By Amy Cheng Photos Courtesy of Joanne Nakonechny   Art is not just about those usual paintings that hang on our walls. Rather, art is a way of understanding and unraveling how people piece their worlds together, with the medium being infinite. For Joanne Nakonechny, an avid connoisseur of textiles, this is especially true.   Joanne’s appreciation with textiles dates back to her childhood and that hasn’t dimmed. “While growing up, my mother regularly knitted and sewed, and in turn, she taught me how to cross-stitch, knit, and sew,” she fondly recalls. Additionally, she also has an aunt who is a weaver. Despite being well over ninety years of age, her aunt is still enthralled by the different perspectives in using Ukraine colours and patterns into her material work. ”It’s so incredibly inspiring,” Joanne gushes. Being surrounded by all those materials and inspirations involved in her mother’s and her aunt’s creative processes since young, her nascent fascination with textiles only grew. The more she wove, the more ideas came to her. And before she knew it, she was enamoured by a euphoric sense of freedom.   “I’m not only working with my hands, but I’m also working with various colours and my mind—thinking of the endless possibilities to the patterns. And within those frameworks, there is this constant rewarding engagement with chaos, which I just love,” she adds. “I understand that this can be overwhelming, but as long as you maintain within the weave structures, you have a hundred degrees of freedom. And this freedom is exactly what enables you to explore and find yourself within those very structures and boundaries,” Joanne explains. After all of her years of working with textiles, Joanne is still discovering herself in the process. For her, working with...

By Ellen McLaren Photos: Noriko Nasu-Tidball   Drums almost all handmade, leather skins are stretched taught across recycled wine barrels, wood still fragrant. In North America, this is the norm among taiko, percussionists finding it more practical to make their own drums than import them from Japan, where the prices run much higher. Since his entrance into the taiko world, Doug Masuhara has joined the ranks of BC drum makers. His odaiko, the largest taiko drums, sound rich and deep, craftsmanship clearly on par with musicality. Not that Doug would ever say so himself. Despite his success with taiko – establishing his own performing group, Tetsu Taiko, and managing several practicing circles – Doug remains exceptionally humble. He attributes many of his accomplishments to the hard work of his daughters, without whom he may have never tried out taiko drumming at all. Until 2000, taiko had no presence in Doug’s life. A Vancouver native, Masuhara is sansei, third generation Japanese Canadian. Growing up, he mostly connected with his Japanese heritage through his grandparents. Other than that, however, his homelife remained fairly western in nature. Certainly, traditional Japanese drumming was not something frequently heard. It was only fifteen years ago, at the Steveston Buddhist Temple, that Doug had his first introduction to taiko. In a workshop led by Shinobu Homma, of Chibi Taiko, a Burnaby based drumming group, Doug began his taiko lessons. Initially organized for children at the temple, “I was the only adult there,” he says, “and I was the most nervous!” They practiced mostly on car tires, using bachi drumsticks, also homemade from wooden dowelling.             Under the tutelage of Shinobu and his assistant instructor Naomi Shikaze, for two and a half years Doug, his daughters, and a handful of other students...

            By Patrick McGuire Photo credit: Noriko Nasu-Tidball, Keiko Honda, & Albin Sek              If spray paint is the brush of the times then the stencil artist is king.               Banksy and Shepard Fairy are among the most popular and influential artists in the world and the street art movement they’ve lead has created the images that have captured the spirit of our times. Both honed their craft on the streets, using stencils and spray paint to reflect and shape their urban environment. Robert Naish is not a street artist because that is not where he shows his art, but his stencils are from the street but his art encompasses the whole urban environment.                Naish finds his stencils everywhere. In thrift stores, junk shops, roadside stands and garages sales, they are the fly swatters, the kitchen tools, the plastic railroad tracks and children’s toys, the ones we throw away, the ones with interesting shapes that he can pin to the canvas and spray. He uses them for their shapes, for the lines they create when he places them with precision. He sprays on top of them with bright colors on giant canvasses to create intricate works that are stunning to behold. He has thousands of stencils to choose from.               “It’s endless,” says Naish, “I have more stencils than I could use in a dozen lifetimes. The things people throw away are like gold to me.”   Naish first began to paint with stencils and spray guns after painting extensively with oil and brush and exhausting all his ideas with them. He needed to do something different and found his answer in the city around him.               “Stencils allow me...

