details about the show.
Sad Mag: Right—so if you don’t object, we’ll start by briefly treading over some biographical details, then from there we can proceed with more inquiring questions concerning the artwork you’ll be exhibiting along with your peers at the Midsummer Night’s Dream exhibition. I gather that you’re a graduate of Emily Carr University and that you currently work and reside here in Vancouver; aside from those details however, I can’t speak much to your background. Can you tell me where you’re from?
Pandora Young: I was born in Victoria, British Columbia, and enjoyed an unorthodox upbringing. When I was young my parents brought me along to nude beaches, Star Trek conventions, Renaissance fairs. I grew up among Klingons and Vikings, suspended between 1500 and 2500. The period I was least adjusted to was that in the middle.
SM: What school(s) did you attend here and/or elsewhere? Were you enrolled in a specific program, or concerned with any particular area of focus?
PY: I spent a year in Japan as an exchange student at 16 due to, as my mother might have put it, an unhealthy preoccupation with the Japanimé. Immersion into such an illustratively versed and illustratively permeated culture was thoroughly enriching. I can’t think of a time when I was more ravenously, feverishly, ragingly inspired. I was surrounded by things that were so devastatingly cool to a teenaged kid, I knew what I thought was sick and what I exactly wanted to make, and I couldn’t draw fast enough to get it all out.
I spent two years at the University of Victoria in my early twenties, majoring in Anthropology, and studying linguistics, history, archeology, comparative religions, and more. Basically if it was a science you wouldn’t get paid for, I was there. In the end, I felt that Anthropology was too academic, though methodized as it needed to be, and ironically lost touch with the very humanity it studied. That in part led me to finally pursue art as more than a hobby, and to find a livelihood where humanity not only has space, but is requisite.
SM: You previously mentioned that ‘A Mid Summer Night’s Dream’ has an artistic lineage that to some extent dates back to your involvement with Rain City Illustration a couple of years back. Can you explain to me what Rain City Illustration was and or is, and clarify the specific nature of your involvement with it?
PY: A few years back, Emily Carr introduced a small new major, Illustration, anticipating little interest. They received well over a hundred applications for around two-dozen spots. Rain City Illustration was created as a space for the tremendous amount of passion we were made aware existed within the student community.
My involvement began when I took on manning their social media channels. In their third year I became president for the group. By that point we were the largest student group on campus with well over a hundred members. It was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever been part of. I was posited at the nexus of the numerous individual practices that bled into illustration, helping them communicate and cross pollinate, and from the vantage that hub provided the view was ceaselessly inspiring. Where others might only be witness to their own departments, entrenched in our own work as we often become, I saw unquantifiable creation happening in parallel, everyday. Over a hundred artists, each with their own heritage of media and method, all growing and evolving around me. I can’t imagine how a career professor of art isn’t overwhelmed by it.
SM: It’s been a few years since you ran Rain City Illustration, and now your expertise are being solicited to host and curate an exhibition at the Ayden Gallery. Can you explain to me what the show—‘A Mid Summer Night’s Dream—is about, and detail to me the exact capacity in which you are involved?
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a visual exploration of pleasure. Each of us, myself and the seven other women involved, we’re given the theme, and will bring back our own interpretations. I was asked to curate a show by Ayden Gallery, and it was a real fantasy come true for me as I’d often day dreamed what my perfect roster of favorite artists would be.
SM: What would you identify as the primary intellectual and artistic inspirations for the show?
We wanted to take pleasure and turn it over and over in our hands, investigate it. It seems like such a simple thing, but it’s so inalienably intertwined with pain, with drive, with creation, with mistake, with loss. It’s possibly the second most basic and universal impetus after feeding one’s self. […] Escaping poverty of pleasure, is the drive behind just about anything you can name; why human beings migrate to unknown continents, why one empire takes from another, the motive behind why human beings strive to do just about anything we do. It can also be the thing that hurts us the most, as the Buddha would tell us. The Greeks venerated Melpomene as the goddess of celebration and despair. So obviously there is a rich conversation there, and at its heart is an anthropological body of work we are creating.
SM: What does ‘pleasure’—the underlying conceptual focus of this exhibition—mean to you, and how has that interpretation of pleasure informed your own art submissions?
My own take on pleasure has been a darker one. I feel like, with the struggles in my life, I’ve had nine parts pain to every one pleasure. And yet, there’s been pleasure in that too. That string quartet quality of sublime heartbreak, the clean, perfect beauty of bottom of the pit sorrow, of harrowing pain. There’s something exquisite even in wretchedness. The very best love songs come from heartbreak, and poetry. Our humanity is universalized through it. I count myself lucky to be the kind of artist who thrives from this, because these are the inevitable aspects of life. I’ve always been one whose sails are filled by pain. I suppose you could call me a masochist. I tend to think of it simply as having a refined palette for a certain bitter wine.
SM: In what sense(s) are your submissions cohesive with those of the other contributing participants? Do your works share many similarities besides their common topical focus, or do they demonstrate a fairly wide range of aesthetic tastes and techniques?
In truth, I’ve yet to actually see. There’s a wide range of specializations involved: two oil painters, several illustrators, and a print maker. We’ve shared progress shots with one another, but each woman has worked from her respective studio, and the day of hanging was like opening a present on Christmas morning for me.
SM: Do you have any discernable tendencies in terms of where and when you like to practice art?
At home, in total solitude.
SM: Right—ok so before we wrap this up, I have left just a few slightly more personal questions concerning your life, and your aspirations and interests outside and beyond this particular exhibit we’ve been discussing. Have you in mind any plans for after the conclusion of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’? Are there yet any other projects you’re planning or working on that we can look forward to?
I have an upcoming show in January with Vancouver artist Nomi Chi at Hot Art Wet City that I’m really excited for. There is no theme, and for the first time in ages I won’t have to work around school projects, which means I can finally attend to the list of ideas I’ve forever wanted to explore—in my mind, that list is something like an old tattered papyrus scroll which unfurls comically across the floor and out the exit.
Q. What are some of your interests besides art?
Sudoku. History. Science. Languages.
SM: Are there certain artists/people/things from who/which you derive most inspiration?
[…] I love Schiele, Klimt, Ingre, Rackham, Dulac, Dore, Parrish. I cannot express enough love for the work of Norman Rockwell, whose works timelessly bring a tear to the eye and tell an entire story in an image. I think Canadian artist Kate Beaton is a genius beyond measure. I love Brad Kunkle, Vania, Yoshitaka Amano, Katsuhiro Otomo, Sachin Teng, Jeff Simpson, my teacher Justin Novak, Yoann Lossel, Michael Carson—Just to name a few! And of course, all the ladies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream!
Q. Lastly, who, if anyone, would you identify as your hero or role model?
My personal hero is Sponge Bob. Yes, seriously. He is enthusiastic, caring, thoughtful, eager to excel at his profession, loves his friends, and is insurmountably sincere.
A Midsummer’s Night Dream runs from now until September 7th at the Ayden Gallery (88 W. Pender St, Suite #2103) For more information about the show and its featured artists click here.