Blue Cabin
(Blog) Daniel Francis. “Blue Cabin Launches” August 28, 2019.
Meredyth Cole. “Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency Launches on Vancouver’s False Creek” Canadian Art. August 27, 2019. “Blue Cabin is not a structure that’s ever been owned, it has resisted ownership for almost a hundred years and that’s not going to really change,” says Vanessa Kwan, grunt gallery’s program director and a member of the Other Sights production team. “That’s been very important for the collective to maintain; to say that this is a space that is cared for and is stewarded but it is not something that any one entity or person can own.”
Gloria Macarenko. CBC On the Coast – 88.1FM. August 23, 2019.
“Derelict Cabin Revitalized as Artist Residency” CityTV. August 23, 2019.
Robin Laurence. “Salish weaving brings Blue Cabin to life” Georgia Straight. August 22-29, 2019.
Shawn Conner. “Blue Cabin to Host Weavers’ Residencies” Vancouver Sun. August 22, 2019.
Jaz Papadopoulos. “Weaving and Resisting on the Foreshore” SAD Magazine. August 20, 2019.
“Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency Sets Sail August 25” My VanCity. August 20, 2019.
(Blog) Jay Minter. “Visit The Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency” August 19, 2019.
Lua Presidio. “Queer, indegenous and youth” CiTR: The Arts Report – 101.9FM. August 14, 2019.
“An old squatters cabin is reinvented as a float home and art studio” CBC News. August 8, 2019.
“The Blue Cabin – Floating Art” Canadian Art Junkie. July 31, 2019.
“Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency Launches” Galleries West. July 26, 2019.
Rebecca Bollwitt. “Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency Open House” Miss 604. July 24, 2019.
“Blue cabin residency hosts Coast Salish weavers” Salish Sea Sentinel. 2019.
Janet Smith. “Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency headed for False Creek in August” Georgia Straight. July 16, 2019.“The Blue Cabin is a culturally and historically significant work of architecture, and its launch in False Creek will encourage both artists and the public to appreciate the many complex histories that make up the community…The cabin — and the broader region we now call the Lower Mainland — is inextricably linked to the colonial displacement of Indigenous peoples. As a heritage-focused project, one of our core values is to reflect and engage with the stories of the traditional owners of these lands: the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.” – Glenn Alteen.
Charles Campbell. “The Remarkable Effort to Save an Artist’s Shack” The Tyee. January 7, 2019. First published in subTerrain, #79. Charles Campbell “The Last Squat”.“Al lived in the cabin for fifty years, on the border between Mackenzie Barge and Marine Ways and a stretch of beach that leads to Cates Park, on the edge that lies between land and ocean, at the exact spot where ownership is hard to determine, such that possession becomes all that matters. It’s an uncomfortable spot for those concerned with certainty in the rights to property, but it is exactly where Al wanted to be. The house is a remnant of a life that’s been obliterated in Vancouver. Call it the last squat. Yet because the Blue Cabin sat on a very particular in-between place, it survived.”
“2019 Heritage Award Recipients” Heritage BC. 2019.
Throughout 2017 and into early 2018, Jeremy & Sus Borsos, the artists who restored and refurbished the Blue Cabin, were also interviewed on CBC TV, Check 6 News TV, Amanda Spotted Fawn Strong, and CBC Radio (with host Margaret Gallagher).
Blue Cabin Press Articles from 2015-2017
Big Rock Candy Mountain
Marina Roy. “Big Rock Candy Mountain” Canadian Art Review. January 29, 2019. “The chewing gum becomes a quasi-object, a kind of binding glue that circulates as shared knowledge exchange and collaboration between students with the aim of creating new types of relationships, experiences and ways of knowing, including understanding what is behind the seemingly banal yet desirable products that occupy our world.”
Kevin Griffin. “Trick or Trouble” The Province. October 31, 2018.
Kevin Griffin. “Bubble Trouble gum released in time for Halloween trick or treating” Vancouver Sun. October 31, 2018. “Artists Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling spent a year with a class at the school researching, developing and prototyping the gum. The final flavour was chosen by students in a vote. The gum’s distinctive mauve packaging describes the gum in several different ways, including “Hello Kitty bubble bath,” “tastes like coffee powder,” and “zigzag sap highway.”
