We Heart the Arts

This was a recent (end of January 2010) fundraiser called "We Heart the Arts", put on to bring awareness to the arts funding cuts in BC:

It has been on display for over ten years, a simple statement, yet dynamic in color and boldness. Its one word message is ignored by passers-by on a daily basis, making its declaration one of slight nostalgia for what once was: a powerful entryway into the world of art and culture, strong and thriving in British Columbia.

LOVE: a steel sculpture by Robert Indiana, stands large and proud outside the Buschlen Mowatt Art Gallery, host to “We Heart the Arts”, a fundraiser designed to bring awareness to the state of Arts and Culture in British Columbia.

Walking into the gallery, a bearded, long-haired, glasses-clad gentleman (think David Gray without any of those things) plays the piano and sings his heart out to a crowd of polite enthusiasts, while others mingle, drinks in hand, among the various paintings and sculptures throughout the gallery.

Buschlen Mowatt, right on the cusp of downtown on West Georgia, boasts an array of art, from a photograph of Snow White standing in a living room holding two babies in her arms while prince charming obliviously watches TV in the background, to Jackson Pollock-like paintings almost an entire wall-length high. It is this diversity in format that makes the gallery a fitting place to not only celebrate and appreciate the arts, but to fight for them.

Spencer Herbert, MLA for Vancouver’s West End, and this evening’s host, (looking very dapper in a grey suit and electric blue shirt, finished off with a yellow tie) is hoping a night like tonight will bring more attention to the importance of Arts and Culture in BC. With the BC Liberals’ recent cuts to arts funding and potentially more in the works, the future is looking pretty weak for BC’s Art and Culture community.

“…it’s just staggering and bad for the economy, bad for our ability to relate to each other, tell our stories and just bad for the province, so we’re trying to push back and get them to re-invest in arts and culture,” Mr. Herbert laments.

The local film and television industry has been hit hard by the arts cuts, as well as tax initiatives other provinces are offering to lure production elsewhere.

“…the film community’s been really struggling because of huge loss of productions to other jurisdictions,” continues Mr. Herbert “and so we’re calling on the Provincial Government to make film and television and the whole digital media sector a priority.”

What does the future hold for artists just trying to make rent?

“We’ll find out March 2nd what the government’s going to do so I think a lot of people are very nervous right now,” Mr. Herbert says.

In the meantime, an evening of celebration, song (and hey, a little booze) helps to lift the spirits of artists who are otherwise very worried about leaving their fate in the hands of the Liberals.

“I think in bleak times you also have to celebrate and show your passion for something, in this case, it’s the arts, and I think that helps build the spirit to take us to that next level,” says Mr. Herbert.

So in the wake of this foreboding climate for Arts and Culture in British Columbia, what will become of its artists? Only the Campbell government knows for sure. Until then, keep optimistically partying and pray Wendy’s is hiring.

-Alisen Down.

Crow Article

This is an article I wrote for last year's Vancouver Eastside Culture Crawl, which focused on the crow as a growing muse for artists:

Arleigh Wood is beautiful, like a crow. As she sits in her studio, a small space on Vancouver’s Eastside that has a definitive New York loft feel to it with its wooden elevators and industrial location, one can’t help but be distracted by her dark hair, olive skin and soft demeanor.

Much of her work centers on crows, so one could draw the assumption that both the artist and her work are ominous, but the opposite is true. There is a lightness and an openness to both Arleigh and her paintings resulting in a natural and enthralling loveliness to the woman and her work.

“They’re quite revered animals in most cultures. I think that people here are maybe afraid of them because they are…just very powerful symbols. They evoke such a response in people, either very positive or very negative.”

Wood and a dozen or so artists at the annual Eastside Culture Crawl consider crows to be a muse in their work. Often met with condemnation when mistaken for the Raven in First Nations Myth, a nuisance to construction sites, and constant dumpster decoration, the crow is now taking its rightful place as a symbol of local spirit.

The crow-rich Eastside Culture Crawl, an art exhibition that runs this year from November 20-22, showcases the work of various eastside artists between Main St. First Avenue, Commercial Drive and the waterfront.

Each year, organizers design the entire press package around crows, from crows on ceramics, to three-dimensional crows on jester sticks.

Richard Tetrault, a longtime artist in Strathcona and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, said they’ve far from exhausted the usefulness of the crow in art. He has been intrigued by these ornithological opportunists for the past 25 years.

“They’re consummate urban adapters…much of my work centers on the downtown eastside…human survivors and human energy and spirit…crows in a way have become analogous in a sense because they’re adapters and they’re survivors.”

It’s the duality of their nature, much like our own, that fascinates Tetrault.

“What’s intriguing to me about crows…is that you can…love them and then they do something totally wicked or gross or aggressive…they have that dark and light aspect.”

