Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Playgrounds, Gaza, and a Forest: How Competition Impedes Prosperity

One damp autumn day, I crossed the dirt and wood-chip playground to the swings, where I saw a girl a couple of years younger than I was, and also the bottom of her grade's social heap, swinging on the best swing. You know the best swing? It's the one that is for some reason not spun up out of reach by the older kids, and the most visible to the playground supervisor, so other kids don't bother trying to haul you out of it. During those years, I spent all recesses and lunch hours either hiding on the bluffs, up in a tree, or firmly glued to that swing and swinging fiercely back-and-forth, back-and-forth, daring people to come near me with a glare they never noticed. But this day, this younger girl's thick brown hair flew back-and-forth, back-and-forth over her raincoated shoulders. I stood at the pole of the swing-set and ground my boots into the dirt. When nobody was looking, I told her passing face that I was magic and would turn her into a rock if she didn't get off and give me the swing.

When I was a kid I was near the bottom of the social heap. The kids who hurt me the most were also hurt the most by their parents, or by other kids at the school. It's normalized, in our culture, to turn and dish out to someone else a cruelty that was served to us. School, career-building, politics, capitalism--they're all just games of getting ahead of others, and put us in a position where we feel that "getting ahead" is the same as "prosperity". It's an illusion, but our longstanding capitalist social structure leads us to believe in it at the cost of vision and community. 

Israel is flexing its playground seniority in Gaza. It feels heartless to compare genocide to playground bullying, but I want to point out that in accepting what we see as insignificant cruelty in our privileged day-to-day as a necessary cost of getting ahead, we also pave the way to accept greater and greater atrocities. I understand from my playground experience how easy it feels to commit some lesser act of cruelty against another person when I've been hurt. So by extrapolation, I get that maybe if your people has been persecuted for thousands of years, and even in living memory was the pointed victim of horrific acts of genocide, it might seem less than horrible for (some members) of that people to commit genocide against the next victim down the chain. I mean, aren't we all just making gains by stepping up upon the backs of those just below us in rank, privilege, or esteem?

Well no--not everybody is doing that. Some of us from every race, religion, and social ranking in the world are in fact trying very hard not to be that kind of monster. Some of those in my circles who are most vocally supporting freedom for Palestinians are my Jewish friends. Because fighting to get or stay on top of a social pyramid does not equal prosperity! Because some of us learned this important lesson in childhood.  

Back in my elementary school playground... I have never forgotten the look of horror on that girl's face, and my triumph at seeing her run away, so I could get to safety on that swing. My triumph was the worst. I remember the sick feeling in my stomach, after she left. I didn't know where she had run to, or who might be kicking her, feeding her dirt, or holding her down and whispering the most vile threats in her ears. I remember thinking we looked rather similar and maybe she could have been my friend if I hadn't been so desperate to get that swing. I felt that getting the swing gave me safety, but it also took away hers. I remember that my triumph came with a horrible cost to my feeling of righteousness, and that year I became one of those people who knows better than to pass the bullying on to the next rung down the ladder. Sometime after that I bravely spoke a few words to my bullied-mate in the classroom. We had a breath-holding competition. So for a couple of minutes we found common ground in an environment of terror and ladder-climbing, and I think in some small way we both learned to transcend the hierarchy of our class.

We can ALL learn from our mistakes. We can all look at our leaders and our cultural and personal privileges and refuse to make progress at the cost of others. Sure, we're trying to survive in what is, at its root, a culture of competition, and to some degree we have to participate in the status quo to survive. But we can also work to change it. Those of us with more privilege have more ability to effect change. We can change the ways we look at others; we can choose to befriend the people who make less money than we do, the people whose lashes lower when we speak to them; the people who seem least likely to improve our social status. We can look critically at our privilege and resources and belongings and ask ourselves what we actually need, and how we can change our lives and share the excess to achieve a social balance in our community. We can remind ourselves that a balanced community means prosperity for all. 