Renee Filipone. “Interview with Elaine Gelizon, Tessa Dec & Hannah Jickling” CBC Radio – The Early Edition. October 31, 2018.
“BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN” Tate Liverpool. 2018.
Rebecca Bowllwitt. “Big Rock Candy Mountain Gum Exhibition” Miss 604. October 24, 2018.
Tara Lee. “Chewing Gum as Public Art in Vancouver”. Inside Vancouver. October 18, 2018.
Gerry Kowalenko. “Interview with Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed” The Arts Rational. October 18, 2018.
Jay Minter. “Bubble Trouble is brewing in time for Halloween” Jay Minter Blog. October 5, 2018.
Justin Langlois. “Why Art Schools Need More Socially Engaged Art” Canadian Art. September 27, 2018.
City of Vancouver. “QA Chew’s Bubble Trouble” Project information. Spring 2018.
Leah Sandals. “25 Artists Longlisted for the Sobey Award” Canadian Art. April 17, 2018.
Lucien Durey. “Art in 2017: A View from Vancouver” Canadian Art. December 18, 2017. “SOUR VS SOUR is delicious and symbolic of the lively exchange between adults and kids instigated by Big Rock Candy Mountain’s inventive approach to public art. The project has proven that socially engaged practices can be funny and accessible while exploring new material approaches and furthering contemporary art dialogues. Jickling, Reed and Kwan are adept at selecting and combining playful, political and educational elements in a way that feels relevant and exciting.”
“Mayors Arts Awards” City of Vancouver. October 4, 2017.
The Foreshore
Anne-Sophie Rodet. “Access Gallery” Pacific Rim Magazine. 2017. “Foreshore, a yearlong collaboration between Access Gallery and the non-profit artist collective Other Sights, is both an artist residency and an exhibit space. This project was inspired by Vancouver’s position on the shoreline, and the impact that water has on major cities and societies around the world.”
Coastal Camera Obscura
“Donald Lawrence’s Coastal Camera Obscura turns city on its head” Georgia Straight. August 9, 2017. “When you see the distant viaducts upended, with the water rising, you’ll start to see the urban foreshore as a place of flux and question where it’s headed.”
Slow Dirt
Naiobh O’Connor. “Worms inspire Mount Pleasant art exhibition” Vancouver Courier. October 21, 2015. “Other Sights spokesperson Jen Weih describes worms as humble, slow, careful and inevitably productive creatures whose function is additive as opposed to extractive.“It’s not going into the community and pulling out profit. It’s being in a community and generating value embedded in that community,” she said.”
Robin Laurence. “Urgent Imagination probes development push” Georgia Straight. October 15 – 22, 2015. Page 29. “Here, the lowly creature that transforms organic garbage into nutrient-rich soil is a metaphor for what urban development could be, a process both enriching and incremental.”
Deadhead
Kimberly Phillips. “On Bathtub Rings and Other Irritants: Cedric, Nathan and Jim Bomford’s Deadhead” C Magazine 124, Strata. Winter 2014. Pages 15 – 21. “If for only a brief moment, one could say, Deadhead conjured the city’s uncomfortable pasts.”
Kevin Griffin. “Best of 2014: Visual Arts” The Vancouver Sun. December 19, 2014.
“Best Floating Mystery Art” Georgia Straight, 19th Annual Best of Vancouver edition. September 18-25, 2014. Page 62.
Jen Muranetz. “Deadhead Art Sculpture on Shaw TV” Shaw TV, go! Vancouver. September 17, 2014. “It looks like a cross between a fort and a pirate ship. It’s called ‘Deadhead’ a floating art sculpture commissioned by Other Sights for Artists’ Projects.”
Kevin Griffin. “Deadhead: moored in a legal grey area in False Creek” The Vancouver Sun. August 20, 2014.“The fundamental question is who owns the foreshore? Who owns the water? Who owns the land?”
John Thomson. “Floating Sculpture Intrigues and Infuriates” DZine Trip Online Design Magazine. August 14, 2014. “Deadhead may look like a jumble of shapes and sizes but once on board, it becomes an intriguing labyrinth of intersecting planes and angles.”