  By Sean Yoon Photo Courtesy of Colleen McLaughlin Barlow   Despite exhibiting artistic talent early in her childhood, artist Colleen Barlow had been channeled towards becoming an English teacher or journalist by her family based upon her aptitude in reading and writing with the idea that an education should lead to a job. Colleen would follow this thought process throughout the early stages of her education, going on to pursue a bachelor’s degree in journalism at Carleton University in 1976. What she encountered in studying journalism was that the field of journalism quickly proved to be an extremely rigorous and competitive environment as Colleen recalls, “Fifty percent of your mark in 3rd year reporting was running the C.B.C. News Room for one afternoon in Ottawa and you were being watched by professional journalists who at the end of the day, would say whether you passed or not. You might’ve been working for three years on a degree and you could have just been cut right then.” Ultimately surviving the competition, Colleen began her career as a journalist at the age of 21 after graduating in a class of only 42 students from a starting pool of near 400 first year students.   The stress that came from a rigorous, competitive environment would persist throughout Colleen’s career as a journalist, which culminated in instances where her moral values were skewed negatively. Colleen recalls a particular instance of this phenomenon stating, “It’s very stressful and you start to get some very odd values like I actually remember being in a war zone in the Bekaa Valley. Nothing had been happening for about three or four weeks and then suddenly there was some skirmishing going on and I thought to myself: ‘Great we’ve got something for...

By Chloë Lai Photos: Noriko Nasu-Tidball     With delicate intensity, a young Japanese woman dips a bamboo ladle into a small black cauldron and raises it up again, the steam from the near-boiling water she has collected curling softly as it vanishes. She pauses. A moment later, the ladle is being tipped into a tea bowl at a slight angle, the hot liquid streaming down its inner curve until it finds the bottom. She lays the ladle, called a hishaku, across the top of the black pot, and reaches for the chazen, a short-handled whisk also made of bamboo. Its slender legs are splayed slightly outward from the handle, their tips curled in toward the tightly bundled limbs gathered at the centre. She lowers the chazen into the bowl and raises it, keeping it perfectly horizontal. She pauses. Repeats the action. Pauses. The third time, the chazen is suddenly vertical, whipping the water first in tiny circles, then in one larger, more sweeping motion that encompasses the entire interior space of the vessel, the movements so controlled that the wide sleeve of her kimono barely rustles. She places the whisk on the table, picks up the tea bowl and without hesitation pours it out and begins to wipe the bowl dry with a white linen cloth.   I exhale sharply, realizing that what I had assumed was the matcha blending was instead the most contemplative bowl washing that I could ever have imagined.   It is the Kerrisdale Community Centre’s first Sakura Festival, and the Japanese tea ceremony demonstration by the Urasenke Tankokai Vancouver Association has just taught me my first lesson in chanoyu, the way of tea: each step of the ceremony is a ceremony in itself.   From the placement of the...

By Sean Yoon Photos: Noriko Nasu-Tidball   On May 4th, I met with two SFU graduates, Joe Bickson and Kevin Kimoto, are founders of a zero-waste initiative called Uproot. Uproot was founded in January 2015 and by working along with three other team members: Dayna Stein, Natradee Quek, and Danielle Vallee, the initiative essentially seeks to divert 100% of Vancouver’s wood waste from the landfill, appropriating the material instead into sustainable and useful products. Significantly, the project has already produced remarkable results, having diverted over 12 tonnes of wood waste from the landfill.   First of all, Kevin and Joe recall the crucial state of mind which marked the beginning of their journey towards the founding of Uproot: “I’m not sure what the origin of this is, but we’re both very passionate about waste and the environment. I think it’s just a part of our generation, which is understanding that we need to live on this planet more sustainably. So we began with this context of, okay we want to help our environment, we like to participate socially in Vancouver and we’ve found this need which is diverting wood waste from the landfill. There’s too much wood in the landfill, what do we do about it.”   Thus with a forerunning passion towards waste and sustainability, Kevin and Joe had formed a team through a minor program at SFU called “A Semester in Dialogue” in 2014, which initiated their shareable neighbourhood project done through an innovation hub inside City Hall called CityStudio. The shareable neighbourhood project aimed to connect neighbours and reduce waste through the production of a recreational sharing library, allowing for the sharing of recreational items, such as sports equipment. The search for wood waste to construct this library began locally for...