Does prosperity mean a lack of suffering? Of course not. We're all going to die. We're all going to hurt. We're all going to lose loved ones, and health, and hope. But a balanced community is exactly the only thing that will sustain us through these challenges. And we can look to the ecology just outside our city limits for inspiration in achieving prosperity through social balance. 

A tree in a forest. If a maple drops ten thousand seeds on the forest floor, all but a few hundred of those are likely to be eaten by insects, rodents and birds before they ever sprout, and of those that do sprout, most will be eaten as spring greens by the likes of deer, and others. And maybe five will grow to be saplings, and maybe zero will live to become trees, most years. Until one day the mother tree has crumbled under the weight of some winter snow and in the mess of her fallen limbs, one of last year's saplings will grow sheltered and become a tree, itself. But you know what? In all those years where not a single one of those seeds grew to maturity, that original tree fed the ecosystem around her, and reached her roots through the landscape to share nutrients with the neighbouring trees. All the other plants and animals' droppings and dead bodies fed the soil, and now that soil is rich with microbial life and nutrients, and that new maple tree will grow strong--not on the backs of all those it conquered, but in an ecology of giving and dying and growing. The maple tree has no fear of falling behind. She is a sanctuary for mosses, ferns and all kinds of insect, microbial and animal life--she is part of that life. She's just growing and giving and crumbling and feeding her ecology. And that is why she prospers. I want to learn some of that wisdom.

What if there was no fear of falling behind in human society? Would we carry, feed, and connect with each other; with our ecology? Would we relish those connections instead of conquering others? I feel like I've experienced this when I sing in community. When my own voice drowns away among the voices of others, but together we're a beautiful sound. I experience it when I play with children in the wilderness. We're each so insignificant in the big forest, but our play changes the landscape and we see the impact of our being there; we learn to play carefully. We learn that if we destroy the stream-bank, then the water downstream will be muddy, and then we'll have no clean water for drinking, anywhere. We learn that affecting anything (anybody) will have impacts on ourselves.

If my life depends on privilege gained through competition, and supported by people who aren't being supported by me, then when those people's lives falter, so do I. We can't build a pyramid to stand on, then rip out the stability of the base, and expect to keep standing on the top.

And from another perspective, when we've prospered exponentially at the cost of the ecosystem that supports us without honouring it, giving back to it, and living in harmony with it, the ecology we depend on is faltering underneath our ridiculous pyramid, and we're all beginning to discover what happens, then.

Our system of pyramid-climbing is not a strong one. A strong system is lateral. Like a forest, or a group of people singing. A strong system loses a limb and regrows to heal the wound. A strong system has no leaders, but many trusted and equal members, all giving instead of taking. Giving is not sacrifice, it's prosperity.

It's scary to think of not having enough (food, money, land, power, achievement, influence, etc.) In a hierarchical culture, "not enough" equals failure, threat; fear. For those near the bottom of the cultural pyramid in my community it means no shelter; no food. For those on the bottom in Gaza it means abject trauma every day. It means death. Is this an acceptable cost for my "getting ahead"? I don't want this kind of unstable throne. I don't want to support a global society that prospers on hierarchical oppression, because in that kind of culture, everybody is a potential pawn, or enemy. Everybody is unstable. 

I want to transcend capitalism and find joy in uplifting others instead of uplifting myself at a cost to others. I want to stop prospering as an individual, and when I fall, I want to fall down in community, knowing that others will grow into my wounds. I want to be worth more than what I own or who bends under my feet. In a lateral community I will be worth the whole of us. I want the mirage of hierarchy to disappear and I want us all to be free.

Free Palestine.

Thursday, January 11, 2024

Participate in a Long Covid Awareness Project!

CALLING PEOPLE WITH LONG-COVID:
 
I'm looking for self-contributed photos of people who have or have had Long-Covid. 
 
