Space: Issue No. 24

CREATING SAFE SPACES

Design.

Vancouver’s Indigenous public art

issue no. 24: space

a guide to modern constellations

Art.

25274 94971

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$14.99 cdn printed in canada

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ISSUE 2 $14.99 CDN

Stories.

for women of colour in the arts

COASTAL CULTURE

WRITTEN IN THE STARS

Stocksy is an artist-owned cooperative raising the bar — and the industry’s expectations — of stock photo and video.

S T O C K S Y. C O M

C R E AT E D B Y

BY RESPECT

George Vergette Tom Hammick

Kim Dorland WIlliam Perehudoff

PICTURE FRAMING

info@kentpictureframing.com 1666 West 8th Avenue Vancouver, BC 604-558-3040

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full production An interview with filmmaker

Lisa Mazzotta Rachel Burns

09

neighbourhood magic

Th e Vancouver Parks and Recreation Board’s Fieldhouse Activation Program

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12

Sarah Bakke

the future is now

reating safe spaces for women C of colour in the arts Kristin Cheung

the divulgers

ow the stage changes comedians’ H perceptions of the truth Jackson Weaver

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tried to nap, poem without a hero, perfect places Poetry

Aja Moore

16 18

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28

star struck

Is astrology really all that out of this world?

Alice Fleerackers

50

why we deserve safe spaces

Essay

32

local lettering

Sunny Chens

ecreating hand-lettering found in R the neighbourhoods of Vancouver Alanna Munro

over time

On taking up space

Tanvi Bhatia

every building on 100 west hastings, then & now P hotography

Stan Douglas, Pamela Rounis & Lauren D Zbarsky

24

speculators of the final frontier

The work of Jem Finer & Fei Disbrow

Alison Sinkewicz

starry eyed

A guide to modern constellations

Anthony Casey

i’m just browsing

Why small-space shopping is not for me

Michelle Cyca

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a space called space

Collaboration and creativity on Clark Drive

34

52

36

54

space shifting

Observations in a new neighbourhood

Kerria Gray

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Dallas Gawlick

Art Komboh

30

Genevieve Michaels

all in your head

How our perceptions differ from reality

nasty brutish & short

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holding space

coastal culture Vancouver’s Indegenous public art

Dispatches from the Horsehead Nebula J ocelyn Tennant

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An interview with Jeska Slater of Young Artist Warriors

why i will not be attending your play

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Only

Film

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40

42

46

Cole Pauls

claim to space

Street art and place making

Megan Jenkins

total immersion I n conversation with artist Jim Holyoak Christina Gray

i’d rather be a radio

Essay

Mica Lemiski

starry nights

Free stargazing parties at SFU

Madeline Barber

It’s all film, baby! True story. All of the photographs you see in this issue (and every issue) were shot on film or Polaroid. We believe that the world is rough around the edges, and there is beauty in that imperfection. We hope you do too.

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Pat Christie

dear emily, / m’girl

Poetry Anne Denning, Samantha Marie Nock

most likely to break

ssay E

Meghan Bell

take the stage

Why I take up all the space I want

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59

as a stand-up comedian

Jackie Hoffart

over the moon

Our fascination with space exploration

Jessica Johns

elusive beasts

An incomplete recollection of Vancouver’s shuttered galleries

Alison Sinkewicz

60

dispatches

India, California & London

Veronica Ciastko, Ashley Jardine, Meredyth Cole

hello@sadmag.ca | Instagram @sadmagazine facebook.com/sadmag | twitter.com/sadmag #SADSPACE

editorial staff

contributors to sadmag.ca

Pamela Rounis

Liam Siemens

Co-Publisher & Creative Director

Sarah Thompson

Katie Stewart

Brianne Dempsey

Co-Publisher & Programming Director

Helen Wong

Michelle Reid Cyca

Alice Fleerackers

Co-Publisher & Development Director

Alice Clair

Sara Harowitz

Paloma Pacheco

Editor in Chief

Becca Clarkson

Robyn Humphreys

Art Coordinator

Irina Rakina

Kyla Jamieson

board of directors Maryam Bagheri Anthony Casey Taryn Hardes Zeenat Lokhandwala Amanda McCuaig

SAD Mag is an independent Vancouver publication featuring stories, art, and design. Founded in 2009, we publish the best of contemporary and emerging artists with a focus on inclusivity of voices and views, exceptional design, and film photography.

Kristin Ramsey Emily Ross Pamela Sheppard Gillian Wong

Elizabeth Holliday

Editor of Poetry & Prose

Katherine Chan

thanks to

Ella Adkins

Selina Boan

Ljudmila Petrovic

Michael Champion

Proofreader

Jorin McSween

Meredyth Cole

Stephanie Berrington

Maya Hey

Alistair Henning

Helen Wong

Jessica Johns

Megan Jenkins

Emilia Kalka

Kenneth Ormandy

Typographer

Katrina Vera Wong

Copy Editor

Sabrina Miso

Fact-Checker

Megan Jenkins

Megan Lau

Web Editor

Sarah Bakke

Web Editor

events

Mica Lemiski

Jackie Hoffart

Aili Meutzner

Digital Art Curator

Booker & Host of SAD Comedy

Angie Wangler

Todd LeBlanc

Alice Clair

Audio/Visual Coordinator

Distribution Manager

Robyn Pekar Helen Wong Vancouver Art Book Fair

astrological index

Signs of contributors in this issue:

4.2% Cancer

4.2% Taurus

6.25% Virgo

6.25% Aquarius 6.25% Pisces

6.25% Scorpio 8.3% Libra 8.3% Leo

10.4% Gemini 12.5% Aries

12.5% Sagittarius 14.5% Capricorn

on the front & back cover

special thanks to

Looking Over Silver Moon

Vancouver Specials: House 2

by Jake Lee collage

by Christina James pencil on paper

SAD Mag is published two times per year by the SAD Magazine Publishing Society 1-3112 Windsor St. Vancouver, bc v5t 4b1 Distribution coordinated by Disticor

ISSN 1923-3566 Contents Š2017 SAD Mag All rights reserved.