By Lauren MacFarland   It’s a goal of any artist and Stuart Ward has managed to achieve it: to create something truly original. Based in Vancouver, Stuart is the head of Hfour, a design company which pushes the boundaries of art as an immersive medium, bringing his installations out of the confines of galleries and into public venues, making his work more accessible and interactive, introducing the public to art they might never have discovered. It’s a fine balance to strike, to create innovation while keeping it approachable, as he explains, “if it goes so far that you need to have a large explanation to understand it, then maybe the visual communication is missing something.” Public art which is funded by taxpayers should especially be something that can be appreciated by anyone of any age.  “I don’t think there’s going to be a great big cultural shift, but if one person who doesn’t want to go to the art gallery has an interesting art experience…they might wonder what there might be in the world.”  This year, Stuart’s work ranges from a light installation at the annual Cherry Blossom Festival to working with performance artists, merging the physical beauty of dance with projection mapping technology that turns the sky into a stage. But perhaps the most exciting project Stuart has in development is ‘Divine Lights’, a stunning mix of craftsmanship and video art that comes together to create art pieces that are both state-of-the-art and a callback to the stained glass masterpieces of centuries before. It starts with projection mapping technology, the projection of video onto a solid piece, but Stuart takes it one step further, displaying video on LCD screens behind an overlay. The video displayed corresponds to the lattice, and the result is...

By Lauren MacFarland     It’s not too common to meet a poet in today’s world, but Kevin Spenst is proving that this form of the written word won’t be dying off anytime soon. It started when he was five, pretending to write and putting the pen to page that started him down the path to authorship. “I grew up with a schizophrenic father, so there were a lot of question marks all over my life, and I think I was trying to find some sort of answer, decipher the uncertainties of my world.” These uncertainties led him to explore religion for some years, before he began meandering through the arts at the age of sixteen. Kevin developed skills in different mediums before settling on poetry around seven years ago. When Kevin moved to Vancouver, he was encouraged to audition and participate in theatre, getting roles in professional productions which let him fall into the world of film and television, collaborating with a group to create short films. While writing these scripts, Kevin found his niche. “I really liked the fact that I could just write a story every day, which is what I started.” It’s no small feat to commit to a daily output, but Kevin held himself to his work and found the traction he needed to develop his craft as a writer. “I’d wanted to write since I was a kid but I’d never found the right circumstances and the support of these people in Vancouver kind of gave me that encouragement to set up on my own and set up my own website.” His website is a collection of poems, drawings, prose, all lending to the growth of his own personal voice. “It was fun to write in this short,...

Interviewed by Keiko Honda (Editor-in-Chief) Photos by Karney Hatch   An exciting time for urban farming and Vancouver! Prior to the upcoming Canadian Premiere of his documentary film, Plant This Movie, at Kerrisdale Community Centre in the evening of Friday, March 20th (Mark Your Calendar!), I interviewed filmmaker Karney Hatch about his incredible journey with Plan This Movie.    1. Where did the idea for the film come from? Something you knew a lot about? What attracted you to the world of urban farming as a setting for your new film? Why was it important for you to do a film about urban farming?   I grew up on a farm in Idaho, and when I was living in Los Angeles, I became aware of that city’s water issues, how they essentially steal most of their water from Northern California and neighboring states.  So then when you’re driving around the city and see all those green lawns, it doesn’t really add up.  They’re stealing all that water and not even using it to grow food.  I mean, the statistic that still freaks me out to this day is that lawn grass is the #1 irrigated crop in the U.S.  Talk about a terrible waste of resources!  So I started spending time and filming with the Food Not Lawns chapter in Claremont, a suburb of L.A., and it took off from there.  I also read Heather Flores’ book, “Food Not Lawns”, which was very inspiring as well.   2. What sort of research did you do with regards to urban agriculture movement (e.g., its history and economics, multiple stakeholders, city regulations, technology development, local economy development and marketing, community building, land use etc.) and how is this research represented in the storyline of the film?     I did quite...