I live with Long-Covid myself, and am currently working on a Long-Covid art piece, which will be performed and displayed at the Art Vancouver fair in April, 2024, and likely more places, after that. The piece will be part of my (dis)robe series, and titled Hospital Gown. It will be a wearable art piece made of a hospital gown and hospital blanket, and including a train Long-Covid symptoms and research findings over a gown of the faces of Long-Covid! I will need at least a few hundred faces of the millions currently affected in order to make a solid statement. The purpose here is to increase visibility for this issue, as well as for the many who are affected. Hopefully through awareness we'll also get more research.
 
Edited to add: The 200+ people who have already sent their selfies for this project have humbled me. I've had personal conversations with over a hundred of them; have shared stories of symptoms, of ups and downs and hopes and despair. We've talked about some of the things that are helping us persevere, and of who we were before all this. The images I'm collecting cover a range of experience from pre-covid wellness to the depths of illness. There are masked, gowned and tubed people, and smiling faces in work and athletic gear. This experience has been personally very motivating for me. It's easy when, like me, we've been sick for 4+ years, to forget our humanity and to accept the social perception that we're just a bunch of sick people. This project is reminding me that before this we were active contributing members of society. We want that back. This is why raising awareness matters.
 
Current concept drawing for (dis)robe: Hospital Gown, Jan 25, 2024

In April 2023 the National Library of Medicine published that "at least 65 million individuals worldwide are estimated to have long COVID, with cases increasing daily." This gown will be a part of sharing that story with the public.

Huge gratitude for these first 72 faces that will become a part of the upcoming project! I now have nearly 200 contributed faces, and hope to finish with 300.

IF YOU HAVE OR HAD LONG COVID AND WANT TO PARTICIPATE:
 
Just send me a photo of your face--any photo you like (although face must be visible). That's it!
You can Instagram DM @emilyvanartist or send in an email to emilyvanartist at gmail dot com.
 
Yes it will be anonymous! Even if I see your name when you send me the photo, it will be printed without a name and added anonymously to the gown.
 
I would also very much appreciate this post being shared, as I hope to get at least a few hundred photos on this art-piece. Thank you!

New Year New Projects!

WOW it's been a year!!!
If you follow this blog or my Instagram feed, you already know I was lucky enough to install three shows this year, all with the gracious help of my partner Markus, and one with my first project grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. I also hold enormous gratitude for the Hearth Gallery and the Gibsons Public Art Gallery for hosting these shows, and to the huge number of supporters I'm beginning to realize I have for not only showing up at the openings and to take in the shows, but also for buying quite a few of my paintings to bring home. Because of this support I was able to donate over $1400 this year to support the Bowen Island Conservancy, an organization that works hard to advocate for and preserve wilderness around my home. It feels humbling, in the way my wedding did, nearly 25 years ago now, when I looked out of the window and saw the guests gathering, and realized that these people cared about me. It's very deeply personal, and in the case of my art, it means I'm able to make an impact in protecting and educating about the things that are important to me. And this is huge.

In my studio working on paintings about the Shuswap fires.

As I sit here contemplating the year, the things that stand out are even more personal. My kids moved out last January and are now paying their own way in the city, some friends lost their homes in the raging wildfires we had this year, we lost a few loved ones both in my family and the community, and I'm FINALLY beginning to recover some of my ability after 3.5 years of living with long covid. Interesting, because 3.5 also happens to be the number of MILLIONS of Canadians who have or have had long covid, as of StatsCan's December 2024 publication.

So this leads to my next project: Hospital Gown.
This wearable art piece will be part of the (dis)robe series, and will be made from donated used hospital gowns and blanket, along with an ever-growing collection of photos of Canadians currently living with long-covid. Again I am humbled by so many people putting their trust in me as an artist to bring their faces into the wider community. The gown is barely started, but has already been invited to the Art Vancouver fair in April. I'll wear it to the opening event, there, whereafter it will be displayed along with other gowns from the collection. I still encounter quite a bit of misinformation and disbelief about long-covid, especially because those of us with autoimmune disease are so invisible. Either we're hidden away with our illness or we're out in public trying our damndest to look healthy. So it means a lot to me to have this opportunity to bring the faces of so many invisible sufferers out into the world.