Alex Varty. “Metaphors afloat aboard False Creek’s Deadhead” Georgia Straight. July 30, 2014. “The germ of Deadhead, then, was to create art that would lure people to the shore, then get them thinking about the uses of the littoral zone. Four years later, the project is that, and much more.”
Daphne Bramham. “In the eye of the beholder, A Tale of Two Barges.” The Vancouver Sun. July 23, 2014. “There’s a higgeldy-piggeldy barge with a tower, winding stairway and landing dock anchored off Vancouver’s Maritime Museum that looks like a fit spot for Popeye, or Kevin Costner in his Waterworld persona.”
Eileen Power. “Featured Story, Art Barge – Deadhead” CBC Radio One, North by Northwest. Saturday, July 19, 2014. “Freelance producer, Eileen Power braves the shallow waters off the Vancouver Maritime Museum in a rowboat to board the Deadhead, a floating sculpture built on a barge.”
Kevin Griffin. “Floating sculpture evokes squatters shacks, Deadhead structure was built without plans” The Vancouver Sun. July 16, 2014. “For something called Deadhead, there’s really nothing remotely morbid about it. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s very playful and full of surprises.”
Grow
Joseph Hart. “Art for Eat’s Sake” Public Art Review | Vol. 23 No. 2, Issue 46. 2011. “Artists are exploring the sustainability of our food systems with hands-on, interventionist projects.”
Robin Laurence. “Artists and Gardens: A Growing Concern” Canadian Art. November 4, 2011. “I’m interested in how our urban environments are shifting and changing as a result of pressures around the ecological crisis.”
Robin Laurence. “Two urban agriculture projects bring art to Vancouver’s gardens” Georgia Straight. August 22, 2011. “The organizations and individuals behind them are making a new genre of public art that focuses on community, utility, sustainability, and reclaiming marginal urban areas for cultivation.”
Digital Natives
Lorna Brown. “Digital Natives” Canadian Theatre Review. Vancouver After 2010. Edited by Peter Dickinson, Kirsty Johnston, and Keren Zaiontz, 164. Fall 2015. Pages 31 – 35. “As a temporary spectacle that leased a piece of the built environment, Digital Natives drew together the standardized global template of the billboard with this particular location, and the viewpoints of dispersed contributors and audience members.”
Mercedes Eng. “Decoding ‘Digital Natives'” Jacket2. September 1, 2014.
Jo-Anne Green. “Digital Natives (Vancouver)” Networked Performance. April 17, 2011.
Rob Bittner. “Digital Natives Controversy (Vancouver, BC)” The C-Word. April 7, 2011. “The whole thing seems to be quite an incredible idea and is worthy of much attention. And there has been. But not all of it has been positive publicity.”
Rossi Cheryl. “Twitter-like messages highlight Vancouver billboard art project: Aboriginal artists contribute messages.” The Vancouver Courier. April 5, 2011. “Interspersed with ads for Air Canada, Starbucks, cars and wine on the controversial electronic billboards adjacent to the Burrard Bridge, new messages are provoking thought in a different way.”
Clint Burnham. “‘Digital Natives’ Between ads for beer and pop music, an electronic billboard in Vancouver beams challenging messages by and about First Nations” The Tyee. April 5, 2011. “With Digital Natives, we’ve taken back – temporarily – some visual space in the city for messages from individuals, to display a dialogue from this city and beyond.”
Marsha Lederman. “The billboard – on Squamish Nation land – becomes a venue for artistic and literary exchange between native and non-native communities” The Globe and Mail. April 5, 2011.
“One Digital Natives message a day for the month of April” Vancouver is Awesome. April, 2011.
Jessica Werb.“Burrard Street billboard to host public art work of Twitter messages” Georgia Straight. March 31, 2011. “A public art project curated by Vancouver artist Lorna Brown and Simon Fraser University English lit associate professor Clint Burnham is elevating Twitter to an art form.”
Kevin Griffin. “We: Vancouver Opens Today at the Vancouver Art Gallery” The Vancouver Sun. February 12, 2011. “One of the works that will be breaking the boundaries of the gallery is Digital Natives, a series of text-based Twitter messages that will be sharing space with the advertising on the controversial electronic sign mounted on traditional Squamish territory on the Burrard Street Bridge.”