    By Oliver Hockenhull  Photo Courtesy of Oliver Hockenhull         Beginning with some key definitions: 1.  The technological singularity is the hypothesis that accelerating progress in technologies will cause a runaway effect wherein artificial intelligence will exceed human intellectual capacity and control, thus radically changing civilization in an event called the singularity.   2.  Norbert Wiener, mathematician and philosopher, defined cybernetics in 1948 as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.”  The word cybernetics comes Greek κυβερνητική (kybernetike), meaning “governance”, i.e., all that are pertinent to κυβερνάω (kybernao), the latter meaning “to steer, navigate or govern”, hence κυβέρνησις (kybernesis), meaning “government”, is the government while κυβερνήτης (kybernetes) is the governor or the captain.   3.  The Anthropocene for the current geologic chronological epoch that began when human activities had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems.   We’re navigating rough waters, living in highly accelerated times and we haven’t caught up socially, culturally, intellectually, institutionally, economically nor ethically to the incredible capabilities of our computational technologies. It bares repeating —each of us is wandering around with the power of devices that are more powerful than the computers used to help land Apollo 11 on the moon — and what do we use them for? Typing to one another and downloading cute videos of our feline overlords. Our society and our politics are becoming increasing polarized, contentious, violent — though most of us would agree that our government system is falling to successfully manage our today let alone to envision a livable future  — and that our politicians and pundits are grotesquely over paid windbags of one sort or another — whose decisions are rarely wise. We will soon have the capabilities to realize the utopian dreams of generations — a united world living sustainability in creativity, peace &...

By Emily Cheung Photos: Noriko Nasu-Tidball Special Thanks to KIKORI (film location) When wood work artist Russ Gray moved to Vancouver with his wife 18 years ago, he developed a fondness for Vancouver’s unique climate, referring to the rain as “liquid sunshine.” It is this sanguine disposition which has been the vehicle behind his unconventional career path to date. Having grown up in Ontario, it was Russ’ high school art teacher who became the inspiration behind his passion for art. He was motivated by perspective drawing and the eclectic persona of his teacher. Meanwhile, his interest in Japanese culture stemmed from practicing martial arts, specifically Judo and Kendo, ever since he was a young boy. After high school, Russ spent some time in the military. He sang with the Canadian Armed forces as a lead singer. Russ recalls the days when he sang rock and swing, and often travelled across different countries including Germany, Israel, and bases across Canada. Afterwards, Russ travelled to Japan and it was there that he cultivated his skills in Japanese wood work. He began his training in Japan in the 1980s and deepened his woodworking expertise through experimentation and applying Japanese concepts into his own work. Russ adds, “Mistakes are part of the growing process.” Russ specializes in screens, lamps, paper shoji (paper sliding doors), panels, and other custom interior goods. Reflecting upon the paths he has taken in life, Russ muses, “Where you go determines where you will end up”. He believes that reinvention is achieved through circumstances. As for the origins of Kikori, a Japanese antiques and furnishings shop run by Russ, it started when his current business partner, Carol Yamamoto, came looking in his furniture workshop in Langley. The two later found out Carol’s husband, Robert...