Space is such a hot topic, especially in Vancouver. How do we

create more of it? Why is it so expensive? For SAD Mag’s SPACE

issue, our challenge was to go beyond the Vancouver-centric issues

of housing and dissect the theme from many angles. Head space;

performance space; personal space; community space; safe space;

yes, and outer space—as always, our stable of staff members and

contributors have produced a dynamic, exciting, and engaging

mix of stories and artworks that I am proud to share with you here.

I am also proud of all the work we have done at SAD Mag over the

last few years, which is why it is with only gratitude that I resign

from the editorship. It has been a joy to put together this magazine

issue after issue, and the hardworking people behind the scenes

deserve just as much, if not more, credit than me. To Pamela

Rounis, Michelle Cyca, and Katie Stewart: your passion, energy, and sincerity have made SAD Mag feel less like a job and more

like a family.

I can’t wait to see where the magazine goes from here—I have no doubt it will continue to push the boundaries of publishing and

culture. This magazine has always been greater than the sum of its

parts; every success (such as winning our first-ever National

Magazine Award this year) belongs to all of us. This space is ours, but it’s yours, too.

— sara harowitz, Editor in Chief

SUNNY

CHEN

Born in Nanjing, China, but raised by the free Internet, Sunny Chen celebrates 18 years of living in our democratic capitalistic heteronormative patriarchy, having immigrated to Canada at six years old. She writes and performs music as Sad China, when she’s not immobilized by her emotions. She is also a thespian, and trying to quit cigarettes.

COLE

PAULS

Cole Pauls is a Tahltan First Nation comic artist, illustrator, and printmaker hailing from Haines Junction, Yukon Territory with a BFA in Illustration from Emily Carr University. Currently located in Vancouver, he focuses on Pizza Punks, a self contained comic strip about punks eating pizza, and Dakwäkãda Warriors, a language revival series about two Southern Tutchone earth protectors.

KERRIA

GRAY

Kerria is a photographer, teacher and never-graduating graduate student. She currently teaches Grades 5 and 6, and is completing a thesis about the experiences of women and non-binary folks in the culture of skateboarding.

In her “spare time” she makes ceramics, writes stories, sings in a rock choir, and takes on all sorts of projects she doesn’t have time to finish.

TANVI

BHATIA

Tanvi Bhatia is an activist, writer, and cinnamon bun enthusiast studying political science and creative writing at the University of British Columbia.

When she’s not in class, she can be found taking part in the movement for migrant justice, watching stand-up specials, or writing about things she doesn’t quite understand.

Interview

FULL PRODUCTION An interview with filmmaker Lisa Mazzotta

words by rachel burns illustration by katie pickering ‘bad’ choices definitely wouldn’t work,” she says. “Focusing on solutions is great, it creates and opens dialogue. Focusing on problems is the old

At just three years old, Lisa Mazzotta developed an interest in crafting performance. Throughout childhood, she wrote, directed, and acted in plays with her best friend, when not training to become a professional dancer. The two paths diverged when her plan to tour globally with a dance troupe didn’t come to fruition. “In the year after high school, I was supposed to dance in 60 cities around the world, but the program was cancelled,” she recalls. “I had to decide what to do next.”

“There is power in being female.” approach.” This solution-based focus comes to light when looking at the film’s supplementary website, fashionheroes.eco—a place to showcase the labels and designers who are putting sustainability first.

After a short stint in business school, she shifted in the direction of her first love: film production. The talent demonstrated in her work subsequently garnered a meeting with an executive producer from Los Angeles. He sponsored her, leading to a full-time studio job after her fourth year of school.

Working as a woman in film has had its challenges, along with advantageous dynamics. “There is power in being female—we bring a different perspective,” she says. “As a producer, my intuition, communication skills, and ability to navigate situations and people are incredibly valuable.” Recently, Mazzotta experienced working with an all-female crew. “I worked on a film this year— for the first time in 15 years, the camera crew were all women. The feel of the set was very different—it was much more collaborative, less competitive, and much more encouraging. Film can be an aggressive space, especially because of the stress related to how much money is being spent on set,” she explains.

“I’ve also noticed that women often have a tendency to apologize or be timid in their opinions, but there’s no time for that. Women need to take up space, physically, and use their voice. We need to acknowledge that what we say has value, and own it.”

Fast-forward to today, and Mazzotta is a Primetime Emmy Awardwinning television, feature film, and documentary film producer. She is currently a producer for eco-fashion documentary RiverBlue, which illustrates the devastating effects that fast fashion has on our fragile waterways.

Working as a documentary producer, Mazzotta gets to tour the world promoting and distributing RiverBlue (the online global release is slated for 2018; the film is currently working the festival circuit and has a limited theatrical release at the end of 2017). “When you’re promoting a film, you’re sharing something—creating space in which to be welcomed. It was especially important to stay positive—telling people they are making

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Kodak Portra 400

Essay

NEIGHBOURHOOD MAGIC The Vancouver Parks and Recreation Board’s Fieldhouse Activation Program

words by sarah bakke photography by andrea fernandez that which too often goes unnoticed, and on community activation: how can artists engage with and enhance a community’s existing relationship to a space?

“Instead of deciding something for the neighbourhood, what I’m attempting to do is function as an amplification of what already exists here,” Owen says of her practice. “I’m finding things and maybe aestheticizing them a little bit, but they were here beforehand.” Her fieldhouse projects include Odd Jobs, which has Owens asking the neighbourhood residents what tasks need doing while also maintaining the park grounds; the Collaborative Embroidery Society, an earlier project brought into the fieldhouse, meant as “a flashpoint to get people together and talking about their neighbourhood” within feminist discursive space; Window Gallery, which aims to connect artists with community members by hosting exhibitions inside peoples’ homes; and research into an East Van phenomena known as the “parking ladies”—older women who offer their front yards as parking space for PNE-goers (a practice that has managed to change city by-laws). Owens’ work as part of the Fieldhouse Activation Program does more than just activate the old park structure, it also sends waves out into the surrounding collective. “I think that my job as a settler artist is to amplify other people’s perspectives,” Owens says. “Being an artist who’s asked to enter public space as an agent of the municipal government [means] asking difficult questions… and amplifying the already really active communities in this neighbourhood, to find out what the specifics of this space are that are allowing them to thrive.” In the past, these park fieldhouses may have stood empty—wasted space, unknown territory. But through an investment in arts and culture, they now hold the potential to invigorate a neighbourhood and foster connections between its history and its people.

