Visual Arts – Page 20

Leaving some things hidden

Olga Campbell and Larry Green’s shared exhibit at the Zack, Hidden, is on until March 6. (photo by Olga Livshin)

In the new exhibit at Zack Gallery, Hidden, the pieces are united not only by theme but also by media. Both artists featured, Olga Campbell and Larry Green, mostly use photography, which they then play with in Photoshop. The computer-generated effects contribute to the graceful and faintly mystical feel of the images. Hazy silhouettes hide behind the splashes of paint. Eyes peek through the veil of the unknown. Mysterious places and partial faces open the gates of subconscious and let us witness the artists’ creative cores, their emotions.

The images are distinct, echoing each artist’s personality, but the common approach makes their double show almost seem inevitable. And the meshing of their artistic visions spills into life beyond the gallery. Both chose careers in the helping professions, for example. Campbell was a social worker until she retired. Green is a psychotherapist and a professor of psychology. But they didn’t really know each other before the idea of a mutual exhibit took root.

Campbell explained how it happened: “Last year, I participated in Culture Crawl. Linda Lando, the Zack Gallery director, came to see my pieces. She asked me if I wanted to have a show at the Zack Gallery.”

Green added: “I was with Linda that day – we are partners. I remembered Olga’s art from other shows…. I like what she does. Someone suggested we have a show together. That’s how this collaboration started, but, even before that, we were vaguely aware of each other. We saw and admired each other’s art at group shows. We knew many of the same people: friends, neighbors, co-workers.”

After the dates of the exhibit were set, the artists met to decide on the theme. “Larry came up with the Hidden, and I thought it was wonderful,” said Campbell. “There is so much in the world that is hidden. People hide things from others and from themselves, adopting layers of masks and veils. When we put obstacles in the way of seeing the world, we hide not only the shadows, but also the light. When we acknowledge the shadows, then we are able to see the light. Most of the really profound and rewarding things in life are hidden beneath the layers of mystery.”

In Campbell’s pieces, the layers are frequently photographs superimposed upon each other in Photoshop, plus special effects and the occasional addition of multimedia. She admitted that she doesn’t do much pure painting although she studied it.

“I always liked doing art,” she said. “In 1986, I took several art classes and then I thought, what to do with it? So I enrolled in Emily Carr. Afterwards, I worked as a social worker part-time and on my art part-time, until I retired. Art is not a hobby for me. I have to do it.”

Green’s path was a bit different. “I did a lot of art until I was about 25. Then I dropped it for 20 years before starting again, first with pottery and then with other stuff. When I worked with clay, sometimes my hands knew better than my brain what I wanted to say. I made a sculpture and now, years later, I look at it and think: Oh, that’s what I meant. Of course! My brain has caught up with my hands.”

The intuitive application of their skills underlines both artists’ creative courage. They are not afraid to experiment.

“I play around with Photoshop,” said Campbell. “I don’t know it very well. I try different things and I often get something I like by accident. Later, I can’t always reproduce the effect, so I never repeat myself.”

Green concurred. “I like Photoshop,” he said. “I learn it as I go. My ideas pull me through the learning process…. Using Photoshop, I can realize my vision much faster than with paint and canvas, but it is all trial and error. I keep worrying at the piece until something comes along. Or not. If it comes, I go for it. If it doesn’t, I don’t. Some pieces take years to come together. For example, years ago, I saw a single pink running shoe in a park and snapped a photo of it but I didn’t do anything about it. Then, recently, in a different place, I saw a single pink glove, and photographed it. I brought them together in Photoshop, and now they are not lonely.”

Many of Green’s pieces at the Zack are foggy landscapes. “I’ve always been fascinated by fog,” he said. “A foggy landscape has a particular dreamlike quality to it. Shapes are indistinct and, therefore, invite the viewer in, in an attempt to give the scene some definition. Alternately, the viewer can rest in the soft tranquility of the scene rather than be overwhelmed by details…. People who come to me for therapy are often afraid of the fog, especially inside themselves, but they’re also interested in it, in what it might reveal. Everything I do, in both art and psychology, is basically the same: trying to reveal the underlying reality, the hidden connections behind the apparent.”

“The same for me,” Campbell agreed. “Although not everything should be revealed. Some parts of the whole are better hidden, while the essence should be revealed.”

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Painting beauty, meaning

Lori Goldberg in front of one of her paintings. (photo from Lori Goldberg)

Lori Goldberg is one of the artists whose work has been chosen to be part of a special project in aid of what will be Abbotsford’s first residential hospice facility, Holmberg House, set to open this year.

“The Reach Gallery and the Abbotsford Arts Council, in partnership with the Abbotsford Hospice Society, selected several artists for the project,” explained Goldberg to the Independent. “After the artworks are completed, the Reach will host an event where donors will bid on them. The proceeds will be split between the Abbotsford Hospice Society, the Reach Gallery and the Abbotsford Arts Council. Some of the works will be placed in Holmberg House. Others will be used to cover medical equipment.”

The artists only receive a small honorarium for their work, which is due at the end of January. But payment comes in other forms. “I like the challenge of creating an uplifting and soulful work that would give the viewer peace and joy,” said Goldberg, who is coming off a fall 2015 solo show at the Zack Gallery called Urban Forest.

The forest theme, intertwined with the “true Canadian” theme, has been filling her canvases for the last several years.

“In the past, my art often involved objects,” Goldberg said. “I was a single mom with two growing sons and I realized recently that the objects and still life in my art meant me being domestic. The objects were all around me, part of my family life, and each object had a story to tell about their owners and the relationships between things and people. An object could be spiritual or mundane, and the stories could change with use.

“But, as my sons grew, I could expand myself. Before, most of my buyers were women. Now, I could reach further with my imagery. I traveled and I taught a lot, and the more I traveled, the more I realized how important my home was: Vancouver, Canada. I started exploring the theme of being Canadian in my art.”

One of the symbols of Canada in Goldberg’s eyes is a canoe. “Visually, the canoe represents something significant. Canoes took explorers across Canada.”