By Lauren MacFarland Photos: Noriko Nasu-Tidball Special Thanks to Terry Sasaki Gallery (film location) Bursting with light and colour, Terry Sasaki’s gallery and clothing store are a unique blend of different cultures and versatile creativity, art of different mediums all telling the story of the man behind these beautiful works. For more than twenty years, Terry has been travelling the world, bringing his experiences to his work, and fusing the styles of East and West, the perfect mix for the Vancouver art scene, where so many different cultures collide. Relocating in the Lower Mainland presented new challenges and inspirations, allowing Terry to avail himself of new techniques and textures, always learning and evolving as an artist, constantly creating art that has inspired people the world over. Paintings are the main focus of Terry’s gallery in the Pan Pacific Hotel in Downtown Vancouver, his art instantly eye-catching and evoking his Japanese background, mixed with Western influence. “I get my energy from a lot of different places,” he explains, “and when my energy is good, then my art reflects that. If I ever feel tired of a painting, I move on, I try new things, because the most important thing about my art is that it reflects who I am and makes me happy.” In addition to his own pieces, the gallery also holds work from other local artists, as Terry recognizes the importance of giving back to the art community and giving other artists a chance to have their work seen. Interpersonal relationships hold a great amount of importance to him, and he counts friends from all over the world, including other many other diversely skilled artists. “When you take from different cultures, you have to give back to it as well,” he explains, and...

 By Haley Cameron Photo Courtesy of Mariko Ando When Mariko Ando first moved to Vancouver fifteen years ago, she craved a local network, a connection to her new home. In the end it was art that led her to the community she was searching for, shaping her career and her life for the better.   Mariko first picked up printmaking at college, back in Japan. She loved the art form, but recognized that it was a difficult one to pursue. “Printmaking requires a studio, chemicals, a press machine…” at eighteen she chose to continue on with other artistic outlets, including drawing and acrylic painting. She landed a job at a magazine where she illustrated for the advertising department, offering a steady income and a means to develop her skills. “In Japan it’s more common to use illustrations everywhere,” explains Mariko of her role in graphic design. “Our company was huge, the Japanese economy was so good at that time; I was always busy with work.”       When Mariko and her husband relocated to Canada, she assumed the same publishing opportunities would exist. She quickly learned that wasn’t the case. It made the move to Vancouver more difficult. “I didn’t have a great job, I don’t have kids, I wasn’t connecting with people,” she explains. Having always maintained an interest in printmaking, local artists suggested she approach the Malaspina Printmakers Society on Granville Island. “That really changed my life,” Mariko shares, honestly. “I had bought a press machine, but I returned it right away and started to work in their studio.”       The Malaspina Printmakers Society is a local organization that brings printmakers together to create, workshop and exhibit their work. For Mariko it was a comfortable setting in which she could...

By Haley Cameron Photo Courtesy of Pia Massie   Pia Massie was working on independent film No Words Will Ever Do in Geneva when she decided that Vancouver would be her next home. “I had moved almost every year for thirty years,” Massie says. For the fearless artist/activist, who calls herself a fish in need of water, Vancouver seemed an obvious choice. “I flew here for five days twenty-eight years ago and immediately knew I wanted to stay.”   Proximity to the Pacific wasn’t all that made Vancouver appealing. Massie wanted to live in an English-speaking city with a thriving film community. In the end it was the community as much as the ocean that solidified the deal. “It makes it easier to do your work as an artist knowing that there are others working on the same thing; there’s a place for dialogue about effort,” she shares. Thanks largely to a supportive local film industry, Massie was able to focus on the documentary stories she felt passionate about. Apart from a six year hiatus that took her back to her hometown of New York City, Massie’s love of the west coast has supplanted her nomadic ways, making Vancouver her true home.   Massie has always been one for recognizing great opportunities as they arise. Perhaps most notable in her captivating story are the two years she spent training under National Living Treasure calligrapher, Shiryu Morita. Massie was working at an art gallery in Kyoto, Japan when the honorable Sensei happened to see her work and requested to teach her. That she had no formal training in shodo, a form of Japanese calligraphy, and had no intention in seriously pursuing the art form, didn’t stop him. “My boss explained that to refuse Morita Sensei...