Monday, October 23, 2023

w h a t . h o m e coming to Nex̱wlélex̱wem/Bowen Island November 10


I'm SO excited to finally be installing this immersive show in the community where it began. The first person to volunteer was my father. The next was my brother, and from there my video documentation of people talking about their experiences of home, belonging, and community spread into the wider community, and eventually to the mainland and Vancouver Island. What a massive learning process this was for me!! Not only the technical side of developing ways to intersect stories and landscapes by film, projection, and fabric, but learning to ask questions that promote the sharing of stories we don't often tell. I made many friends while interviewing for this work. And in an extreme stroke of luck I got to develop and exhibit the first iteration of it in Amsterdam! Which was odd, since all of the protagonists of the work are living in Western Canada. But the Dutch audience responded with passion, causing me to realize that it doesn't really matter where we live; feelings of belonging and community are essential to humanness. 

So here comes  w h a t . h o m e  to Nex̱wlélex̱wem/Bowen Island!! It's opening on my birthday, so I'm making some wild (local) needle teas and cookies to share. I hope you'll come. 

Lots of further links and info about this show are on the  w h a t . h o m e  page, but here's the essential info:

w h a t . h o m e

The importance of place, community and belonging in our increasingly globalized world

The Hearth Gallery
430 Bowen Island Trunk Rd.
Bowen Island, BC
(a 20-minute ferry ride from West Vancouver, and a 1- to 2-minute walk from the dock)

Nov 10 – Nov 25, 2023
Wednesdays – Mondays, 11am-5pm

Evenings for this show only:
5-8pm, Nov. 11, 17, 18, 24 and 25th

Opening event: November 10, 6-8pm
 
Oh yeah... and those forest paintings from the next post below will be on display during this show, as well. 😊

What's for Sale this Holiday Season!

It's holiday shopping time, which for me means it's almost my birthday... and that is when I finally get to discover what my partner bought for me at the Gibson's Public Art Gallery a few months ago!!! Woohooooo!!! I love supporting other artists, and I love when people support them in my honour. 🧡 So increasingly I'm realizing that my art is also a commodity, and of course I love to be supported in what I do! 

People ask me what's for sale. Well... pretty much everything's "for sale", except my soul -- hahaha! But maybe you'd like a list of what's popular. I happily oblige. Here's a selection of things of various prices, to hopefully inspire your gift-giving, or just to fill your own home with some love and thought-provoking interest.

To Purchase: Please contact me at emilyvanartist at gmail dot com to arrange for e-transfer (or cash) and pick up or shipping! Of course, if you'd like to visit the studio and see these works in person before purchasing, that's always an option. Email me to arrange!

Forests - these are so fresh that you can't pick up until late November, when the paint's cured, and they're finished their residence at the Hearth Gallery, on Nex̱wlélex̱wem/Bowen Island. They're also so popular that one of them sold before I finished it (yikes--scary for me as an artist, but also super exciting, as I finished it specifically for the person who bought it!)

Left: "Cedars Dancing in the Autumn", 12x36 inches, $632 CAD
Right: Licorice Ferns Embracing Cooler Weather", 12x36 inches, $632 CAD

"Late September Catching Wind off the Sea"
18x72 inches, $1496 CAD


Each of these is 4x12 inches; $248 CAD
Titles, left to right: "Cedars in September", "Licorice Ferns in September", "Dancing Trees", "Licorice Ferns on Fallen Maple".


