Suzy Birstein’s “Ladies-not-Waiting: Harlequin Zsa Zsa.” (photo from ParkerArtSalon)
Suzy Birstein’s “Ladies-not-Waiting: Harlequin Zsa Zsa,” made of fired ceramic with glazes and lusters, is featured in the book the poetry project: where poetry expands upon a visual idea, published by ParkerArtSalon. The artwork is accompanied by a poem it inspired, written by Majka Pauchly: “I’m not home décor / I shift on the shelf, and plot / To make my next move.”
Beedie Luminaries students were invited to participate in the project by submitting a work of poetry, inspired by a selection of art provided by the ParkerArtSalon artists. The book launch and an exhibit of the poems with the corresponding artwork by the artists – who also include Miriam Aroeste – takes place at Gallery George June 1-July 3, Wednesday-Sunday, noon-5 p.m., with the official opening weekend June 4-5, 2-4 p.m., with artists in attendance. Visit parkerartsalon.com for details.
Suzy Birstein in her studio, with works featured in her solo exhibit Tsipora, now at the Zack Gallery. (photo from Suzy Birstein)
Suzy Birstein’s Hebrew name – Tsipora – means bird. The artist’s new show, Tsipora: A Place to Land, which opened at the Zack Gallery on May 20, expatiates on her name’s meaning and its connection to the winged creatures of the sky.
“I love feeling like an exotic bird,” Birstein told the Independent. “I like bringing colour and joy to the people who visit my shows.”
Birstein’s art is bursting with bright hues and glitter. Both her sculptures and her paintings seem to aspire to one purpose only: to instil gladness in people’s hearts, which feels especially important during COVID and all its associated hardships and anxieties.
“The show’s idea was born out of a personal tragedy,” said Birstein. “A few years ago, one of my close friends passed away. I grieved but I knew I didn’t really lose her. She stayed right there, always with me, like a bird on my shoulder, and I thought: what a wonderful concept. I decided to create a series of sculptures of women, with birds incorporated into the whole in different ways.”
Almost every sculpture in the show has a bird. Sometimes, it is a tiny golden bird peeking from behind a woman’s shoulder or hiding in her skirt. Sometimes, it is an elaborate hair ornament. And, sometimes, it is implied rather than shown. But the idea of a bird is always there.
“When I started this series in 2017, my thoughts were all about freedom and travels – flying like a bird,” Birstein said. “I’ve always liked to travel and visited many countries: Europe, Asia, Mexico. I like seeing something new every day.”
Accordingly, the first few sculptures of her new series were reminiscent of her travels, their dark texture a reference to the ancient sacred sites she had visited. Their diaphanous tutus a playful metaphor of dance and flight, a symbol of the weightless grace of a ballerina.
“In 2020, I was planning to travel to the south of France, with a show scheduled in Cannes, when the pandemic hit, and all travel stopped,” Birstein said. After that, the focus of her art changed, becoming more home-oriented.
“Instead of flight, my sculptures became about nesting,” she said. “I couldn’t teach anymore because of the pandemic, didn’t teach for a year due to the school closures, so I took the opportunity and the time to indulge in self-exploration. I asked myself: what is beautiful? And my answer was: birth. And rebirth. Each sculpture I made during that time was of a pregnant woman. Not flights anymore but home and harmony.”
Many sculptures also have mirror fragments embedded in them, making them festive, shining. “The mirror shards help me bridge the inner world of a woman, her home and soul, with the outer world of traveling and flying,” Birstein said.
The show includes not only sculptures but several paintings as well. “The sculptures always come first,” she explained. “They are inspirations for my paintings. After a sculpture is ready, I sometimes paint it: like another version of the sculpture, an exploration of a unique perspective. It is a different experience – working on a flat surface with no fear of breaking the fragile pottery. I don’t use a brush. I paint with a tiny palette and my fingers. It feels almost like working with liquid clay.”
Clay was the medium that catapulted her into the art world, and she feels a deep affinity for it.
“When I was a child,” she recalled, “I couldn’t draw realistically. I thought I couldn’t be an artist. I danced and I modeled for artists. I was about 22 when I started working as an artist model full-time for an art school in Toronto. The administration of the school offered me any art classes I wanted for free, and I decided to try pottery. Clay spoke to me. I also took up weaving and fibre art and liked it. Later, when we moved to Vancouver because of my husband’s work, I wanted to take more art classes. There was no fibre art school at the time, but I enrolled in Emily Carr as a sculptor. They accepted me on the basis of my portfolio – the pieces I created in Toronto.”