Red canoes float and bob on the water across Goldberg’s paintings. Some of them are big, others small, but all of them are empty. “A canoe is a vessel, and I make it empty on purpose. Everyone looking at my paintings can imagine themselves in the canoe. It is there for them. I did a lot of kayaking in my life, and the experience is similar. You’re on the water, paddling, and there is a landscape unfolding, sometimes peaceful, sometimes dangerous. There is a relationship between the persons in the boats and the landscape. There is a home there.”

For Goldberg, the color of the canoes – red – also represents Canada. “Like on our flag,” she said. “There are people who enjoy boating and water, and they like and buy these paintings. I have some new commissions of the canoes.”

Goldberg loves working on commissions. “I’m good with commissions. People who order them usually know my work, but we always discuss what size of the painting they need, if they want some specific colors, or if they have a story to tell. Maybe they have a cabin on a lake, and then I do research, make lots of sketches, and try to incorporate their familiar landscape details into the painting.”

More often than not, Goldberg’s canoes sail past wild, forested shores, shimmering with green leaves and filtered sunlight. “I like a punch of bright red inside the green,” the artist mused.

Forests, especially Canadian urban forests, have become another important theme in her art. “The forest is so close in Vancouver, just behind your windows. The city is all concrete, but when you step inside a forest, you shed the city, all its artificial neon colors, all the metal and plastic. It all peels off. You become part of nature, but you also become more exposed, more vulnerable, you feel alive. Nature inspires you, but it can also be dangerous, full of beasts and unknown perils. It’s beautiful and uplifting but also powerful. You have to respect it.”

The juxtaposition of the wilderness and the city, our cultural icons among the tangle of branches is a recurring motif in Goldberg’s forests. You could see a deer peeking from behind a tree, or people lugging their suitcases along the woodsy paths. “We all bring our luggage to the forest,” she said. “A forest is as much a metaphor of human lives as it is a real place. There is light and there are shadows there. Our cities are encroaching on the forest, but we need to become caregivers. In my small way, I do what I can, so we can find harmony with nature.”

The theme of urban Canadian forests resonates with many in Canada, and more and more people have become interested in Goldberg’s work. A few months ago, she and her paintings of canoes and forests were profiled in the magazines MontrealHOME, VancouverHOME and TorontoHOME.

More information can be found on the artist’s website, lorigoldberg.ca.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Each creation unique

The faces that Larry Cohen creates communicate a range of emotions. (photo by Olga Livshin)

Larry Cohen has been working with pottery, on and off, for about 30 years. “A long time ago, I tried to make money from it, but not anymore,” he told the Independent. “Now, I just make things I want to make, things I love.”

Touch and Fire, Cohen’s solo show at the Zack Gallery, highlights the things he likes: elegant but aloof vases, functional bowls made with salted fire, and expressive faces cut into clay – manifestations of the artist’s pains, hopes and desires. “Clay registers every touch,” he said, “expressing the character of a particular place, time, person or purpose.”

With a few touches of his fingers, a few slashes of a knife across a thin clay slab, Cohen manages to convey a multitude of emotions. Every face he has made is unique but, together, they represent the artist’s inner core.

“Sometimes, you have dreams,” Cohen said about his faces. “Good or bad, with faces you recognize or you don’t. Dreams are part of us, part of the human psyche. My faces are mysteries; they’re my imagination. I started making them in 2015 and I call them ‘manifestations.’”

Every other piece on display in the gallery – vases, teakettles and bowls – the artist calls “pots.” Some of these he creates on his pottery wheel, while others he builds from the slabs of clay like sculptural ceramics.

“When I start working with a piece, I know approximately what I want to make, but there are so many different steps along the way,” he explained. “I have to pay attention to what is already done during each step as much as to what I wanted in the beginning. Every step holds a surprise, although some surprises are better than others. Sometimes, things fail technically – like crack in the kiln – and you can only cry. It’s humbling, when the technical stuff affects the end result as much as your skill or your vision. The more I work with clay, the more I realize that there is still so much I don’t know.”

He is learning new things with every pot he makes and, in three decades of working with clay, he has learned quite a lot, but the unknown always beckons.

“I don’t like doing the same things, like factory production. The machines can repeat the same patterns and colors endlessly and sell them in department stores. The pottery coming from machines is perfect and the same. I’m not interested in doing that. I want to experiment; I try something different all the time. My every pot is unique.”

His craving for the new and surprising has guided him as much in his professional life as it has done in his art. In his life, he has been a criminal lawyer and a University of British Columbia law instructor, he did a stint as a commercial fisherman, worked as a building contractor and managed a Japanese restaurant. “Life is interesting when you try different things,” he said. “I’ve been lucky to be able to do what I wanted.”

Whatever he was doing to earn his living, art always occupied a part of his soul. He has never stopped creating in a variety of forms, from simple teacups to complex sculptures, and clay has been his passion for years.

“It’s nice to work with clay,” he said. “It’s meditative and it engages me completely. It’s good for your health but it’s hard physical work. First, you have to prepare clay, to ‘wedge’ it, like kneading dough. Then you make a pot, but afterwards it has to dry completely before you fire it the first time. Only after that, when it cools, you can apply glaze and fire the second time.”

Cohen has two kilns in his studio on Cortes Island. In one, he fires with salt to create texture on his pottery; the other is for smooth surfaces. “In the summer, I spend months on Cortes Island, working in my studio every day. In other seasons, I do it occasionally, too, every few weeks. When I’m there, I work in the studio, but I’m not as young as I was before. It’s getting harder to work long days.”

His artistic creations run from utilitarian to high art. “A difference between art and craft is hard to pinpoint,” he said. “It’s a continuum. On one end is pure craft, the functionality. A teapot has to hold water to make tea. On the other end is pure art, like my faces. They don’t have to do anything. But, mostly, you’re in the middle. Every pot – a vase, a bowl – has to be both functional and esthetic. Pottery at its best is both useful and beautiful, and skills are necessary to achieve both goals. Most of the time, it’s a mixture. I’m as much an artist as a craftsman.”

Unfortunately, he admits, he is not much of a salesperson. “I don’t sell as much as I wish. I want to sell more to have room for new things,” he said with a smile.

