Interview

Photo of Jeremy Shaw by Zoe Bridgeman

As Jeremy Shaw took the stage at the Glastonbury Festival on Friday evening, "Back to the Future," a group show including his work, opened at COMA gallery in Berlin. Shaw is not an artist/musician, emphasis on the "slash"—although he is both artist and musician, the latter in the form of Circlesquare, a one-man operation the Vancouver native has headed up since the late 1990s. Circlesquare, now based in Berlin, has just concluded an international tour, in its full live incarnation with Dale Butterfield and Trevor Larson, promoting its new album, "Songs About Dancing and Drugs"; meanwhile, this year Shaw has exhibited in Basel, London, Berlin and Vancouver. In a territorial art world that demands the constant assertion of one's domain—in medium, in subject matter, or even geographically—Shaw commits the perfect crime: He's a disciplinary two-timer, and the results speak to periphery culture and the art world with equal bearing. Plus, you can dance to it.


VICTORIA CAMBLIN: You're not really focusing on art these days, are you?

JEREMY SHAW: I'm trying to! I have a huge public poster project I'm working on in Vancouver right now—every two weeks there's a new poster, for the whole year. Vancouver has the Olympics next year, and in 1986 we had the World Expo 86. That's two massive world events in the span of about 20 years. Of course, with the Expo there was a ton of political fallout... for instance with the McBarge, a floating McDonalds on a barge. After the fair ended, the McBarge was this monstrosity that sat there for ten years while people fought about what was to be done with it. Now it's docked, inland just out of view of the city—a distopian 80s relic. So the original idea for the project was to do a poster that looks like an Ansel Adams photo, with a beautiful Pacific Northwest background, but with the McBarge obstructing the view.

VC: Is the McBarge still operational?

JS: No, but they did shoot Blade 3 on it—it was the vampires' hideout! So the project was going to be a critical response to the city of Vancouver building new buildings  for one-off Olympic events— speed-skating rinks, for example. I received funding from the Olympics for the poster project, although I'm sure they're going to pull their name off it soon. The project evolved into more than just a document of the architecture to include archival ephemera from the fair, and promotional items. I found my mom's season pass from Expo with her photo on it and made a poster out of it: She's going to freak.

MORE »

Installation shot of Surface Values, by Eemil Karila, at PROGRAM, Berlin.

Carson Chan wants us all to think a little harder about architecture. That's why, in 2006, he co-founded PROGRAM: Initiative for Art + Architecture, along with fellow Harvard Design alumnus Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga. Part gallery, part think-tank, workshop, library, salon, and artists' residence, the initiative stands out among Berlin-Mitte venues not only for its critical approach to art and architecture but also in its sense of community-building. In a city with more than its share of expatriate-run venues, few other spaces set out to create the kinds of productive networks and cross-pollinations—between architects and artists, but also musicians, curators, critics—that PROGRAM has worked on in its still young existence. "Surface Values," an exhibition by Finnish artist Eemil Karila, opened there last Thursday; an examination (under UV rays) of the mechanics behind the custodial maintenance of the old "white cube," the show perfectly highlights PROGRAM's ever-critical attitude towards the function of those spaces we so often take for granted.


VICTORIA CAMBLIN: How did you come to work with Eemil?

CARSON CHAN: We met about three years ago when he was living in Berlin. He was working with a space, now in Oslo, called 0047, which was a Berlin hub for Scandinavian artists. Eemil was dealing with Finnish identity at the time—he was doing a project about Santa Claus—and I was curating a show on Scandinavian social design and how it can be enacted through art and architectural practices. When he showed me images of his new work recently, like the one we are currently showing, I was eager to exhibit it in Berlin. It's a piece in which he collaborates with the cleaning staff of the gallery or museum, trying to reveal the various players that contribute to transforming spaces into institutions.

VC: What does your cleaning staff consist of?

CC: We have two cleaning ladies.

MORE »