Birstein uses white clay for her pieces and paints them before she fires them. “Sometimes, this process has several iterations,” she mused. “I paint the sculpture. Then I fire it, but firing is unpredictable. Colours might burn out or melt into each other in unexpected ways. Then I paint the piece again, maybe add some elements. Fire again. Some pieces take five or six times in the kiln before I know they are ready, but I don’t do perfect. I make mistakes sometimes and then play with my mistakes. I love quirkiness and imperfections.”
It helps that she owns her own kiln. “My kiln is in my basement,” she said. “It was a wedding present from my parents. They knew pottery made me happy.”
It is significant that the most important tool of her art was a gift to celebrate her family.
“I feel free like a bird in my art, but only because I have such strong support from my husband,” said Birstein. “I have stability in my life, a safe place to return, a secure home, and that allows me my freedom of artistic flight.”
That’s why the only image in the show with a man in it is her husband’s portrait.
“I was looking at all those sculptures and paintings of pregnant women in this series and thought: who made them pregnant? There must have been a man,” she said.
“It depicts my husband and my art,” said Birstein of the portrait painting, which features a man standing beside a sculpture of a pregnant woman.
The show Tsipora runs until June 27. In addition to being able to book a walk-through of the exhibit with the gallery, people can arrange a personalized tour with the artist via her website, suzybirstein.com, or by calling her at 778-877-7943.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
Dorrance Dance will perform at the Rothstein Theatre on Aug. 30. (photo from Vancouver International Tap Festival)
“It would be like a jazz festival presenting Oscar Peterson,” said Sas Selfjord, executive director of the Vancouver International Tap Festival. She is so proud that tap dancer Michelle Dorrance is headlining her festival that she compared Dorrance to the great Canadian jazz musician. “Michelle Dorrance is the ‘it’ girl,” she said of the artist who takes the stage Saturday, Aug. 30, at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre.
The dance festival is now in its 15th season and it’s time to celebrate. A weekend of professional performance and a fundraising gala are on the schedule that runs Aug. 28 to 31.
With this, the festival’s 15th edition, Selfjord said, the Vancouver International Tap Festival “is one of the top two or three in the world. With that reputation,” she said, “we can attract any artist we want. That’s a very egocentric statement, but it’s true. People want to be part of the Vancouver festival, so that is the legacy.”
Selfjord said anyone who has ever enjoyed tap, even in old movies, will appreciate the festival’s artists. “Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelley, the Nicholas Brothers, these are people we revere in the highest regard,” she said. “Their work is a subset and that work is always carried through in everything that a tap dance artist does, except we give our own relevance to it … there could be a little bit more hip hop, there could be some breakdancing, there could be, you know, innovative combinations that no one has ever heard.”
In addition to Dorrance Dance on Aug. 30, the festival features two other professional performances, on Aug. 29, also at the Rothstein. First is LOVE.Be.Best.Free, choreographed by Danny Nielsen with an all-male cast. Selfjord remembers encountering Nielsen years ago. “I remember he was at our very first festival and what was he, 14? He’s now an internationally revered artist.”
Travis Knight (photo from Vancouver International Tap Festival)
Second on the Aug. 29 ticket is Lisa La Touche’s Hold On, the debut of a work commissioned specifically for this festival. “Lisa was here from the get-go,” said Selfjord. “Now she’s in New York and she’s revered.” Hold On has an all-Canadian cast of dancers.
Selfjord is also proud of Travis Knight, one of the performers in Hold On. Knight has been a tap consultant with Cirque du Soleil and performed at the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Olympics. He has toured with the Australian show Tap Dogs. Knight “is one of Canada’s top artists,” said Selfjord, “and I remember he came to our first festival. He took a Greyhound bus and came out on a scholarship from Montreal. He is one of Canada’s amazing, talented, generous artists.”
The gala fundraising and awards event, which takes place Aug. 28 at the Holiday Inn Downtown Vancouver, benefits from the sculpting talent of local ceramics artist Suzy Birstein. The local artist – who once chose dancing class over Hebrew school – was commissioned to design the awards to be presented. Birstein, who dances with the society during the year, was given the task of coming up with fancy ceramic shoes to honor some of those who have made the society great. “They pretty much gave me carte blanche as to what I wanted to do,” said Birstein. “So, I’m making shoes, like miniature shoes, not just like tap shoes. They’re just kind of in my style,” she said, referring to her own internationally known approach to sculpture.