Touch and Fire opened on Jan. 14 and will continue at the Zack until Feb. 7.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Glass exhibit at Zack Gallery

From left to right are artists Larissa Blokhuis, Kirsten Rankel, Maria Keating, Sonya Labrie, Joanne Andrighetti, Hope Forstenzer, Mona Ungar and Scott McDougall. (photo by Denise Relke)

From antiquity, glass has been used for utilitarian and ornamental purposes. The current group show at Zack Gallery, Works in Glass from Terminal City Glass Co-op, demonstrates both functions in the elegant and colorful creations of co-op members. Vases and funky animal sculptures, jewelry and abstract decorative pieces transform the gallery into a celebration of light and flowing forms.

Holly Mira Cruise, one of the co-op founders and its current executive director, told the Independent a little about the group’s history.

“Terminal City Glass Co-op is the first and only nonprofit, cooperative glass arts facility in Canada. It was founded in February of 2012 by Morley Faber, Joanne Andrighetti, Jeff Holmwood and myself. We came together around a mutual desire to see the glass community in Vancouver grow…. We have worked together since then. We started with 30 members, and we now have over 150. It’s a constantly changing community, and we see new members come in every month, and others move on to other opportunities.”

Many co-op members exhibit their glass art often, attracting interest from both customers and professionals. That’s how Linda Lando, director of the Zack, discovered them.

“Linda reached out to me earlier this year,” said Hope Forstenzer, one of the show participants and a member of the local Jewish community. “She had seen some of our co-op’s pieces during Culture Crawl, liked them, and wanted to talk about a show at the Zack.”

Forstenzer herself is in love with glass. “Glass is an amazing medium. It’s elemental,” she said. “There is nothing like it in the whole world. At different stages, it could be liquid and malleable or hard and bullet resistant. It reflects light and allows colors to play inside. It’s created with fire.”

A professional artist, Forstenzer didn’t start her artistic life with glass. “I worked in ceramics and, at one point, I designed several pieces as a combination of glass and ceramics. I couldn’t find the glass I wanted so I started taking classes to make my own glass. I loved it so much, I stopped doing ceramics and concentrated on glass.”

She even moved from New York to Seattle because of her fascination. “Many of the best glass artists in the world live and work in Seattle, and I studied with some of them. There are two glass centres in the world. Venice is one. Seattle is another.”

When her partner took a job in Vancouver a few years ago, Forstenzer moved here. She has been teaching glass-making for about 10 years now. She teaches a class at the co-op, and she also teaches graphic design at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Like Forstenzer, Cruise is also passionate about glass. “I tried almost every medium before glass. I painted and drew, I tried clay and metals, I made jewelry. I was an art school dropout. A friend who had been blowing glass since he was a kid told me, ‘Try glass, you’ll like it!’ He was right. I liked it and I never looked back. I became really attracted to the material, to the way it moves and feels and, of course, all the amazing colors. Glass is enthralling in a way that no other material has been for me. I think a lot of people find it has addictive qualities. There have been times over the past 20 years when I have taken a break from glass, but I always seem to go back. It calls me.”

To answer that call, she not only works as a glass artist but also manages the co-op, organizing all its programs and classes, and bringing in visiting instructors from all over the world. “TCGC offers classes in glassblowing, beadmaking, flameworking and sandblasting,” she said. “We make it easy for people to take the first steps. We also offer advanced learning opportunities for people who have practised for awhile. There is no post-secondary glass program in Vancouver, but there is one at Alberta College of Art and Design and at Sheridan College in Ontario. Hopefully, we will catch up with other provinces soon.”

Widely available education in glass-making is a relatively new development for such an ancient craft. Before the 20th century, glass was mostly worked at factories, and each one guarded its secrets.

“In the 1960s, the Studio Glass Movement started,” Cruise explained. “Glass-making moved from factories to independent artist studios. It became a lot easier for people to approach glass and learn it…. Today, there are books on how to set up your own studio and build your own equipment. People are 3-D printing with glass. This year, Emily Carr ran its first class in 3-D Design with Glass through our studio. It was a great success, and seeing the potential of glass as a material to be enhanced and developed with technology was thrilling.”

According to both Cruise and Forstenzer, the students taking classes at the co-op come in all ages and artistic levels.

“Our students are pretty diverse,” said Cruise. “We get all ages, from 17 to 75. Sometimes, it’s retired people who want to pick up a hobby, or younger people who want to become glass artists, or couples looking for something fun to do. We have something for everyone to try here.”

Works in Glass runs until Jan. 10. For more information about the co-op, visit terminalcityglass.com.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Challenging viewers’ beliefs

“Ganesha,” from Dina Goldstein’s Gods of Suburbia series. (photo © Dina Goldstein)

You have to speak more than one language if you want to read all of the articles on Vancouver photographer and Pop Surrealist Dina Goldstein’s art. English, of course, but also French, Italian, Spanish and Greek, for starters. Among other places, her work has been exhibited in Canada, of course, but also Poland, India, Colombia and, most recently, Holland.

She attended the Oct. 11 opening of In the Dollhouse at Rize Gallery in Amsterdam. “I try to get to all of my openings,” she told the Independent in an email interview. “Traveling and experiencing other cultures is the perk of being an artist. I enjoy being at the exhibition in person and seeing the reactions to my work. The galleries also like it when the artist is there to offer more perspective.”

In the Dollhouse is the second of three large-scale photographic series that Goldstein has created. The other two are Fallen Princesses and Gods of Suburbia. All three have been, or are being, exhibited in various places. About whether galleries pay artists to display their work, Goldstein explained, “The agreements vary from gallery to gallery, sales from the show are split between the gallery and the artist. There are some festivals that cover travel and accommodation in order for the artist to attend. I currently produce my own large-scale projects with the help of print sales and grant awards. These are print sales of my limited edition pieces from Fallen Princesses, In the Dollhouse and the Gods of Suburbia series (displayed on LED light panels).