These human qualities are what make the crow a much more captivating subject than other birds in the city.

“We see certain human characteristics reflected in crows and that attracts us to them…because we’ve got some terms of reference…and whereas maybe with birds and other animals, we don’t have that same element of empathy.”

Not everyone sees what Tetrault sees.

In fact, there’s a strong collective belief that crows are a nuisance to our city, as Dr. Wayne Goodey, a lecturer in the Department of Zoology at UBC, indicates.

“A lot of people seem to have the idea that crows exist mainly to annoy us”, he says. “That somehow our activities have attracted them and therefore they’re here causing us all these problems. It’s really quite the reverse…they’re taking advantage of the opportunities that we have provided…so it’s a bit arrogant for us to complain that they’re a problem when we basically created the situation in which they could cause us difficulty.”

Perhaps, like other often-judged urban citizens, all they need to gain a little respect is some plain old understanding.

According to Crowbusters.com, the American Ornithological Union recognizes four species of Crow in North America, Vancouver being home to the North Western Crow. Extremely social animals, they live in family groups of between two to fifteen birds and they work together as a unit. They are one of only a few species of birds that exhibits “cooperative breeding behavior”, meaning they help feed the incubating female, watch over their family members, feed the nestlings and defend against predators.

As a whole, they operate from central positions called “roosts” where they gather every night just before dark and, though it is not entirely known why they meet in such a large cluster, sometimes in the thousands, it is thought by researchers to be a part of their complex social system.

Their high intelligence level is starting to gain the attention of researchers as well, as in the case of Betty, a Caledonian Crow studied by Oxford University’s Behavioral Ecology Research Group. Without having seen it done before, Betty fashioned a hook out of a piece of wire in order to retrieve a bucket of food from a long tubular container.

American communications consultant Joshua Klein has studied crows in his spare time for ten years, and shows the remarkable Betty Video as part of a lecture on crows on the website www.ted.com. Crows can “very quickly and very flexibly adapt to new challenges and new resources in their environment, which is really useful if you live in a city,” Mr. Klein says in his discussion.

This intelligence and adaptability will continue to inspire artists to interpret them in a human way, if not because they are always there, ready and willing to inspire.

“There are so many on the Eastside that you’re kind of watching them all the time,” Arleigh Wood reminisces. “They’re like your little neighbors.”

-Alisen Down.

Tamara Taggart Interview

I am making the transition from actress to actress AND freelance writer. My plan is to write for magazine/newspapers, as well as online publications and that ever-so-elusive novel.

I will be posting my articles here; the first, in honor of Valentine's Day, is an interview Tamara Taggart graciously gave me last year. What a fantastic woman.

Here is the article:

Tamara Taggart has a terrible cold and has to preserve her voice. But when asked about how she met her husband, the Weather Anchor seems to lift herself out of her murky condition and her voice becomes the silky tenor we have come to be so familiar with on CTV.

“I met my husband at a hockey game…I felt a connection right away and I thought he did too…but then I found out he had a girlfriend he lived with…he’d been with her for ten years…”

Resigned to the fact that this would be the end of the love connection, she put the brief encounter behind her for the next year and a half. Until fate intervened.

“I was at a party and someone said ‘Did you hear Dave and his girlfriend broke up?’…and I went to the same Christmas Party I always go to and he came in and made a beeline for me and that was that.”

How did she know he would be the one for her? “I’ve had a lot of first dates and I think I have a really good sense of a good person…and that’s what I knew about him from the beginning.”

Her son Beckett, born August 2, 2007 and daughter Zoe, born a year later on September 24, 2008, taught her how big her capacity for love could be. “I didn’t think I was able to love as much as I love them. They definitely hold your heart, you’d do anything for them, throw yourself in front of a bus for them.”

With so much love in her life, what has surprised her about it? “I guess there are so many layers to it. I love my dog, I love my job, I love my husband, I love my kids, I love a lot of things…when you peel away all the layers you get to the most intense part of it and the thing I love the most is my husband and kids. It can be just a word until you find something you intensely love.”

Does being a full-time mom and career woman leave much room to celebrate Valentine’s Day, the yearly symbol of everlasting love? “It never used to symbolize anything for me…but now it means more because it’s the day David and I were engaged…he asked me in a Japanese restaurant, so we always go back there on that day to exchange little presents and be together.”

What advice would she give herself about love if she could go back to her younger years? “I remember I was 14 or 15 and this boy broke my heart and I was devastated and I remember my aunt said to me ‘I know you’re hurt right now…you need to know you’re going to feel this way again, this is not the first time this is going to happen.’ I was horrified but I’m so glad she said that to me because the next time it happened, I remembered what she said and I knew it would be okay.”

-Alisen Down.