    By Haley Cameron Photos: Noriko Nasu-Tidball   When Etsu Inoue first came to Vancouver from Fukuoka, Japan back in 1989 it was to explore. The twenty-four year old had caught the travel bug while working for a Japanese airline, prompting her to apply for a Canadian working holiday Visa. Fast forward twenty-five years and Inoue is still exploring — but these days it’s with water colours and calligraphy.   “There is so much more nature here than in Japan,” Inoue shares, explaining how she came to stay in British Columbia and what inspires her creative work. “And there is quite a strong community of artists,” continues Inoue, a member of the Federation of Canadian Artists who is graciously appreciative of her local support systems.   When Inoue first landed in Vancouver she remained in the tourism industry, working with a local tourism company until 9/11 and SARS fears began to hurt the travel sector. “That’s when I started pursuing my art and calligraphy more seriously,” she shares.   Inoue first began studying calligraphy at the age of eight, when it was introduced to Japanese children as a part of their regular academic curriculum. Since leaving Japan, Inoue has continued to train under the guidance of her master, whom she calls Kisui, using his artist name. “I’m still learning,” laughs the humble student, explaining that she sends her work back to Japan for feedback once per month.   Her water colour work is an entirely different story. “It is all self-taught,” she says. She began pursuing painting professionally fifteen years ago. “Before that it was always a hobby; I love painting very much,” says the artist. Inoue has customized her watercolor painting by incorporating materials traditionally used for calligraphy. “I use the washi...

  By Dr. Richard Niles Photo courtesy Dr. Richard Niles   I have been a professional arranger in popular music since 1975. Most people, even some musicians, have little idea what that means. Many think that studio musicians make up their parts in a joyous act of spontaneous inspiration. So what do arrangers do, anyway? Consider the explosive, instantly recognizable brass melody in the opening bars of “Dancing In The Street” by Martha and the Vandellas. Who wrote it? If you assumed it was written by the songwriters, Marvin Gaye, William Stevenson and Ivy Hunter, you would be wrong. Paul Riser, one of Motown’s staff arrangers, composed that melody and decided on the instrumentation of trumpets, trombones and saxophones to play it. Riser, usually un-credited, composed instrumental lines such as this to enhance many hits and act as a “hook” to the listener, encouraging them to buy the records.        My book presents the work of some of the most influential arrangers in pop, artists who have been uncredited, undervalued and misunderstood. Yet, despite being “invisible” to the public,  during a critical period of popular music history arrangers have played a significant part in the evolution of musical genre and content. In the U.S. arrangers have the opportunity to be recognized by the Grammy  Awards in two categories—Best Instrumental Arrangement and Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists. At least winners and nominees can use this to promote themselves and bring in more offers of work. In Britain and the rest of the world there is no such award. The financial rewards of an arranging career are limited. Arrangers are paid a fee for each job. It’s not huge. Keep working, get jobs in every week and you can pay the mortgage. Arrangers receive no royalties unless they...

By Dave Wheaton Photos: Noriko Nasu-Tidball At Keiko’s home, she, Noriko, and I met with John MacLachlan Gray. I think the best way to describe John is as a modern day Renaissance Man. I say this because it seems that whatever John attempts, whether it’s theatre, novels, film, or television, he knocks it out of the park, earning awards like the Governor general’s medal and the New York Film and Television Gold Award along the way. He’s best known as the writer of the 1982 international, award-winning musical Billy Bishop Goes to War. But despite his early success, John never slowed down. He continued to turn out top quality plays, novels, movies – you name it. In addition to fiction writing, John has written for both Globe and Mail and The Vancouver Sun, and written and performed for CBC’s The Journal, all while finding the time to raise two boys with his wife Beverlee. It all sounds overwhelming, but to him it’s simply writing for writing’s sake. “I write because I feel like writing, not because I’m ambitious or anything”, John told me, after asking him if he has any plans to wind down and retire. John takes a seat in the living room opposite Noriko and I and settles into a cross legged Zen-like pose. As he talks, you notice this habit he has of moving his hands in sync with the rhythm of his speech. Since the year 2000, John has been writing thriller novels. His earliest is titled A Gift to the Little Master, set in a version of modern Vancouver “where everything has gone wrong”, according to him, and in 2007 he completed two historical thrillers set in London during the Victorian period. “What have you been working on lately?”...