“There are also art competitions that award cash prizes. This was the case for me when I won the Prix Virginia in 2014 and was gifted 10,000 euros.”

photo - Dina Goldstein (photo from Dina Goldstein) — Dina Goldstein *(photo from Dina Goldstein)*

Goldstein has been a photographer for 25 years. “I started out quite young and worked very hard in my 20s and 30s to create a career for myself,” she said. “I was a photojournalist and traveled to war-torn regions. I freelanced, shooting covers and feature stories for magazines. (I was a staff photographer at the Jewish Western Bulletin.) I also photographed some cheeky ads with some brilliant art directors. People within the Vancouver Jewish community will remember me photographing weddings and bar mitzvahs; alongside, I created my own projects. Usually concentrated on the study of sub-cultures within society, I termed the work ‘photoanthropology.’ These images were documentary, photojournalistic.

“In 2009, I released my tableau series Fallen Princesses, which was an internet success and brought recognition to my personal work. I went on to realize more ambitious projects like In the Dollhouse in 2012, and Gods of Suburbia in 2014. I am now fully concentrated on producing my own large-scale conceptual series and have become a full-time artist.

“Storytelling has always been central in all of my work past and present,” she continued. “Documentary photography allowed me to create and share the stories of Palestinians in Gaza, gamblers at the racetrack, East Indian blueberry farmers in B.C., dog show dogs, bodybuilding state championships and teenagers dirty dancing at a bar mitzvah.”

Readers can see many of those images at dinagoldstein.com. They can also see images of her three large-scale series, all of which challenge viewers to question their beliefs, some of which were instilled in childhood. Is there an ideal body, an ideal marriage, an ideal anything? Can we rest assured that good ultimately prevails and evil is punished?

“Much of my work investigates the myth of perfection and the collective perception influenced by pop culture,” said Goldstein. “Western society today is influenced by pop culture, which informs us how to look, what to like, what to buy. Most people don’t even realize the effects of the unconscious collective that drives us to behave in certain ways. Perfection is not stable or sustainable in nature and in life. Also, there is an individual perspective about what is ‘good’ or ‘perfect.’ This is mainly the reason that I work with archetypes and stereotypes to relay my messages and offer some social critique. By twisting the storylines of beloved characters, I am able to provide some insight into the human condition, and expose the many flaws in the nature of humankind.”

Fallen Princesses takes the Disney version of 10 fairy-tale women, including Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Jasmine and others, and “creates metaphor out of the myths of fairy tales, forcing the viewer to contemplate real life: failed dreams, addiction, obesity, cancer, the extinction of indigenous culture, pollution, war and the fallacy of chasing eternal youth,” reads the description on Goldstein’s website. Goldstein’s Snowy, for example, is pictured in an unkempt living room, holding two kids in her arms, with one child pulling on her skirt and yet another playing on the floor, where a dog eats potato chips that her beer-drinking, TV-watching prince has let fall.

photo - “The Dream,” from Dina Goldstein’s In the Dollhouse series. (photo © Dina Goldstein) — “The Dream,” from Dina Goldstein’s In the Dollhouse series. *(photo © Dina Goldstein)*

In the Dollhouse also features an iconic couple long into their marriage: Barbie and Ken. In Goldstein’s version, Ken begins to understand and accept his homosexuality, and he seems to flourish as the narrative progresses, while Barbie “breaks down and confronts her own value and fleeting relevance.”

But why doesn’t Barbie take her dream car and leave Ken? And the princesses? Granted they likely haven’t been taught the life skills needed to deal with illness, raising a family, etc., but do they just accept their unhappily ever after, or do they rail against it? Are they victims or survivors, both or neither?

“Throughout history, the focus in storytelling has been on men and their outlook of this world,” said Goldstein. “Women’s desires and interests have mostly been marginalized. I feel lucky to live in a free Western society where women’s roles are now more prominent. As a woman experiencing this transformation, I take full advantage by creating art that fully expresses my thoughts and opinions. I create art with fictional characters that has elements of real life. What you see within a work is a moment in time (within the fictional life or these fictional characters). As Barry Dumka pointed out in his essay, yes,

Barbie has lost her head, but she is Barbie and that head can pop right back on. Unfortunately, humans don’t have that luxury. In my tableau, the princesses are thrust into everyday life within realistic environments. They, too, have to figure out how to function and thrive within a complex world.”

Goldstein’s website is fascinating. Not only is her artwork displayed there and her many interviews, but she has a section called Dig Deeper. There, visitors can spend hours reading intelligent, thoughtful analyses of her work, including the aforementioned essay by Dumka.

Despite the grim situation of the princesses, of Barbie, there is humor in Goldstein’s work – there’s something sardonic about seeing Ariel, the Little Mermaid, in an aquarium, Belle of Beauty and the Beast undergoing plastic surgery, or Ken wearing Barbie’s high heels, for example. In Gods of Suburbia, she portrays Satan as a tow-truck operator, Darwin is watching people play the slots at a casino, and Buddha is shopping at Wholey Foods.

“I try to keep everything in perspective,” said Goldstein. “Let’s face it, life can get overwhelming and too serious. I use humor to cope with all that the world throws at me. Also to create conversation about modern society and how we perceive it. I utilize satire, which is intelligent ridicule, and irony, because it creates a situation that differs radically from what is actually the case.”

In a Times of Israel interview, when asked if there was a particular God of Suburbia that moved her most, Goldstein said Ganesha.

“The Ganesha piece was inspired by personal memories,” she told the Independent. “My family moved from Israel to Canada in 1976. At that time, Vancouver was a small town and it had not yet experienced the mass Asian population that you see today. My first few years here were very difficult and, as a young child, it was hard to comprehend.

“Learning a new language whilst dealing with schoolyard bullies. Even in high school, and after many years of integration, I felt different somehow. Most of my family remained in Israel, so we would visit every couple of years for the whole summer. There, I got recharged with chutzpah and the realities of war. So, I became an Israeli/Canadian hybrid. Israeli in many ways and not the typical Canadian. However, these days I know that I’m fully Canadianized because I listen to the CBC radio all day!

“Ganesha is naturally odd, as he has an elephant head and a boy’s body. He is different because of his appearance (I didn’t have that problem) but also because of his unique culture. He is judged for how he dresses, what he eats and even what he believes in. He faces the same cruelty that I encountered in elementary school.”