What if I told you that close by, in your neighbourhood park, there is a dedicated artist working away inside a tiny fieldhouse, creating art pieces for you to enjoy?

Perhaps my description would lead you to think of these artists as fairytale figures, gnome-like in their penchant for solitude and enchanting in their ability to transform your local park space. Well, your imagination would bring you pretty darn close to the truth, because all over Vancouver there are artists and collectives using previously empty public structures as studios, working to create art and cultural communities within them. Magical!

Over the past few years, Vancouver’s Parks and Recreation Board has placed all kinds of community-based initiatives in park fieldhouses—small dwellings located on public park grounds that might have once served as caretaker homes or storage. Many fieldhouses around the city have previously been left vacant and unused, so the Fieldhouse Activation Program aims to re-purpose these small spaces into hubs for artistic and neighbourhood engagement. The initiatives aren’t limited to just arts and culture, either; there are fieldhouses being used for sports organizations, environmental studies and involvement, and local food growth. All great ways of using public space, but there’s just something special about art’s ability to enhance cultural knowledge, and the role that artists can play in energizing a community and the neighbourhood it calls home.

To get a better understanding of what the Fieldhouse Activation Program involves, I met with artist Lexie Owen, who has been working out of Burrard View Park for the past three years. Her practice is focused on the dynamics of labour, especially

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Essay

The Future is

NOW Creating Safe Spaces for Women of Colour in the Arts

words by kristin cheung illustration by jane koo Safe spaces have been largely discussed in mainstream media for the past few years in the context of academic and cultural groups. As defined by MerriamWebster, a safe space is a place of discussion that is free of bias, conflict, and threats. Critics say safe spaces are “coddling” individuals and protecting them from ideas and thoughts they don’t want to hear. I would argue, however, that building a safe space is not about restricting free speech, but rather about developing a gathering place for like-minded people to share their views, stories, and opinions, and build a richer community in the process. We have all felt alone and isolated at some points in our lives; safe spaces can connect us.

Metro Vancouver is wonderfully multicultural, but our population’s visible minorities do not always have places for themselves. It is vital that we build spaces that allow them to feel connected. In the arts community, there are some great groups creating spaces in specific artistic disciplines and ethnicities, including the Aboriginal Writers Collective West Coast, Hapa-palooza, Project SAT (South Asian Theatre), and the Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre (VACT). These organizations have been instrumental in providing safe spaces for artists and communities to connect with each other and lift each other up.

One example is the success of VACT’s production of Empire of the Son. VACT was established in 2001, born out of the realization that there was not much Asian representation in Vancouver’s theatre scene, both in terms of actors and the stories of Asian-Canadian people. This initiative was started years before #OscarsSoWhite became a trending hashtag.

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By providing a safe space for Vancouver theatre-makers to produce and tell their own stories centred around Asian-Canadian issues, VACT created a generation of artists who now develop projects that sell out venues and tour across the country. Empire of the Son is a production by Tetsuro Shigematsu, a former CBC broadcaster, writer, and filmmaker. The production was supported enormously by the Vancouver Asian community and local media, and had a sold-out run at The Cultch in October 2015. It has now toured Canada, including a stop at The National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

Throughout my 10 years of working in the arts in Vancouver—from music and publishing to theatre and visual arts—I’ve seen the success of organizations like VACT in developing great diverse storytelling. But also in the last 10 years, I’ve felt alone. Although Vancouver is diverse and the majority of cultural workers are female, I did not feel there was a space for us as women of colour in the arts. I’ve realized that we needed a space where we could be together and discuss our own issues and experiences. I wanted to develop a space that would tackle the issue of diversity and gender parity in leadership roles; we need people in positions of power to represent our voices. This is why I developed The Future is You and Me with my collaborator Megan Lau. Our free community mentorship and micro-grants program teaches leadership skills to young women of colour in the arts, so that they can develop their own creative projects. This is a space for us to develop new talents, feel safe, and connect with like-minded creatives. Right now, safe space is seen as a privilege.

But it is a right.

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“Safe spaces for women of colour in Vancouver are few and far between. Institutions continue to lack voices from visible minorities and Indigenous populations.

Microaggressions that often begin with phrases like, ‘I don’t mean to be racist, but...’ are something my fellow peers, colleagues, friends, and I encounter more often than we would like. While these statements are seemingly innocuous, they ultimately lead to serious consequences such as institutionalized racism and systemic inequality. I continue to make artwork that deals with issues of race and gender due to the necessity of dialogue and spaces that act as catalysts for change.”

—Simranpreet Anand, alumnus of The Future is You and Me

“As marginalized people, we so often spend our lives trying to navigate spaces that weren’t built for us. These spaces don’t always recognize our journeys, our stories, our identities, and because of this we spend so much of our time and energy trying to carve out belonging or prove our worth. Safe spaces allow us to use that energy elsewhere: we learn, grow, make mistakes. And we create.”

—Tanvi Bhatia, alumnus of The Future is You and Me

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Essay

THE DIVULGERS How the stage changes comedians’ perceptions of the truth

words by jackson weaver illustration by jaik puppyteeth Ed Hill nav igates the stage in the same way. A child of Taiwanese immigrant parents, he has morphed with his comedian persona. Asked how years onstage have changed his relationship with the truth he presents to his audiences, he doesn’t hesitate before answering. “Initially? It was 100% fake,” he admits. “It was ver y gimmicky, ver y cliché, ver y objective. At the start, you tend to look at generalizations, because those are the easiest topics to do.”

The stage turned Ivan Decker into someone else.

Why? Because the truth doesn’t work the same way up there. After more than a decade of working as a stand-up comedian, Decker’s perception of who he is has changed. Stand-up is about telling true stories, but framed in a way that get a laugh—and as Decker figured out the types of stories he wanted to tell, it actually changed how he saw himself. Now he recounts experiences that really happened to him, but through a persona he has developed—and they’ve both moved from where they began.