Three of the 15 individually crafted awards – created by Suzy Birstein – that will be given out at the Aug. 28 gala event. (photo from Suzy Birstein)
Each of the clay shoes will bear a special feature. “They’ll all have something that looks like a tap on the bottom of them,” she said.
Rounding out the weekend is Tap It Out on Aug. 31, where, according to the schedule, “everyone in Vancouver is invited to experience the tap phenomena themselves … when more than 100 dancers take to Granville Street,” and a performance by four youth ensembles that night at the Rothstein Theatre.
The festival idea began in the late 1990s when Selfjord took a trip to Minneapolis on behalf of others in the Vancouver tap world “to see what we could do to help build community and engage the community at large, and we thought a festival” might be the idea.
In Minneapolis, she encountered “two of tap’s greatest legends,” the Nicholas Brothers. To some, they are the greatest tap dancers who ever lived. Born in 1914 and 1921, the two became famous as children and opened at the Cotton Club in 1932. They made films throughout the 1930s and ’40s that showed off the prowess of the dancing team, which combined tap with ballet and acrobatics.
Meeting the brothers, said Selfjord, “turned me right on my head. I thought, how am I sitting having a brandy with the Nicholas Brothers and talking to them and engaging them? I was just so motivated by having access to artists of that calibre, that just set the stage to come home and to do the festival, so we did.”
The art of Jesse Rubin, above, and Suzy Birstein will be among the work displayed at the summer exhibit of the Sculptors’ Society. (photo courtesy of Jesse Rubin)
From larger than life to the minute details of life, the artwork that will be on display at the 38th annual summer exhibit of the Sculptors’ Society of British Columbia will engage viewers with multiple aspects of life – and a lot of remarkable art.
The exhibition, which opens July 31 at VanDusen Botanical Garden, features more than 15 artists, including Jewish community members Suzy Birstein and Jesse Rubin. Looking at the difference in style and material of these two artists alone gives an idea of what diverse interest the exhibit will hold. And, as noted in the promotional material, “In some cases, this exhibition is one of the few chances you will have to see [sculptors’] work here in their home province.”
Birstein says in her artist statement for the exhibit, “As a child, I studied dance, Hollywood musicals, film noire and Rembrandt. As an adult, I’ve been seduced by the sensuality, spontaneity and intellectual activity of working with clay and color, and the essence of romance.
“I see my imagery as a marriage of my childhood and adult influences. The figure dominates my work as I endeavor to create archetypal icons … overlaid with the spirit of song and dance. I long to merge the power of Nefertiti with the spirit of Carmen Miranda.”
The magnitude of Birstein’s scope is evident in her colorful, playful sculptures that engender a larger-than-life feeling, even if they are “regular” size. Meanwhile,
Rubin operates at the other end of the spectrum, making detailed miniatures that, while also fun, are highly realistic. A self-taught artist who began sculpting 19 years ago, Rubin writes in his statement, “I try to express the inner emotion of each piece, and hopefully the viewer will get a feel for what the person or creature might actually be like.”
Nefertiti meets Miranda
Suzy Birstein’s art will be displayed at the Sculptors’ Society exhibit, July 31-Aug. 4. (photo courtesy of Suzy Birstein)
While Birstein’s name will be familiar to many JI readers, the last interview the paper carried with her was in 2008 (though she wrote about her Mia Muse workshops in 2013). Since then, Birstein told the Independent, she has created the Tap to the Muse exhibition of life-size Muses, a film that features her dancing and her sculptures, as well as “Motion Pitchers” for the Academy Awards’ ‘Everyone Wins at the Oscars’ gift bags.
“During the summer of 2008, film again serendipitously influenced my life,” she said. “I saw Mama Mia, and it took me back to my early 20s, living in Greece. After crying my way through the film with nostalgia for Greece, I was determined to go to that island.”
The island was Skopelos and, as it happens, Birstein had been forwarded website information for an art centre there. “I wrote to the two American women who founded the centre and the Mia Muse biannual workshops were created. I have been there three times since 2009 and can’t wait to return August/September 2015!” she said.