While all of Goldstein’s art can be seen on her website, there is nothing that can compare to seeing it in person. Gods of Suburbia will travel to Montreal in February to be shown by Art Souterrain. And there also will be at least one local opportunity to see the exhibit next year.

“The Diamond Foundation has generously donated the whole Gods of Suburbia show to appear at the Capture Festival [in April],” said Goldstein. “The exhibition will take place at a new gallery on East 6th Avenue in Vancouver called SOMA.”

Refugees painted village blue

“Running Again” by Joyce Ozier, part of her current exhibit at Fazakas Gallery. (image from fazakasgallery.com)

Chefchauen is a village in Morocco. Founded in 1471, it was home to many Jewish refugees escaping the Spanish Reconquista during medieval times. No Jews live in this village now and haven’t since the late 1940s, but this little tourist town in the Rif Mountains was the inspiration for Vancouver artist Joyce Ozier’s latest exhibit, Blue Refuge.

“I discovered Chefchauen by accident,” Ozier told the Independent. “Last year, while I was getting ready for my show at the Zack Gallery, I received lots of emails and newsletters. One of them mentioned Chefchauen, a blue town in Morocco, and included a few photographs. I was knocked out by the magic of its blue colors, but my first response was purely esthetic. I imagined how these different shades of blue – blue stucco walls, blue doors, blue roofs – would change throughout the day in the strong Mediterranean sunlight.”

photo - Joyce Ozier — Joyce Ozier *(photo by Pink Monkey Studios)*

After her initial fascination wore off, she became curious. What was the reason for the town being blue? “There was a one-line explanation for the unusual color: a group of Jews running from the Nazis in the ’30s painted the town blue in gratitude for it being a safe haven. After I read that line, I wanted to know their story,” she said.

Ozier started researching the history of those Jews who gave the town its charming blue attire, while simultaneously creating her own visual narrative – the nine abstract panels reflecting their intriguing story. But, while her artistic endeavors were successful, her research path was littered with disappointments. Nobody knew much or even anything about Chefchauen and its Jewish history.

Determined to learn all she could about the people who made the town blue, she embarked on a quest to understand those long-gone Jews. After various online searches, she tried the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library, but to no avail. “Then I found a Jewish tour company in New York that specialized in Jewish Morocco,” she said. “I called them, thinking that they would be able to answer my questions, but they had no idea either. Their advice was to try the Jewish museum in Casablanca, Morocco.”

She made the call and spoke with the museum’s curator, but still no luck. “By this time,” she said, “I decided to imagine my own version of what had happened, how those Jewish refugees got to Chefchauen, what they went through, why they decided to paint everything blue, and what happened after. Over the years, I’ve read many personal accounts of the Holocaust and, based on those, I wrote the texts for my show, the short write-ups on each of the nine panels that comprise the show.”

Ozier wrote about the hardships the refugees would have encountered on their flight from the Nazis, about their joy at finding a safe haven, and about why they painted the town blue.

“Blue is the symbol of divinity in Judaism, being the color of sky and ocean,” she explained. “Observant Jews are required to have a blue thread in their prayer shawls, so when they pray, they are enveloped in divinity. To express their appreciation for being alive, for being able to reach Chefchauen, the refugees painted the whole village in shades of blue. The divine blue created an environment that gave them the hope they needed to go on. It helped them stay positive in a terrifying and insecure political situation. It prodded them to resume relatively normal lives once they had settled in.”

Unfortunately, as soon as the Vichy government took over Morocco, the persecution of Jews started there, too. “Their safe haven was a dream,” Ozier wrote, and her panels follow the rest of the story, as most of the Jewish citizens of the blue town left. Nobody knows what happened to them, but Ozier hoped they had headed for Israel.

“My show was almost ready, but then I panicked,” she recalled. “I needed a confirmation for my fictional story. Was it based on fact, or even a possibility of fact, or was it just my imagination?” The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre came to her rescue.

“Phillipa Friedland, the centre’s education coordinator, was wonderful,” said Ozier. “She had not heard of Chefchauen and its blue world but she was visibly excited to see the photos and hear my story. She suggested that I contact Yad Vashem, the Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, the Museum of Jewish People in Tel Aviv, the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem and the Museum of the Diaspora at the University of Tel Aviv.”

One by one, Ozier contacted each of the leads Friedland gave her, but most of the institutions couldn’t help. Some only did family research. Others specialized exclusively in the war years. “I wrote an official request for information to Yad Vashem and got a response from them much sooner than I expected. Timorah Perel from their reference and information services explained to me that most of their testimonials are written in languages other than English and would require translation. She sent me the only English testimony that came up in her search in English. It was very interesting but it did not mention Chefchauen.”

Eventually, Ozier’s persistence paid off. She contacted Tel Aviv University. “The receptionist who answered the phone told me that they had a professor who specialized in the Jews of Morocco, Dr. Yaron Tsur. She gave me his university telephone number and his email address. Excited to have a real lead after all the dead ends, I immediately wrote Dr. Tsur a long email, explaining my upcoming show and including all my photos and my texts. I asked him whether he thought my story could be based on reality or it was a total fantasy.”

She received no reply, and no response to several phone calls. “Frustrated, I called the receptionist again, thinking perhaps I’d written down the wrong number. This time, she told me Prof. Tsur was in America. He was on sabbatical this year.”

Ozier finally was able to reach him. And Tsur confirmed her story, saying in an email that “the story of the Jewish refugees that you relate and the asylum that some of them found in Morocco is historically true.” She could go ahead with her show.

“They still paint the town blue,” Ozier said, “even though no Jews live there any longer. It’s a tourist attraction now, and the local government pays for the paint, so they could retouch it annually. One more little factoid I found in my research: the blue changes during the day, resembling running water. It repels mosquitoes.”

Blue Refuge is at Fazakas Gallery, at 145 West 6th Ave., until Dec. 17.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Creating artistic storm

Shevy Levy’s Storm Brewing is at Zack Gallery until Dec. 6. (photo by Olga Livshin)

This month, Zack Gallery is dedicated to abstract art. The exhibition Storm Brewing introduces gallery patrons to an unusual artist, Shevy Levy. Nobody looking at her daring, color-splashed paintings, throbbing with élan, could guess that Levy is an amateur artist. In her professional life, she is the owner of a software company, Lambda Solutions.

