Statements from each artist

​

Valerie Arntzen

My art career began as a kid because I was always making things and collecting things.

My collections were small as I shared a room with my sister and we moved around a lot.  When I first struck out on my own and started traveling, I did not have a home so collections again were limited.  As I started to travel as an adult with my husband we both collected treasures from our travels.  As our house filled up I began to put our collections into display boxes.  This developed into my creating my assemblage pieces. As I travel in different countries, including my own, I find I need to create art to continue my experience and memories of those places.

 

My studio is a visual feast piled high with labeled, clear plastic boxes and drawers stuffed chock o block on shelves holding my collections of junk.

 

I like to work in series mostly due to the fact that I collect in multiples but I also find my thought process needs more than one piece to be complete.  Sometimes I start with a theme and other times the series just organically comes together because of the items I am working with .  This particular series of course started with the ironing boards.  The tall altar like shape begged for a totem like display so the story could be read up or down.  The ironing board is a tool and each story has an aura of by gone industry about it. 

 

 

​

James Ryan

 

James Ryan is a multi-disciplinary artist working and residing in East Vancouver. In 2016, James graduated from Capilano University with a Bachelor’s degree in Motion Picture Arts. James grew up in Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island. 

 

James sees art as a means to investigate and interrogate his environment, blending artifacts from the neighbourhood with ideas of artifice, permanence, place and perspective. James enjoys finding inspiration in alleys, piles of recycling and processes that involve repetition.

 

 

​

 Ian Freemantle

 

I love what is left behind.  Pieces of what was, that contain an essence of the object, the thoughts, values, emotions, and morals that society has attached to it.  The discarded toy, the bones of a creature, the mechanics of an obsolete machine; I am drawn to reconnect these parts in a new way, to ask the viewer to see them again but with a new meaning.  To jar the perceptions of what the object once was – what it initially represented.  What are we really leaving behind, discarding, and what can it say to us in return?

 

 

​

Iiro Kivistö

 

I come from a small village on the west coast of Finland called Pyhämaa. I've been living in Vancouver since February 2022, working as a 3D artist in the visual effects industry.

 

From time to time, I find techniques while working with 3D graphics that have the potential to create unconventional and visually interesting designs. These techniques might have a direct use case for film work, but other times, I find the designs strong enough to work on their own in a physical form. While exploring new designs, I'm trying to find the best path for them to manifest. I have a passion for handicrafts, and since I'm already spending a lot of time looking at the screen at my day job, I'm biased to work with more traditional mediums rather than digital. This time, I chose the materials available to me.

 

I'm a self-taught artist, which is common in the visual effects industry. Even people who went to university found themselves learning most of the subjects independently. Many factors create this phenomenon, but the most substantial factor I see is the passion of individuals to break into the visual effects artist career without being willing to compromise anything. Through hard work, dreams will eventually manifest in reality. I've personally got to experience this multiple times, and again through this exhibition.