Change/Able - these are rearrangeable paintings. The concept is that you can change the art on your walls whenever you like; rearrange, reconfigure, or just turn a piece. Make your own art from a set of hand-painted unique tiles. It's like psychological growth: nobody else is working with the exact set of experiences we are as individuals, and we can experiment and direct our own growth, every day. The smallest ones come on a panel so they're very easy to hang (like a regular wired painting), but the larger ones come with hanging instructions, so you can blend them gorgeously with your own wall. 

"Wash Away the Rain", 7 canvases 4x12 inches each, $760 CAD

"Devil's Dream", 13 canvases, 3x3 inches each, $317 CAD

"Fingal's Cave", 13 canvases, 3x3 inches each, $317 CAD

"Invasive Family Tree", 24 canvases, 6x6 inches each, $1640 CAD

"Mayflies", 9 canvases, 4x4 inches each, $488 CAD

"The Instability of Memory", 16 canvases, 10x10 inches each, $2440 CAD

"A Universe Inside Me", 18 canvases, 4x4 inches each, mounted on panel 30x24 inches, $776 CAD

Abstracts - some of these are painted to a particular song, the lyrics of which inform the title. These are my visual/emotional interpretation of the stories in the songs. Others are my interpretation of a feeling.

"Tree of Life 2", 15x30 inches, $650 CAD

"Blue 1: A Meditation on Phosphorescence", 30x24 inches, $920 CAD

"Do You See Me? (Does Anyone Care?)", 16x40 inches, $952 CAD

"Green 1: A Meditation on Phosphorescence", 36x24 inches, $1064 CAD

"Keep Your Eyes Open, Mama; We're Almost Home", 16x20 inches, $520 CAD

"Sit With Me and Watch the Sun Yellow Behind the Smoke", 4x12 inches, $248 CAD

"Drink Before the War", 20x24 inches, $680 CAD

"Sun Setting on the Avenue 2", three canvases, 4x12 inches each, $344 CAD

"Up Behind and Away Again", 3 canvases, 12x24 inches each, $1280 CAD

Vegetation - all oil on canvas. I don't paint these much anymore, but sometimes I just need a little joy!

"Thank You for Sheltering Me 3", 36x48 inches, $1928 CAD

"Spring Came Early and Surprised the Bluebells 4", 36x24 inches, $1064 CAD

"Cherry Blossoms 1, 2, 3", 3 canvases, 15x30 inches each, $1550 CAD

"You Opened Your Eyes Like the Morning", 20x24 inches, $680 CAD
 
"It Was in the Time of Dancing Leaves that You Were Born", 24x24 inches, $776 CAD
 

Portrait Commissions - hire me to create a graphite, oil or acrylic portrait of you or your loved one. Having a portrait painted is an experience as much as an outcome. Price includes a photo-shoot with me: You get some photos, and I get to know the subjects I'm working with, which makes the portrait much more accurate and meaningful. Pricing ranges from about $500 to $1000, depending on size and photoshoot.

All of the following images are privately owned. None are for sale!




 






Tuesday, October 3, 2023

Disinformation and meanness. What is going on?!

"Escaping the Nest" (detail)  E. van Lidth de Jeude

It just hit me that maybe ten years ago I was worried about the rise of misinformation on social media. I saw it once in a while; people posting things from known biased sources, or just stating information they assumed was correct but wasn’t. Extensive fact-checking became more necessary than I had felt it was, before, since even trusted sources seemed infiltrated with presumption and error. Or maybe I was just becoming more aware. 

Recently, though, it feels like disinformation is the norm, and complicated with some serious cruelty. On the bigger social media groups I’m a part of (chicken-keeping, canning, foraging, mushrooms, birds, education, etc.) it’s just absolutely normal for somebody to post a question and receive 30–70% wrong answers. It seems people have just become accustomed to stating an uneducated guess as fact. (And seriously — for canning, foraging, mushrooms, chickens, and schooling, this can lead to disaster, for example when someone asks for ID on a poisonous mushroom, and half the responses say it’s edible, and most of the other half are phallus jokes.) And then there are the people berating each other, not just for being wrong, but for correcting the mistakes, as well. Or for totally unrelated things. Like when said phallus jokes become linked to anti-trans attacks. It gets awful out there.