The Games are Open – Köbberling & Kaltwasser
Barbara Cole. “Hijacked Narratives” Canadian Theatre Review. Vancouver After 2010. Edited by Peter Dickinson, Kirsty Johnston, and Keren Zaiontz. 164, Fall 2011. Pages 16 – 21. “Over the four years of the project’s existence, the artwork’s form shifted from sculpture, to garden, to dirt pile, each transformation driven by the agendas of assumed owners.”
“Köbberling and Kaltwasser build nothing to last” Video produced by Michael Cox. Vimeo. 2012.
“New Teutonia Must Fall, Folke Köbberling & Martin Katwasser” Lodown magazine, Zeitschrift üfr Populärkultur und Bewegungskunst. Dec, Jan, Feb 2012. “In spatial and sculptural site-specific interventions, we tackle issues around the public domain, grass root participation and self-organization, market economics, mobility, shelter, sustainability, and the scarcity of resources. The potential for social conflict is inherent in all of these.”
“Folke Kobberking and Martin Kaltwasser, The Games Are Open, Vancouver, Canada.” Sculpture Magazine, January/February Vol. 31 No. 1, pg. 16. 2012. “The Games are Open simultaneously addresses community building through a new conception of “green space,” decommodification of the art object, and the accessibility of art.”
Folke Köbberling, Martin Katwasser. “The Games are Open” Urban Constellations, ed. Matthew Gandy, (Berlin: jovis Verlag GmbH, 2011), 89 – 91. “The project presents a kind of decay in the face of rapid and seemingly unstoppable urban change.”
“Full-scale bulldozer made from recycled Olympic Games materials” Artabase Web. October 12, 2010. “Folke Kőbberling & Martin Kaltwasser spent 9 weeks creating the sculpture from 1,000 wheat board panels liberated from the neighbouring 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Athletes’ Village.”
Katherine Monk. “Olympic Village discards recast as public art, Berin-based artists reclaim abandoned space with biodegradable bulldozer” The Vancouver Sun. August 7, 2010. “Koebberling says the compostable bulldozer is in itself a meditation on time, not only because it will biodegrade over the course of an estimated eight years, but because bulldozers are a symbol of massive and near-immediate landscape transformations.”
False Creek – T + T (Tony Romano and Tyler Brett)
Robin Laurence. “From bars to brollies, Bright Light shines” Georgia Straight. February 7, 2010. “Among their many references are the inequities of Vancouver’s real-estate boom, the construction of the Athletes’ Village, and the now-banished floating homes of former False Creek squatters.”
Looking Up Series: Ffinnigans Wwake – Aaron Carpenter
Kevin Griffin. “Finn Again Awakes every three minutes” Vancouver Sun. May 13, 2009. “He’s done that in homage to Joyce and his liquid nouns, words that change their spellings for various literary reasons each time they’re used. It’s among the many reasons why the novel is so impenetrable”.
“Literally: Aaron Carpenter, Joel Herman, Roula Partheniou” a pamphlet produced by Artspeak Gallery to coincide with the screening of Finnagans Waake. “Interested in both mimicry and the processes of research, the artists consider the formal and connotative aspects of the book and the printed word as readymades and as points for further fiction”
Launch of Park – Marko Simcic
Kevin Griffin. “New sculpture pulls over to the curb” Vancouver Sun. November 30, 2008.
Robin Laurence. “Looking for a place to Park” Georgia Straight, January 2-8, 2009. Page 27. “Park creates a tension Simcic observes, between the public and the private. Between our sense of sharing and our sense of entitlement. Between our culture, domestic culture, and visual culture.”
Looking Up Series: Vox Pop – Antonia Hirsch
Jeremy Todd. “What Are We Now? On stadium and Vox Pop” BlackFlash, Fall Issue 27.1, 2009. Page 44. “Stadium crowds look into a singular point/event and respond in accordance to it, while being watched by others as a spectacular whole through media broadcasting. They also watch each other”
John Mackie. “An art wave hits Granville and Robson” Vancouver Sun. October 18, 2008. “It may make you look differently at advertising, it may make you look differently at the type of imagery that’s thrown at us.”
Lynn Mitges. “Zero in on a new wave” The Province. October 9, 2008. Page B8.