After over five years of touring, the stage changed that. From accidentally murdering his pet turtle, to his father not bringing a camera to his first band performance because “no one wants to remember this,” to his f irst forays into self-pleasure that somehow resulted in his mother breaking her hip— Hill shares his most private thoughts and stories in his sets now, and is still somehow able to make them funny. He mines for personal tragedy and then displays it when he gets onstage. “My entire set is just a vulnerability pit,” he says. “But I have to talk about it. Because that’s how I process it.”

“When you start comedy, your onstage persona is over here,” he explains, spreading one hand far away from the other. “But what makes a great comic is that they’re as close to their personality onstage as off. That shift doesn’t happen with your onstage persona coming closer to your real persona—it’s that they meet in the middle.” His hands join, and the empty space between them disappears.

“I’m not omitting the truth, but I’m not revealing all the information. And that’s where there’s truth in comedy.”

That’s the nature of stand-up; it has always been a place of personal admonitions, often going as far as the near-painful honesty of Tig Notaro’s infamous set crafted around her breast cancer diagnosis, or Louis CK’s personal admissions about his failed marriage and struggles with depression. In Decker’s case, his set has become a curated window into his offstage self. His skit about being terrified of the gym is really about his own self-consciousness; peppered with self-derogatory remarks, it gets laughs even though it would elicit cringes anywhere else. His routine on drinking coffee first thing after waking up, even though being a stand-up comedian means he has nothing to do but watch Netflix until 8 p.m., is a not-so-subtle dig at a supposed lack of productivity, or perhaps a loneliness that comes with the job. Still, when we hear it, we laugh. It’s a level of profession we don’t want anywhere but the comedy club—an openness that Decker needs, and one that it took him time to be comfortable with. He had to learn that the truth was integral to his art. He’s now able to cultivate that vulnerability, and use it to his advantage.

“You put yourself into a joke. It’s better to watch somebody just being vulnerable,” he explains. “It’s like a relationship: the first time you tell your partner something you wouldn’t tell anybody else, you strengthen your connection. That’s what I love about it: really picking up the energy in there with those people, and working with it, and making it the best it can be… then you all leave, and you never see each other again.”

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And yet, stand-up is not an all-access pass; it doesn’t simply give a full picture of the comedian’s life. Rather, it changes the standard for truth.

Outside of Decker’s show one night, a woman stands next to him, her hand in his. She’s his partner, but Decker didn’t speak a word about her onstage that evening, and never has. It’s the same with Hill; his wife will never be featured in a single one of his jokes. It’s a rule made as part of their marriage. “And I’m going to respect that, because that’s important. There are things that need to be left unsaid, out of respect for others,” Hill says. “When I talk about my family… it’s the truth, it’s not fact.”

By requiring only the emotions of an experience without the facts and details framing it, comedians create a different form of truth. The stage demands something unlike any other space; it requires stories that would be painful in any other venue. The main objective, of course, is to make people laugh—but that has to be done within the frame of real life. That’s the very nature of the game. Stand-up requires the lightness of truth without the baggage of fact.

“It’s not not true,” Decker says of his act. “I’m not omitting the truth, but I’m not revealing all the information. And that’s where there’s truth in comedy… you don’t have to lie, but you can certainly take out parts of the story that aren’t necessary.” To connect with an audience, comedians like Decker and Hill give away their rawest, most vulnerable memories, but tweak, stretch, and obscure them—and, consequently, themselves. It’s personal truth, but it’s not fact. Just because what comedians talk about onstage is intimate doesn’t mean they are divulging everything. It doesn’t mean you’re getting the entire story.

“It’s the appearance of truth,” Decker says. He smiles.

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Field Trip

Poetry

TRIED TO NAP Couldn’t as usual stayed sour split In bed feeling the ends of me immolate on The internet I learned from a poet I adore That an iceberg the size of Delaware broke off today Meaning there are bigger things To worry about than u twisting My words were as genuine as they could be Within what I allow myself There is hope but not Too much would make me naïve Crazy is a word I use when I feel most Alive when I’m thinking The worst things about myself but it rly undoes me To think the worst things about u I thought it was impossible feels like

POEM WITHOUT A HERO

Shit u can change Yr location and see clearly That yr location was never the source

When I first saw

A part of me rly believed the virus

your cock I wasn’t

On my computer would just go away

thrilled when I

When I entered the new time zone I blamed it Because idk when or where or who am I

brought it up with friends it became clear that no one

To demand to be treated better

was thrilled about

Than a planet? Who am I to waste yr time

the cocks in their lives in this way I began to

Mourning people when

feel I might not be

There are much more fatal separations occurring?

gay just alive where what is unexciting still receives praise

POETRY AJA

BY

MOORE

Iford HP5 400

photography by Shabnam Nag

PERFECT PLACES Every night I live and die Feel the party to my bones Watch the wasters blow the speakers Spill my guts beneath the outdoor light It’s just another graceless I hate the headlines and the weather I’m nineteen a I’m on fire But when we’re dancing I’m alright It’s just another graceless night Are you lost enough?

Have another drink, get lost in us This is how we get notorious, oh ‘Cause I don’t know If they keep tellin’ me where to go I’ll blow my brains out to the radio, oh All of the things we’re taking ‘Cause we are young and we’re ashamed Send us to perfect places All of our heroes fading Now I can’t stand to be alone Let’s go to perfect places Every night, I live and die Meet somebody, take ‘em home Let’s kiss and then take off our clothes It’s just another graceless night, ‘cause All of the things we’re taking ‘Cause we are young and we’re ashamed Send us to perfect places All of our heroes fading Now I can’t stand to be alone Let’s go to perfect places All the nights spent off our faces Trying to find these perfect places What the fuck are perfect place anyway?

All the nights spent off our faces Trying to find these perfect places What the fuck are perfect places anyway?

All the nights spent off our faces Trying to find these perfect places What the fuck are perfect places anyway?