“I don’t have a formal art education,” Levy said in an interview with the Independent. “I always liked art and design, painted at school, and my mother encouraged my interest in art. She urged me to take classes, to study, but I was drawn to science, too. When the time came to choose between art and science as a career, I chose science and got a math degree. Much more practical,” she laughed. “But art was always in my life. You could say it is in my blood. I heard that math and creativity originate in the same part of the brain.”

Levy has taken classes with many famous artists, first in Israel, where she was born, and then here, in Vancouver, after her family immigrated. “I’m still learning, still enrolling in art courses. It’s a lifelong study,” she said, “an ongoing journey to learn new techniques and skills, develop them. The better your skills, the wider their range, the more they allow you to express yourself.”

Levy’s visual language consists mostly of colorful abstract compositions. Colors flow and clash, tinkle and thrum like an orchestra, twirl like dance strains and float like snowflakes. “I like nature and colors, not so much shapes,” she explained. “When I paint, I don’t plan. I just want to express myself. What color would fit here? What color should be there? It’s all intuitive. I want tons of energy on my canvases and I pour it out through colors.”

Light and darkness interlink in her paintings as they do in our lives, and in her own life, which hasn’t been easy or straightforward. “We came to Canada in 1993,” she recalled. “My husband retired from the Israeli air force and I took a sabbatical from teaching math. Our children were 10 and 15 at the time. We decided to travel for a year and came here. I did my master’s degree at SFU [Simon Fraser University]. We stayed.”

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. The life of an immigrant is never simple. It requires much time and energy to build a new home in a new country, to integrate into a new culture. There was no time for art.

“I painted a lot while in Israel, but when we came here, I stopped for awhile,” she said. “I started painting again about 10 years ago, and now I don’t see myself stopping. I’m busy with my work, I love it, but I love painting, too. I paint in the evenings and on the weekends. It’s my way to meditate, to relax, a distraction from real life.”

Levy also started taking classes again, and every new class offered a new discovery. “I always thought I had an intuition for colors, how they fit together. Then I took a class on colors at Emily Carr, and it explained so much. It was very helpful to know what the colors mean, alone or in different combinations. It is like there is a conversation of colors in my paintings.”

The sense of communication, of wordless discussion through the paintings comes from the artist’s original approach. “I always paint several pieces at the same time. I can’t do just one. I need continuity, from one painting to another. Sometimes I paint on top of older paintings. It might be beautiful, esthetic, but if there is no ‘umph,’ I have to fix it. I need to see a story in each painting, a conflict, a tension, where color clusters interact with empty space.”

For the current show, the story is all about storms – both in art and in life. “The idea for this show was not only to investigate the storms in nature but also to reflect on what storms make us feel,” said Levy. “We are facing storms all the time in our lives. There are darker clouds and lighter moments. But storms are not necessarily black. I wanted to know how a storm would look in pink. Could it be white? It was an exploration of the theme, and every painting has a title that came from music, from songs. I couldn’t live my life without music. I always put on music when I paint. I love classical music, jazz, rock.”

Like notes that build into melodies, the paintings of the exhibit create a concert of colors on the gallery walls. Some pieces are like symphonies, deep and powerful, while others look like doodles coming alive, buzzing with current and bursting with the artist’s emotions.

Levy seems to be drawn towards the darker spectrum of the palette, where happiness is tempered with concern. “Sometimes I force myself into a ‘cheerful mood’ but generally I think life is darker,” she said. “My sister is going through a serious illness now. Maybe the darkness in my paintings comes from it.”

Storm Brewing opened on Nov. 12 and will continue until Dec. 6.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Mosaics depict Judith story

Lilian Broca with the diptych “Judith Meeting Holofernes,” part of the Heroine of a Thousand Pieces: The Judith Mosaics of Lilian Broca exhibit that opens at Il Museo on Nov. 12. (photo from Lilian Broca)

Artist Lilian Broca calls her most recent subject – the apocryphal Judith, who slew the general Holofernes and saved her village – “a woman’s woman,” because “she was able to do what she wanted to do.” Granted, times have changed, and that’s not such an unusual phenomenon, but equality is still an issue for many, there are still oppressors, the world is still in need of repair, tikkun olam. Broca’s work reminds us of the power we each have, woman or man, to save, heal or improve at least a part of the world in which we live. And it does so in the most beautiful way.

Heroine of a Thousand Pieces: The Judith Mosaics of Lilian Broca opens at the Italian Cultural Centre’s Il Museo on Nov. 12, 7 p.m., with a reception. It is the artist’s second major mosaic series. Her first – seven years in the making – told the story of Queen Esther, the heroine of Purim.

“Throughout my career,” writes Broca in the Judith exhibit catalogue, “I have deliberately used powerful women figures from mythology as symbolic figures and role models whose experiences, I contend, shed light on today’s concerns, thereby becoming relevant to our contemporary society. In my last three series of artworks, I have profiled three exceptionally wise and fearless legendary figures: Lilith, Esther and now Judith.”

Over the years, she has worked with a variety of media, but the Queen Esther series called for a new medium: “In the Book of Esther, it is written that King Xerxes’ palace was magnificently adorned with a floor encrusted with rubies and porphyry in pleasing designs – in other words, mosaics.”

As with the Esther series, the nine panels depicting seven scenes from the story of Judith are created in Italian smalto glass. The panels range from 72 to 78 inches tall and 48 inches wide.

As a widow with no children or family, Judith was able “to act on her own without getting permission from the alpha male of her family,” Broca told the Independent. That allowed her to do what she did, “because women, as you know, in biblical times belonged to a male, either a husband, father, brother, son. She had none of those, and she was wealthy because her husband had left her quite wealthy. So, she was a woman’s woman, she was able to do what she wanted to do.”

In short, Judith wanted to save her village of Bethulia from the Assyrian army, which was under the command of General Holofernes, who answered to the ruler Nebuchadnezzar. A beautiful woman, she seduces her way into Holofernes’ camp and, eventually, into his tent, where she manages to get him so drunk that he passes out. She then cuts off his head with a sword, smuggling it out of the camp with the help of her servant. She presents it to the people of her village, while Holofernes’ army flees in disarray.