By Aryan Etesami Photos courtesy of Tim Sullivan    Tim Sullivan, a local contemporary abstract artist, was born into an Anglophone family in Montreal, Quebec in 1946. Ever since childhood, Tim had a ceaseless interest for various art forms as well as philosophy, and spirituality. Despite his passion for the arts, Tim decided to pursue a career in his other area of strength, the sciences and specifically Chemistry. He obtained his Bachelor of Science Honours and later his Master’s degree in Chemical Kinetics from Concordia University in Montreal in 1971. He then moved to beautiful British Columbia to further his Chemistry education at Simon Fraser University, where he left as a Doctoral Candidate in 1974. While Studying at SFU, Tim spent 5 months in London, England on what turned out to be a life-changing odyssey for the future artist. There he embarked on a journey of self-discovery and enlightenment, and came to the realization that Chemistry is just not what he was born to do! Following his return to Vancouver, Tim left the PhD program at SFU and took on a number of jobs as a chemist before changing course to studying Psychology; he was accidentally re-introduced to art in his late 40’s when a romantic partner gave him a book to read: “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. After reading the book, he immediately purchased the necessary supplies and started experimenting with paints and canvas, using his creativity. Tim’s reunion with his artistic side was followed by a series of demanding posts as a counsellor and a trainer for a mental health facility, as well as the responsibility of raising a child, which together would not allow for him to focus on art. The fire had already been lit however and as soon as he...

By Haley Cameron Photos by Lydia Nagai For Salomé Nieto, dance is not just a career. “It’s my oxygen,” says the Butoh dancer. Twenty one years ago when her ex-husband asked her to relocate to Canada she agreed under a single condition. “I told him that if I could dance in Canada I would go.” Luckily the answer was yes and she has called Vancouver home ever since.   Salomé’s stylistic focus is initially surprising. The 47-year-old hailing from Mexico City calls herself a Butoh dancer, a post-war genre originating in Japan, however this was not always the case. “I was trained in contemporary dance with a traditional Western background,” she explains. It was Kokoro Dance, a local company she worked with upon her arrival in 1992, that introduced her to the modern Japanese style.   “I’ve spent a lot of years trying to show diversity but I am ultimately most comfortable with Butoh.” According to Salomé, Butoh deals with themes of humanity, fragility, renewal, and constant transformation. Translated as “firm step into the ground with arms opening away”, she explains that it is the strong sense of expression that spoke to her. “I love the imagery, the focus on sensation,” she says. When I point out that her arms haven’t stopped moving since we sat down to talk she laughs and tells me, “My thoughts are bigger than the words I have.”   Butoh has taken much of the world by storm. Salomé says she is continually amazed just how much the art form is appreciated worldwide, citing that South and Central America, Europe and Asia are all incredibly supportive of the genre. “I haven’t necessarily found my place in Vancouver,” says the local dancer who does most of her collaboration internationally. “It isn’t...

  By Haley Cameron Photos: Noriko Nasu-Tidball   When Kagan Goh describes a particularly taxing trek through Mexico he doesn’t just say that it was warm. Demonstrating an incomparable gift for self-expression he relays the heat of the Aztec sun with such clarity that I can feel the back of my own neck start to itch with the onset of an imaginary sunburn. Raised in an exceptionally artistic family – he still lists his physician father as his favourite novelist – this writer/poet/documentary film maker always knew he would pursue a creative career. “I’ve been surrounded by artists all my life,” he says, explaining how his entrepreneurial father, Goh Poh Seng, was largely responsible for exposing Singapore to international culture. His primary role model brought famous musical acts into his restaurant, chaired a national theatre association, and helped start Singapore’s first ballet company. And the family’s list of artistic accomplishments only continues as Kagan describes his mother’s editorial work and the various creative pursuits of his three talented brothers. While natural artistry may be hereditary for Kagan, other factors have greatly influenced his creative production and inspiration over the years. For many years, Kagan’s life was completely dictated by manic depression. These days he dedicates most of his efforts – both artistic and otherwise – to advocacy and awareness of the illness. The Vancouverite speaks as candidly of his struggle with mental illness as he does his romantic pursuits or headstrong fight for film school admittance; all stories he shares so openly that you can’t help but give him your trust. One word that comes up repeatedly when speaking with Kagan is ‘maverick’. He has a huge amount of respect for those brave enough to go against the grain in the pursuit of their...