Essay

Expression of Contemplation oil on panel

WHY I WILL NOT BE ATTENDING YOUR PLAY Dispatches from the Horsehead Nebula, this Friday night at the Westridge Community Theatre

words by jocelyn tennant art by steve baylis You are probably wondering why I have declined your Facebook invitation to attend the opening night of your new play. I’m sure you think you know. I’m sure you think it has something to do with professional jealousy. Or maybe personal jealousy, as you simulate sex numerous times in said play and I am your girlfriend. To save you the grave mistake of believing either of these things, I will now provide you with a comprehensive list of my reasons, at the end of which you will fully understand my decision to skip your premiere—and, in addition, never speak to you again.

REASON #4

REASON #1

REASON #5

I’ll be frank—Dispatches from the Horsehead Nebula is derivative at best. In Act One alone you borrow punch lines from both Ally McBeal and Angels in America—something I pointed out during the first cold read, to which you said art should be in conversation with other art and then told me to check my attitude. I won’t be petty and point out the obvious—that I came up with the title while making a joke about slam poetry and watched you write it down in that tiny leather-bound notebook you keep tucked in the breast pocket of your shirt because you once saw David Mamet at a Starbucks and he had the same style of notebook in the same style of shirt—but it is safe to say that you are possibly the least original person in this or any other galaxy.

After it became clear to me that you were definitely fucking Marley Clark in our apartment, I tried to break up with you, and you called me a coward and a cunt and still pleaded that I stay. I wasn’t going to. But then you told me you were struggling with the end of the show, and begged me to help. Do you still love me? I asked. I need you, you said. I need you, is that not enough?

I have to say it again—the play is not good. I wonder if you know it’s not good, if you can hear the way your actors roll your writing over in their mouths like something sour they aren’t allowed to spit out. You have never been good at writing dialogue, and that isn’t just something your professors used to tell you to make you work harder. Dialogue lives in the ear. You have never been able to hear other people when they speak.

REASON #6 I read it and reread it. I drafted monologues and planned lighting cues and painted a scale model of the stage so you could see my vision for the end. The two of you sit centre stage. You say the final line I have written for you, and it’s beautiful. Syrupy, watercolour spots wash your face and Marley’s. A delicate patina of smoke whispers out of the wings and catches the light. A perfect, clear note rings uninterrupted as your ship is enveloped in gauze and you enter the heart of the nebula, never to be seen again. This is how it should end, I said.

I was crying. You weren’t looking anymore. I could tell that you didn’t agree, and after a pause as gaping as a black hole, you said I like the lights.

REASON #2 When you told me you had written a part just for me, I assumed it was as astronaut Dr. Theresa Green, love interest and partner to your character, Trip Ambrose—not as a limerick-reciting cloud of gas. When I asked you why I couldn’t play Theresa, you told me that it wouldn’t be believable that a woman of my stature could be an astronaut, and instead gave the part to Marley Clark, who is a size two and my least favourite person on this planet. I did not know you were looking for a girlfriend who could also be an astronaut.

REASON #3 Having refused the role of Gas Cloud, I was banned from the rehearsals— most of which took place in our apartment, requiring me to sleep on Amy’s couch while you and Marley spent long nights nailing down your roles. For both our sakes, I will not try to count how many times you’ve told me to trust you.

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You have been at the theatre since then, which has given me time to move my things to Amy’s storage locker and contact our landlord to take my name off the lease. Tonight the curtain will go up and some of the three hundred and forty-one people who have RSVP’d on Facebook will smile up at you as you begin your opening monologue. You might notice my absence then, or after the bows. Or long after that, when you get home and discover the books and towels and Orange Blossom hand soap are gone. Maybe then you’ll see me, somewhere in the space I used to occupy. Maybe then you’ll reach out to grab hold of me, but I will be unreachable by then. Not quite an astronaut, no, but beyond your atmosphere all the same.

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Essay

Morning Routine acrylic ink

ALL IN YOUR HEAD HOW DO OUR PERCEPTIONS DIFFER FROM REALITY?

words by dallas gawlick art by eva dominelli

Each of us has a unique perspective on the world, and it changes as we interact with others.

But is our perception always the reality? How do our brains properly or improperly assess situations? Dr. Mark Weinberg, a Vancouverbased psychologist, discusses the concept of first impressions and the effect they have on our lives and future communications. dallas gawlick: I’ve heard that first impressions tend to stick. In your experience working with people, do you find that first impressions impact future relationships? dr. mark weinberg:

As you say, they are said to stick. That’s in accordance with the literature and the research in the area. But I can tell you in general, I don’t actually personally agree that they stick as much as the literature would say.

mw: Just to clarify, you’re right about the use of the word schema in that context, but schema is also almost a map in our heads, a model in our heads of how we understand much of the world. So your question, it depends on the people, and if you’ve formed a negative schema about a particular person. As you mentioned, these are impressions—these are not necessarily empirically validated points of view. So they can be [detrimental] for sure. But we have many negative schemas or positive schemas about ourselves, so they can be very limiting in many ways. dg: So it’s important to understand how we’re making schemas, not just that we’re making them?

mw: You have a first impression of a person, then when you get to know them at a later point, you may realize that you were incorrect. Let’s say you have a negative impression—you may be cautious. But that person will start to show traits you didn’t realize they had when you made that first impression. You start to see things that are outside of your assumptions.

mw : We really need to understand that this kind of mechanism exists in our worlds. We tend to believe that because we feel or think something, it has a truth to it. We think that because we think that person doesn’t like us, for example, that means that person doesn’t like us. Whereas, when you examine the evidence, it’s actually not necessarily true—it’s based on some fleeting assessment.

As organisms, on average, we tend towards the more negative appraisal of situations, because these systems were brought from an evolutionary point of view to keep us safe, to keep us hyper-vigilant. We recognize patterns of negativity rather than positivity first.

dg: So it’s kind of a face value judgement, not necessarily accurate.

dg: It’s safer to assume the worst, because it’s easier to protect yourself if you’re already on guard.

mw: The empirical sign of interaction will be that you may come to learn things that contradict your initial impression.

mw: Exactly. I find in my practice that to people, it’s an important first step. There are obviously people who don’t fit that mold, who are more spontaneous, more risk-taking. But on average, we tend to be a little more anxious than we need to be.

dg:

Oh, really?

dg : I learned that first impressions are called schemas in psychology. They’re the framework we use to make these judgements. Based on my last question, would you say that these schemas can be detrimental to interacting with people?