THEN there’s the morality war. There is a propensity for people (mostly white men, I’m sorry to say), to stick their uneducated opinions into posts about LGBTQ2IA+, indigenous, children’s rights, women’s rights, and BIPOC issues… again, as facts. Many of these “facts” are colonial constructs held by our society because they keep white men in power (and because the rest of us think they ensure our continued prosperity). But many are now also just lies made up by conspiracy theorists (like all the supposed chemical, psychological and media conspiracies to make our kids gay or trans or supportive of minority rights…) Sure, there are many sides to every story, but some things are actually not happening. I’m not even getting into the massive quagmire of people in power (often leaders of large corporate enterprises, politicians and religious leaders) using minorities as stepping-stones to more power. Some of us use these crimes as security for our privilege, without ever questioning ourselves.

In my art life this takes shape as criticism and fear: Am I appropriating symbols that are proprietary to a marginalized group that I’m not a member of? Rainbow spectra and feathers were important in my work before I became aware of appropriation, and it’s been hard to sideline them, even though I know how important it is. Even harder was the bickering between artists and members of the LGBTQ2IA+ and BIPOC communities. Oh yeah, and the outright hate-filled rhetoric between some feminists of different stripes. These issues make communicating online really fraught, even without the added question of misinformation or disinformation.

What is going on?! Why is our culture disintegrating into this kind of nastiness and ignorance? As a long-time unschooling parent who notices the lack of this behaviour in the unschooling groups, it’s easy to feel like it might have some kind of relationship with our education system. Especially since unschooling mindset is one of curiosity, acceptance and learning, and unfortunately the compulsory, competitive nature of our school system can provoke a rebellion against curiosity and learning, as well as a propensity for bullying tactics. The rebellion against understanding and the bullying are apparent in a lot of the online attacks I’ve seen. But I think that, in the bigger picture, there’s a deeper reason. We’re experiencing a massive cultural shift. Our minds are opening. And that’s just messy.

We’re threatened from all angles as climate change changes every single foundation our cultures were built on (predictability of seasons, harvests, weather, migration, and therefore employment, finances, housing, healthcare, and even cultural norms). So in this state of growing societal panic, some people are trying to keep things as they were (ignoring the fact that the great majority of underprivileged people have already been suffering these unpredictabilities forever). Some are taking opportunities to fight for rights long-denied to them. Some, like me, are gleefully running headlong into the change, wanting to create a new and better world out of the chaos, and ALL of us are rather ungrounded in the process. There’s so much change, so much fear and threat, that we’re all just kind of scrabbling for understanding all the time. I guess it’s not surprising that a lot of people are confused about the facts, in this kind of chaos! I am too. Everything seems to take so much research now! And patience, tact, and caution! And in the rush of this change, and the feeling of urgency everywhere, it’s not surprising we don’t feel we have time to fact-check or to come to an understanding of the issues we’re talking about before making assumptions and proclamations. 

So it’s frustrating, and sometimes even extremely upsetting, when people resort to cruelty because they feel threatened or inadequate in the face of such big unfathomable change. But it’s necessary that we remain patient and kind, reminding ourselves that these actions are a part of our societal growth. And I’m choosing to see it as a great sign that big change is happening. As a woman with many friends and family in marginalized communities, I’m glad to see my own and other people’s rights have a chance to be respected. As a person living on earth, I’m glad we are making changes that might make our future survivable! Maybe we can all take deep breaths and remind ourselves that everybody is confused and frightened. And maybe saying lots of wrong things is part of our process. We’re learning to learn and communicate! Real learning with an open heart and mind is how we will adapt to our new civilization. It’s how we will all grow to meet the challenge of a world none of us have lived in, before.