Tag: YouTube

Kyle Paints 2012: Pt. 3: Some Background Info on My Style

This body of work I’m going to be putting together might make more sense with an understanding of where it’s coming from, and how I got started working in this style.

Back in 2005, I was working a summer job as a landscaper; I knew that come September, I’d be starting my thesis year at art school, and I wanted to hit the ground running, rather than aimlessly wandering between styles and ideas. I laid out all these intricate plans, and mentally sketched out images that I would later paint.

At the time, I was making a lot of work that looked like this. While it doesn’t necessarily photograph all that well, the iridescent and metallic colours glimmer and shift like jewels, creating a very alluring effect. The challenge was integrating this technique into larger images an compositions, rather than the all-over textures I had been producing.

September arrived, and I started testing out my ideas; and every single one of them bombed horribly. Over the next four months, I produced nothing but garbage.

Continue reading Kyle Paints 2012: Pt. 3: Some Background Info on My Style

Kyle Paints 2012: Pt. 01 – Introduction

Over the next several months, I’m going to be putting together a body of work for my next big art show. Typically, whenever this happens, artists disconnect from the outside world and disappear into their cave for several months, only emerging once the work is complete – or the deadline has arrived (usually the latter).

For this body of work, I’m going to try something a little bit different. Rather than producing something in private, and only releasing the full finished series of work, along with a poorly written essay filled with confabulations, non-sequiturs and trendy art jargon to back it up, I’m going to pop up every week or so, pull back the curtain, and invite you into my studio. (virtual invitations only. Invitation does not extend to the physical world.) Discuss what I’ve been thinking about, explain how I see my work (note: what you get out of it may vary), I’ll talk about where I plan on taking it. But mainly, this series will be about my working process.

Continue reading Kyle Paints 2012: Pt. 01 – Introduction

Why People Hate Art: Our SoOnCon 2011 Talk

I edited the talk down from 28 minutes into a much more focused 18 minute presentation. The other half will be posted shortly (well…eventually) but here is the meat of the talk.

If you want the background to this talk, and don’t feel like digging through my earlier posts, here is a brief summary of this talk and how it happened:

Brad Blucher and I were invited to give a talk at the TIFF Bell Lightbox for SoOnCon 2011.

The topic for our presentation was “why people hate art”. Using examples of things we have experienced first hand, we launched into an attack on the pervasiveness of obscurantism masquerading as deep insight within the art world.

Art is often nothing more than a footnote to a (poorly written) essay using invalid logic to make unsound arguments, all the while using technical and scientific terms inappropriately and without justification in an attempt to apply a veneer of rigour and profundity over their steaming pile of banal observations and utter nonsense.

This talk is a criticism of that tendency in the art world.

Tiff Talk Teaser

I mentioned my SoOnCon talk in several earlier posts.

I’m currently in the process of editing the footage from the actual talk. The full presentation was 28:50, just shy of the 30 minute allotment we were given. My goal is to remove the dead space and redundancies without taking away from the actual content or tone of the presentation. I want to deliver the complete talk, while taking up as little of your time as possible.

Here is a little teaser to hopefully whet your appetite:

Occupy Toronto

I would like to begin by saying that for the most part, I try to steer clear of politics here. I recognize that I am not a political analyst or policy expert; I’m just a guy who sees the world through a particular lens and wants our planet to be a better place. For this post, I will try to avoid taking a firm stance on either side, and just report on my brief experience of Occupy Toronto from the perspective of an outside observer; an observer arriving with just bits and pieces of information.

It was early Monday afternoon, and I had just finished a meeting and location inspection for my next art exhibition. The venue I had been checking out just happened to be a 5-minute walk away from St. James park. I couldn’t be that close to the action and not go see it first hand.

I had read several online new articles and blog posts about the event, and I was still a little confused. There were questions raised over the point of Occupy Toronto. Politics in Canada aren’t as corrupt as the American system, and income equality isn’t as bad as it is down South. The general consensus on the blogosphere was that Occupy Toronto is primarily a display of solidarity for our friends at Occupy Wall Street in New York. This is the world’s way of telling the citizens of America “It’s ok, we got your back; we’re in this together”.

I don’t know Toronto’s South-East end very well, so I wasn’t absolutely sure what I was looking for, but the police and media presence made it easy to locate the park from the street I was walking down. Vans from each major news broadcasting network were sitting outside the park, and pairs of police officers were patrolling the parks perimeter. A few of the officers had an expression of boredom on their faces, but most were just having friendly conversations with each other.

I entered the park and was met with a sea of tents.
Continue reading Occupy Toronto

Getting Ready for a Show

Every time I have a show, I talk about how I really need to build myself a “show kit”, a box with all the equipment that is necessary to put up a show and cover for when something inevitably goes horribly wrong. That way, in the future, rather than stressing out and running around last minute, throwing a bunch of tools together and hoping for the best, I can simply grab the box and go.

At this point you might be thinking, “Oh, so Kyle has finally made this box and is going to tell me about it!”
Nope!
Sorry.
I’m going to show you a video of me griping about not getting around to putting it together. Hopefully by talking about the show kit here, I will find the motivation to build the damn thing in the near future.

The DRM BOX: Rough Copy of the Promo Video.

This is the same rough copy of the promo video that I put together for the DRM BOX. Since we planned on showing this video during our SoOnCon presentation at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, I had to have this video done and ready to go.

This has been sitting around quietly on YouTube as an ‘unlisted video’, but it’s been two weeks now, why keep it locked up?

Enjoy!