What I do for most of my sessions is provide education about how the mind really works in these situations. Because people often are not aware of how their evaluations are biased.

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dg :

They just assume that they’re correct because they’re making them.

mw: Exactly. Often they’re right, I’m not saying people are always wrong—it’s just that we assume we’re right. dg:

Interesting. So it often turns out our interpretations of the world can be pretty different from reality. Would you say they’re more important than what actually happened, because they affect us directly? mw : I think I would agree with what you just said. Once you get into the argument of what actually happened, it’s all open to interpretation.

I do think we live more in a world of assumption and interpretation than we realize. dg: In your practice have you found any effective ways of adjusting our perceptions so we can see what might be happening behind the curtain, instead of just assuming at face value what’s going on? mw: The first day I see people, I give them a list of what are known as cognitive distortions— and there are many of these, but there’s a top 10 that I’ve got. I go through them with people, and we work together on understanding where examples of these sorts of distortions in their own lives stand. We go through this list to give people a little glimpse behind the curtain. And I find that quite often, it’s very eye-opening for people. They go through the list and say, “Oh, I do this, I do that,” and we’ll go through examples of where that happens. The bread and butter of the kind of work I do is challenging schemas, and getting people to understand that a lot of what they’re doing is based on quite common misapprehensions—which have adaptive function, they’re there for a reason, they helped keep us safe for millennia. But they’re also not necessarily empirical observations.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Essay

OVER TIME On taking up space

words by tanvi bhatia illustration by sandeep johal At the same time, I sat in universit y classrooms built on stolen land, watching settlers speak about reconciliation like it was something they could understand from taking one introductory course in Canadian politics.

I fought for my right to speak over the din of Canadian-born voices talking about immigration law and the value of multiculturalism like it was something intangible, a theory rather than so many people’s reality. I noticed that those who seemed to feel most comfortable talking about the things that affected me did not look like me at all. They claimed their space, and at times, they claimed mine.

I spent two summers as a camp counsellor. Every week, I’d make my group play the same game: they’d line up one by one, grab the old, knotted rope hanging above them, and swing over to a plank of wood a few feet away. If every member of the group made it to the other side, they’d win, but if anyone touched the ground, the whole group had to start over.

It always took a few failed attempts, but eventually the kids would realize that there’s really no comfortable way to fit eight humans on a plank of wood the size of two loaves of bread, even if they’re small children. So they’d get

“I took up so little space that for years I became voluntarily invisible, because it seemed like I’d be safer that way.” uncomfortable. They’d press together and grab each other to keep from toppling over, hanging from tree branches or standing on their tiptoes. They’d each take up as little space as possible, and reach their hands out to catch the person waiting for a turn to swing over.

For those of us who exist in the “margins” of society, whose stories don’t belong in the narrative arc of what Canada is or is supposed to be, taking up space is layered with complexity. I made myself small so I could feel like I fit in, but others disappear as a means of survival. To be a minority is to be under near-constant scrutiny, because we are asked to prove that we are “Canadian enough” at every turn. As we see more and more bodies bruised and beaten by the police who are meant to protect us, as we see asylumseekers being turned away at borders or placed in lengthy detentions, as we see the fear of terrorism manifest itself as Islamophobia, we cannot forget that some of us train ourselves not to take up space because we believe it will keep us alive.

I like to think we each have a responsibilit y to claim our space. We each carry with us stories and values and thoughts and opinions that, when shared, enrich the lives of those around us. We should be responsible both for allowing ourselves to be heard, and for insisting upon it. But it’s not always that simple.

Non-physical space isn’t too different from the physical kind. There’s only ever so much, and when we take too much, there often isn’t enough for somebody else.

As a kid, I was obsessed with finding belonging. I was aware that most of the kids I was growing up with didn’t look like me, that most of them were born here, and that most of their parents didn’t have accents like mine did. I was constantly afraid of exposing myself as too brown or too immigrant, as though my friends would one day discover the ways I was different and decide they wanted nothing to do with me after all. So I learned how to make myself small.

I took up so little space that for years I became voluntarily invisible, because it seemed like I’d be safer that way.

So maybe the best we can do is be aware of how much space we take from others. Only when we look critically at ourselves can we centre the voices of those who are most affected by the conversations we have and the beliefs we hold, and those who perhaps have the most to lose.

It’s by sharing the space that we ensure no one gets left behind.

I don’t always know when I’m taking up too much space, or too little, and I haven’t yet found a perfect formula for knowing when to shut up and when to keep going.

Things changed as my world got bigger. I sat in classrooms where people who looked like me were unapologetic about sharing their opinions on global geopolitics or the influence of graphic novels on the literary canon. I saw people who looked like me on TV and in movies without thick, exaggerated accents, not blowing up buildings or driving cabs. I saw people who looked like me taking up space, and, slowly, I began to understand that the things that made me want to be small could help me be so big.

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Still, I like to think it can be as simple as looking down at your feet on a tiny plank of wood, and making sure you’ve left enough room for the people who still need to cross.

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Field Trip

Photography

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Essay

SPECULATORS OF THE FINAL FRONTIER Comparing and contrasting seminal works

by Jem Finer and Fei Disbrow

words by sunshine frère art by fei disbrow Looking at Finer’s and Disbrow’s works, time is activated in very different ways.

When one encounters Finer’s piece, time is conceived beyond the personal life cycle. Finer’s otherworldly composition compels us to ponder metaphysical constructs of interstellar time—it forces an expansion in the mind. Time is drawn out. Disbrow’s work, on the other hand, has a visceral immediacy to it. Her work stops time, each piece implanting an instant and bold retinal impression. Disbrow synthesizes abstraction into a compelling singularity, a force to be reckoned with.

“ Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once... and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.” susan sontag, At The Same Time: Essays and Speeches, 2007

It is only in recent years, thanks to quantum mechanics, that our perception of space and time has changed. Our hypothesized inception of the universe is based on an explosive first impression—the Big Bang theory—but 13.7 billion years later, we are still trying to comprehend this micro-instant.

Fear not, for there are those who seek to understand the strangeness of time and space. Two such artists, United Kingdom-based Jem Finer and Vancouverbased Fei Disbrow, are adept at transplanting viewers and listeners into altered space-time realities.

In the late ‘90s, Finer conceived of a piece of music that would play for 1,000 years. Longplayer exists as both art object and ongoing musical performance: its composition and its physical manifestation, both designed to work continuously for a millennium. Longplayer started at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999 in London, England. It has been playing for over 17 years now. One can tune in anytime online to hear the current ethereal phase as it unfolds.

Each collage in Eccentric Journeys is a confluence of time projected onto a twodimensional plane of infinite density—a singularity. Like the attack and decay of a musical note, first impressions of Disbrow’s work start with a sharp, loud bang, the colours and shapes vibrating voraciously. As the note decays, other layers become audible: texture, context, and concepts undulate ad infinitum. Finer’s work, however, impresses a feedback loop on the listener. For most who encounter Longplayer, it is introduced conceptually first. We become overwhelmingly lost in the conception of time as we once knew it, then we experience the esoteric singing bowl vibrations of the work, and are brought into a granular and embodied present.

Then there is Disbrow, whose Eccentric Journeys collage series is made from printed paper cuttings. A planetary aesthetic prevails in this work; groups of abstract texture, pattern, and colour form solid structures that emit bountiful ocular signals and hover above pristine backdrops of white space. The series invites viewers to circumnavigate the flat and multi-dimensional aspects of these arrangements.

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Expansion and contraction play a key role in interpreting both works, which toy with the notion of space in unique ways. Disbrow explores the void, her planetary entities stranded in isolation; like a languishing blue dwarf star that is light years away, each composition is its own spectacular swan song of magazine cuttings, an isolated and imaginative gesture of reconfiguration to dive into. When viewed in series, the works form a cloud of connective thought patterns, their existence intangible but visibly interconnected. Meanwhile, Finer’s work sends viewers inwards, directing them to the resonant frequency of their bodies in relation to other objects. Longplayer can be streamed live anywhere with an internet connection. Knowledge of this creates the opportunity for boundless universal experience, but it also comes with heavy existential introspection on time.

Both artists push the audience into a multidimensional universe. Brace yourself—time and space are indeed both happening, all at once.

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Collages clockwise from top: Lodge Insights, Moulded Mess, Floater Landscape, Redaction Redux, Beyond the Reveal

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Interview

“Oh my god, you’re a private person!” exclaims the voice on the other end of the line. “Nobody knows anything about you. Would you say that’s true?”

I grimace, but find myself nodding. This is something I’ve been hearing all my life.

“And I bet you have a big grin,” she continues, with growing confidence. “Do you have big grin?” It’s as if she can hear me smiling from her home in Bowen Island.

I’m about 10 minutes into what is quickly becoming the strangest and most personal interview I’ve ever conducted. On the phone is Georgia Nicols, an internationally renowned astrologer who writes horoscope columns for the National Post, the Province, Elle Canada, among other outlets. She’s supposed to be explaining the difference between a horoscope and a natal chart reading to me; instead, she seems to be revealing some of the most deep-rooted aspects of my personality.

I originally approached Nicols after reading a 2014 lecture by psychologist Glenn D. Wilson about cosmic influences on human behaviour. Through that, I learned that astrology’s popularity is on the rise, especially among young people. Surveys report that a shocking 25 per cent of Americans believe in horoscopes—a number that is more than twice as high among 15- to 18-year-olds. In an age when traditional religious beliefs and church congregations are dwindling, this struck me as odd. Why, I wondered, do so many of us turn to the stars for guidance?

What is astrology meant to achieve? And how, ultimately, does this affect those who believe in it? Intrigued, I turned to three experts to find out, starting with Nicols.

“I would like to think that in some way, by reading me daily and weekly and annually, [people] can get a better handle on their lives,” she explains when I ask her about her columns. “I like to think that I can … help them believe in their future.”

Horoscopes, she thinks, provide value in many ways: by helping us to better understand ourselves and those around us, by guiding us away from bad decisions, and, most importantly, by offering encouragement. “Sometimes we can become paralyzed by the negative,” Nicols sighs. “It’s important to give people hope and an affirmation about their own life.”

Toby Alberin, another local astrologer, agrees: “I think astrology makes you feel like everything’s okay, that you are in the right place in the right time,” he says. Through his business, Vancouver Astrology, he provides personal readings to a variety of clients in the city, who come to him for advice about everything from love to travel to careers.

Like Nicols’s columns, Alberin’s readings rely on the positions of the planets and stars to offer insights about the past, present, and

future. But unlike horoscope columns, which are meant to apply to a wide swath of the population, these predictions are tailored to the individual using his or her exact time, place, and date of birth.

At the heart of this approach lies something called a natal chart, which Alberin poetically describes as a “blueprint” of a person’s potential—an astrological map of core values, behavioural patterns, and opportunities for growth. Simply put, the natal chart “describes the type of person you are and the type of person you’re not,” as well as the person who, one day, you might become.

In addition to his private practice, Alberin also teaches regular workshops in downtown Vancouver, where aspiring astrologers can develop their skills and learn new forecasting methods. I attended one of these sessions— an introduction to an approach called “primary

directions”—where I witnessed the natal chart in action. Using a mix of high school math, Wikipedia biographies, and high-tech forecasting software, Alberin showed us how Jupiter’s position at the time of Margaret Atwood’s birth could be used to predict her Prometheus Award nomination 48 years later; how the moon in local athlete Ross Rebagliati’s chart seemed to indicate that he would eventually make it to the BC Sports Hall of Fame; and how Mercury’s position at Leonard Cohen’s time of birth appeared to signal his father’s death in 1944. Throughout, Alberin referenced the movements and positions of other planets and orbits and what they might signify, highlighting how very different forecasting approaches can often be used to reach strikingly similar conclusions. All of it was incredibly complex and highly technical.