“We meet her at the point where she calls the town officials, and tells them that she’s going to be victorious,” and that she’s going to be successful with the help of God, explained Broca of the exhibit’s first panel. Judith doesn’t, however, tell them what she’s going to do.

photo - "Judith Praying in the Desert," by Lilian Broca, part of the Thousand Pieces: The Judith Mosaics of Lilian Broca exhibit — “Judith Praying in the Desert,” by Lilian Broca, part of the Thousand Pieces: The Judith Mosaics of Lilian Broca exhibit. *(photo from Lilian Broca)*

In the second panel, Judith is praying, asking God to help her deceive Holofernes and his men. Not knowing how women prayed at the time, Broca contacted Dr. Adolfo Roitman, curator of the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum (where the Dead Sea Scrolls are housed), but, despite his and other biblical specialists’ efforts, they weren’t able to answer that question. “So, I was left with my artistic licence,” said Broca. “I figured that light is always associated with the divine, and so I had a lot of photos of oil lamps dating from that century … and I decided to have her praying in front of that lit oil lamp, with that light, and her hands … she is begging God, she is arguing with God, she is having a dialogue, so I put her hands in a kind of gesticulating [position], up in the air.”

The third scene – one of the exhibit’s two diptychs – depicts Holofernes first meeting Judith in all her finery and beauty. “Judith, just like Esther, was articulate, spoke very well, and perhaps also God helped her,” said Broca. “She told the general a cockamamie story about God coming to her in her dreams and saying to her, you have to go down [to see him] because he will be the winner of the war, he’s a great leader, and I’m going to punish the people of Bethulia … because they broke the dietary laws. Well, that was true: they were starving, they had no water. The general knew that the Israelites had a very powerful God” who would protect them if they were faithful to Him and kept His laws. Judith continued, said Broca, “saying that God will tell her in three days’ time when is a good time to attack. During those three days, she will stay with him in the camp but, every night, she will go with her maid … to pray, and then come back to the camp. And then, on the third night, God will tell her. In the meantime, the general wanted to seduce her, that’s all he had on his brain.”

In this way, the sentry was used to seeing Judith coming and going, said Broca, which is why she was ultimately able to steal the severed head, hidden in a sack, out of the camp. The fourth scene of the exhibit is a diptych of Judith plying Holofernes with wine, the fifth panel shows Judith about to bring down the sword onto his neck, while the sixth has Judith and her maid running to Bethulia, sack and sword in hand. The final panel shows Judith raising the head for her people to see.

Broca started this work about four years ago. Roitman was in Vancouver giving a talk on the Dead Sea Scrolls and visited her studio. “When he saw Esther, he said, oh, now you have to do Judith.” He told her that Judith was likely written as a response to Esther, that Judith is the flipside of Esther. “And it is absolutely true,” said Broca. “When I read the story, I knew right then and there that my greatest dream in life is to have both Esther and Judith exhibited in one very large museum.”

Because they are completely different personalities, Broca used different methods in creating the two mosaic series. “Esther was executed in a Byzantine style, and that was because

Esther was a quiet, loyal little girl who manipulated men to do a dirty job, basically…. Judith, on the other hand, was a warrior from the get go.” Judith acted independently and “in a manly manner,” while Esther “acted within the accepted nature of women’s role in life,” said Broca. This is why the artist couldn’t create

Judith using “that very quiet, icon-like Byzantine style…. I had to use a more Baroque style to show her personality.” Judith’s depictions needed to have more action and movement, as well as more emotional facial expression.

Broca said that what attracted her to the stories of Judith and Esther, true or not, was that “these heroines illuminate the fundamental truth … and that is that one single individual, not just a group, male or female, can – and will – make a difference in a threatened community. Today, we have Malala [Yousafzai] – she is an example of such a heroine. And both Esther and Judith save their communities from being exterminated, or taken into slavery, as was the case with Judith, I believe.”

Both Esther and Judith are examples of women’s empowerment, and can serve as role models, said Broca. As well, the medium of mosaics bears its own message, not only connecting an ancient art with contemporary times, the past with the present, but also in that “our world is becoming more and more fragmented, and it’s essential that all these fractured elements should be put together in order to heal, to make the world whole once again.”

In the Esther series, the unifying motif that ran through the panels was a wrought-iron lattice that appeared in each one. Broca said she agonized for weeks over what would be the unifying motif in the Judith series. “Finally, I came up with this idea of a torn sketchbook page. The reason for that is because I thought, well, what am I doing? I’m revivifying or reenacting an ancient story, and I’m starting from scratch, and it’s from my personal vision.” Since she started with sketches that became the mosaics, she thought, “Why don’t I show the whole process?” The sketchbook also becomes a “21st-century prop,” something that brings the work, and the ancient story it tells, into the present. Included in the exhibit are Broca’s sketches and painted sketches (which are called cartoons). “In total,” she said, “there will be 14 pieces under glass accompanying the mosaics.”

photo - For visitors who want to take a piece of the exhibit home with them, Broca has created a series of mosaic silk scarves that will be available for purchase — For visitors who want to take a piece of the exhibit home with them, Broca has created a series of mosaic silk scarves that will be available for purchase. *(photo from Lilian Broca)*

The catalogue accompanying the Judith exhibit is comprehensive. It is a full-color, 94-page publication with essays by Broca and Roitman, as well as by Dr. Sheila Campbell, archeologist, art historian, curator and professor emerita of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies; Dr. Angela Clarke, museum curator at the Italian Cultural Centre in Vancouver; and Rabbi Dr. Yosef Wosk, adjunct professor and Shadbolt Fellow in the humanities department at Simon Fraser University. The book’s foreword is written by Rosa Graci, curator at Joseph D. Carrier Art Gallery in Toronto, where the Judith series will be displayed from May 5-July 4, 2016.