With each trip to Skopelos comes “European art adventure – Turkey, France and Spain – with new artistic influences,” said Birstein. “After France, I fell in love with painting – spent two years teaching myself to paint with oils, creating portraits of my Muses.
“After Spain in 2013, I was inspired by Velázquez’s ‘Las Meninas’ painting. Although not in Madrid to experience the original, the influence of ‘Las Meninas’ was all over Spain – at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, in tourist art, contemporary art. My new sculptures are inspired by ‘Las Meninas’ but, as with all my art, there is never any one influence.
“India is the other place and culture that greatly fascinates me,” she added. “I am planning to create art during an artist residency in India and to explore the giant terracotta horses of Tamil Nadu. I have just begun a series of sculptures and paintings fusing these elements together.”
When asked about her desire to merge Nefertiti and Miranda, Birstein explained, “All my work is interplay of ancient and contemporary world cultures,” adding that she is “particularly fascinated with the concept of goddesses and cultural icons from Ancient Egypt to contemporary film.
Carmen Miranda, wild, elaborate, ornate, fun, song ’n’ dance and with the hint of tragedy from personal life. The notion of transcending tragedy with absolute abandon to the joy of creativity, collaboration, performance and costume” is what draws her to both Nefertiti and Miranda.
“For me,” said Birstein, “life as art is one – my work, person, home, garden, teaching. I am mentored by art spirits and, through this, mentor my students.”
Birstein’s recent work includes 15 sculptures that will be given out as awards by the B.C. Tap Dance Society. “I have always loved tap and been inspired by Hollywood musicals – Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly,” she explained. “I went to the Tap Dance Festival 12 years ago created by VTDS and was hooked!”
She has been dancing with Vancouver Tap Dance Society ever since and is now part of Heart and Soul, their adult company.
“VTDS creates an amazing tap festival annually, on Labor Day Weekend, and this year they are having a silent auction on Aug. 28, giving 15 awards – five to tap artists, five to volunteers, five to patrons. They wanted to present meaningful/personalized awards from someone within their community and thought of me, especially because I also did this for the Academy Awards in 2008. I am creating very funky, colorful ceramic shoes.”
For Mia Muse 2015, Birstein will “have the opportunity to teach children in Skopelos at their film festival, SIFFY, followed by the Mia Muse ceramics workshop for adults. It is fabulous,” she said, to be able to “combine film/travel/art with mentoring children and adults.”
Molding his own reality
Born in Montreal, Rubin was five years old when he moved with his family to Vancouver in 1974. Here, they “opened the first bakery to sell bagels in Vancouver, the Bagel King, and, later, the Montreal Bagel Factory in Kitsilano.”
In an interview with the Independent, Rubin shared a bit about his journey to becoming an artist.
“As a kid, I enjoyed drawing, but, by the age of 13, I began playing the guitar. Music has always been a huge passion,” he said.
“I began sculpting on a whim when I was 26. I bought a pound of clay and made some whimsical cartoonish characters like goofy frogs. After a few months of getting used to working with clay in that manner, I began to sculpt parts of the human body as realistically as I could. The learning curve was fun, painful and, at times, slow. It took a few years to get the fundamentals down and, in retrospect, I could have benefited from some proper instruction. Years later, when I wanted to learn how to make silicone molds in order to reproduce my work, I turned to instructional DVDs for help.
“As far as the scale I work in,” he continued, “my father was a jeweler, so maybe it’s in the genes. I do know that I’m attracted to small-scale realistic sculpture. I like the idea of condensing all that visual information into a small space.”
Many different influences and approaches combine to form Rubin’s final creations. “First, I sculpt my piece out of Sculpey,” he explained. “It stays malleable until you bake it in the oven. (My wife does a little blessing before I bake each piece because it’s so fragile and, once it’s in the oven, it can twist, crack and, occasionally, develop small surface bubbles.) So, once I have my baked Sculpey model, I then use it to make a silicone mold. When I have the silicone mold, I reproduce the sculpture in resin. From there, I go on to the painting.”
Rubin’s art can be seen at deviantart.com, which is a communal website for artists: search for jesserubin. Birstein’s website is suzybirstein.com. For more information about the Sculptors’ Society or the exhibit, visit ssbc.ca or email [email protected]. The exhibit opens July 31, 5:30-7:30 p.m., and runs Aug. 1-4, 9 a.m.-9 p.m., at VanDusen. (Garden admission or membership is required.)
