One section of the co-op workterm report I am writing (on my time at the Centre of the Universe) focuses on the skills I now have a result of where I have worked, and I surprised myself by considering graphics design among them.
See, I’ve never taken an art class. My drawing abilities are… lacking, by my standards. But my knowledge of layouts, of how to use existing resources in new and impressive ways, my ability to navigate photoshop and illustrator, these are things I am proud of.
And that brought my memory back to the art show.
It came from a connection, a gal I met once, Carmen Hung, who stage-managed a theatre production I wrote for IGNITE! in Vancouver. She put out a message on facebook, asking for artists to contribute to a gallery show on surveillance culture. Being an avid Cory Doctorow consumer and a man with a sometimes strange approach to life, I had some ideas. But I wasn’t an artist, not really, so I sent Carmen my somewhat tongue-in-cheek thoughts and gave her permission to bring them to life. She loved the idea, and asked me to please put them together.
Wait, myself? Me, make them? Me? Make visual art? For a gallery?
But the opportunity was unique, so I sized up what I knew how to do, took the text-shaping skills at my disposal, some reference shapes from googled images, and went to work. I ended up performing in a show in Victoria for every night the gallery was up, so I didn’t see the final result directly, but Carmen (who also took my emailed pdfs, printed them, and placed them in the gallery) was generous enough to mail me some tokens from the show. Thanks, Carmen.
A website for the show can be found here: http://www.sfu.ca/~ckh3/surveillance/
Anyway, I thought I’d share. These silly-yet-with-a-serious-point images were placed within the gallery wherever it was appropriate (so, on the floor, on the walls, under a camera, in the washrooms). As always, comments of any stripe are greatly enjoyed!
Andrew Wade 