The exhibit will be in Vancouver at Il Museo, 3075 Slocan St., until March 31, 2016. For hours and other information, visit italianculturalcentre.ca/events/museum. For more on Broca, visit lilianbroca.com. As well, three relevant stories are “Contemporary ancient art,” Nov. 18, 2011; “Piecing together a heroine,” March 21, 2008; and “Mosaics honor heroine,” April 30, 2004.

Forest can transform

Beyond the Edge by Lori Goldberg , part of the exhibit Urban Forest, which opens at the Zack Gallery on Oct. 15. (photo from Lori Goldberg)

“Urban Forest is a body of work exploring the relationship between urban dwellers and the natural world of the B.C. forest, and tying it into Jewish thought,” artist Lori Goldberg told the Independent about her new exhibit at the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery, which opens Oct. 15.

photo - Reconstructing Nature, acrylic on canvas, by Lori Goldberg — Reconstructing Nature, acrylic on canvas, by Lori Goldberg. *(photo from Lori Goldberg)*

The forest affords multiple experiences, which are often dichotomous, she explained, “freedom and fear spotlight fragments of light and cavernous darks, convoluted winds and soft silences. Trees collide with the sky, providing a protective umbrella that obscures the skyline of the cityscape. Those entering the forest shed layers of urban living as the drone of the city dims, senses awaken to the natural world, the forest breathes and comes to life.

“The paintings are narrative in style and explore the arena of the personal and the collective. Ordinary views and everyday objects come together in discordant co-existence and question the multiple, often contradictory, issues we face as members of a fragmented society disconnected from nature and from self.” In this way, the exhibit evokes the notion of tikkun olam (repairing the world), “which suggests humanity’s shared responsibility to heal, repair and transform the world.”

Goldberg will be in attendance at the Oct. 15 opening, which starts at 7:30 p.m. The exhibit is at the gallery until Nov. 8. To see more of her work, visit lorigoldberg.ca.

Memorials to millions

Ian Penn’s exhibit at the Zack Gallery, Pole, “isn’t happy but it’s genuine.” (photo by Olga Livshin)

The poignant tale behind Pole, Ian Penn’s new multimedia exhibit at the Zack Gallery, is a bleak travelogue detailing his recent journey to Poland.

Although Penn’s family came from Poland – his parents were lucky to have escaped the Holocaust and settled in Australia – he never wanted to visit the country of his ancestors. “My mother said she would never set a toe in Poland,” he told the Independent.

Growing up in Australia, Penn moved to Vancouver, where he worked as a cardiologist for many years. He is mainly retired now but still teaches at the University of British Columbia and works as a medic with the emergency-response ski patrol in Whistler.

“When I retired, I enrolled in Emily Carr,” he said. “I graduated in 2010 with a bachelor’s in fine arts but I’ve always kept a visual diary, since university. I have hundreds of little albums at home. Wherever I am, wherever I go, I draw and write in them. It’s how I explore the world.”

He paints regularly, landscapes and figurative images. “For me, painting is a way of telling a story, one of many. There are other ways, too: words, sculpture, video, photography. I used the multimedia approach for this show because I wanted to bring all those ways together, see how they fit. The show is a story of Jewish soul.”

Penn found his subject in Poland. He had resisted making the trip for a long time, until a couple years ago. “My daughter said to me then, ‘It’s time to visit your history,’ so I made the decision to go,” Penn explained. “I have a friend in Australia. We have known each other for a long time. He is a Pole, he speaks Polish, and he wanted to take me. He said we should both read a few books first to prepare ourselves, books about the plight of Jews in Poland during the war, but written by Poles, not Jews. We didn’t want to go as tourists. We wanted to understand.”

Nonetheless, Poland shocked him. “There are almost no Jews left there, and the ones who remain don’t know anything about Jewish culture. I went to a synagogue and I had to say Kiddush because nobody there could speak Hebrew. But the Poles – they exploit Jewish history. They charge 23 euros for a trip to Auschwitz. They have those happy golf carts all around Krakow and they take you to the Schindler’s factory and to the ghetto. They sell Jewish souvenirs, but who made them? Not Jews. This is not how you engage in history. They made a commodity out of our tragedy, of the Jews killed by the millions. It’s like Horror Disneyland. I couldn’t stay there more than one week.”

Penn found most of the Jews of Poland in the cemetery. “There, every stone has a name written on the tombstones, remembered, while those who died in Auschwitz are just dust. I learned that Nazis burnt 1,000 people an hour in the ovens in Auschwitz. I tried to wrap my head about the number. That’s why I did this show. It’s about those thousands of souls.”

All of the works displayed in the show bear the same name, “1000 Marks.” By creating the paintings, Penn wanted to visualize his non-memories, remember something he had never witnessed. Five paintings are similar: dead trees, brown and dreary, wooden poles striving to reach the sky, one pole for every Jewish soul that didn’t have their name written somewhere. Together, they form a memorial.

A couple other paintings have a subtitle: “From the Village to the Ramp.” They are painful to view, powerfully evoking the horrors of the Holocaust. So does the entrance to the gallery, decorated with two real wooden poles, with bark still on in some places, unpolished and branchless. The “Welcome Back” mat underneath them doesn’t look particularly welcoming either. There was a sign at the entrance to Auschwitz, too, and the correlations reverberate in the air.

“This show isn’t happy but it’s genuine,” said Penn. “It’s my response to the entertainment industry they made of the catastrophe. Their tourist trips have nothing to do with our dead families.”

The show also includes a few short videos, two of them filmed at the Jewish cemetery. The screens are mounted to the walls like paintings, continually running loops of footage. “I shot them myself,” said Penn. “There is serenity at the cemetery. And lots of greenery, living trees. I saw a man restoring the text on one of the tombstones and filmed him. I didn’t talk to him, didn’t ask him anything. He was doing a holy job. That was enough.”

A few more wooden poles, also part of the exhibition, are placed outside of the Zack Gallery. They are suspended above the atrium, where the stairs lead down to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

“They are uprooted, like all of us whose parents left Europe,” said Penn. “The poles come from the UBC Endowment Lands and from the Whistler area. They remind me of the trees in the Jewish cemetery but they are also my connection to this place, to Canada.”

The show Pole opened on Sept. 10 and continues until Oct. 11.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].