Clearly, the practice of astrology involves a great deal of scientific precision, and perhaps this is why so many of us put our trust in it. But as Alberin says, any good reading also incorporates a significant intuitive component. “It’s got to be 50-50,” he asserts.

It’s not enough to just identify the symbols;

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astrologers also have to be able to listen to their clients and develop narratives that make sense in the context of their own lives.

This tender balance between intuition and science remains controversial, even among astrologers. “There are some people who want to prove that astrology is a science,” Alberin says with a shrug, “but there are some people who would say, ‘If they prove it as a science, I don’t want to do it anymore.’”

This tension between science and intuition brought me to Patty Van Cappellen, a psychologist at Duke University in North Carolina who studies the influence of religion and spirituality on human behaviour. In 2016, she and her co-authors Magali Clobert, Marianne Bourdon, and Adam Cohen published a paper about the everyday impacts of reading your horoscope. But rather than focusing on whether the events predicted by a person’s star sign can actually come true, Van Cappellen wanted to find out how the experience of reading a horoscope can affect a person’s daily life. She wondered: can reading these forecasts change the way we think, work, and feel?

She found that, compared to participants in a “neutral control condition,” people who read positive horoscopes at the beginning of the experiment were more likely to interpret ambiguous situations in a positive way later on. Even more surprisingly, reading the positive horoscopes also seemed to lead to better cognitive performance and increased creativity. “Once we have certain expectations,” she explains, “we actually make them happen.” So just as being told that you’re bad at math can cause your grades to plummet down the line, it seems being told “there’s luck ahead for Leos” might actually increase your likelihood of enjoying the day.

So what does this mean for us? Van Cappellen is cautious to jump to conclusions, explaining that the effects she witnessed were relatively small and temporary, as is often the case in psychological research. “To be honest, [these were] very short term effects,” she says. “In real life, there are so many other things happening between when you read your horoscope and the next task.” Despite these limitations, Van Cappellen urges us not to shrug the findings off. “Even for people who really don’t believe in horoscopes, this is interesting,” she explains.

“Because just reading them had an influence.”

She hopes her study can help people “realize that how we feel and what we achieve can be influenced by things that are out of our control.”

Personally, when it comes to applying these findings to real life, I’m inclined to take Nicols’ approach: “Read them all!” she laughs.

“Because you never know. Several times throughout the year, a horoscope can hit you right on. It is possible.”

Interview

The Builder acrylic on canvas

HOLDING SPACE An interview with Jeska Slater of Young Artist Warriors

words by genevieve michaels art by jeska slater making. “I wanted to connect with youth using mediums that they respect and understand,” says Slater. That attitude led Young Artist Warriors to evolve into focusing on graffiti, as well as a partnership with local artist Take5.

Jeska Slater worked with one young man for eight months before he finally spoke. A trauma survivor dealing with homelessness, he had started attending the art-making events and workshops Slater was putting on through her organization for Indigenous youth, Young Artist Warriors.

For the 2017 Vancouver Mural Festival, Slater acted as the f irst-ever Indigenous Protocols and Engagement Coordinator, connecting with both urban and land-based First Nations to offer thanks for working on their unceded territories, and to get urban youth involved in festival programming. “The Vancouver Mural Festival is very grassroots,” she says. “The fact that they want to actively honour the territories and urban Indigenous population speaks volumes to me.” In addition to Slater’s new position, this year the festival will be developing positions in order to train Indigenous youth in relevant skills they f ind interesting. “That’s really the model I love,” Slater continues. “Identifying what people’s gifts are, and then building on that.”

“I just never heard him speak,” she says. “I think he had selective mutism, but I don’t know. And then, about eight months in, we’re doing a graffiti workshop and he turns to me and says, ‘This is really cool.’”

She later found out he was fluent in three languages: Anishinaabe, English, and French. That was during the very first Young Artist Warriors project, in 2007 in Montreal. Slater painted large-scale portraits of the youth and community members she was working with, depicting them in confident, serious poses in

“I wanted to connect with youth using mediums that they respect and understand.”

Another recent project was a mural created with the City of Surrey to celebrate National Aboriginal Day. It depicts three faces in profile, looking out into the distance over a background of a soaring bird and turquoise and red design.

“The work in Surrey has a real social justice angle because of the issues that the Indigenous population is facing there,” Slater says. The huge, overlooked metropolis has just surpassed the City of Vancouver in terms of Indigenous populace, yet receives only $4 million of the $94 million of Indigenous support funding allotted to the Greater Vancouver Area. Surrey, she says, has the highest Aboriginal child poverty rate in Canada.

a vibrant colour palette against a background of halo-like triangular patterns.

In this youth’s portrait, The Builder, he looks straight at the viewer, self-assured yet unassuming in his green parka and red baseball cap.

This attitude of respect and honour for those she works with is emblematic of Slater’s practice. At that time, she was involved in the Montreal art scene and then started working with Indigenous youths, many of whom had grown up in Northern Canada and on reserves. She was driven to found Young Artist Warriors when they started to disclose to her “probably the most horrific stories I’ve heard in my life” about their experiences dealing with the inhumane living conditions and intergenerational trauma that are epidemic for First Nations people in Canada. Slater was interested in the Indigenous ceremonies and cultural resources available on the West Coast, then moved her practice here after getting a contract with the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre.

Slater, who is currently completing a master’s degree in social work, considers her own artistic practice to be integral to her work with Young Artist Warriors.

As the mother of a toddler, her work has lately taken the form of beading for its portable nature, combining the traditional medium with contemporary materials like earrings and snapback hats. “When I don’t get time to do my own art every week, I don’t feel able to do this work,” she says. “Even on a personal level, the art is so important.”

Slater didn’t begin to acknowledge her own Ochekwi Sipi Cree heritage until later in life; “it became a tool of safety to disregard that piece of our history after seeing the segregation and experiences my mother had, but I always felt like there was something missing,” she says. With Young Artist Warriors, she set out to develop a program that would address some of these colonial impacts and promote positive identity development through contemporary art-

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Intergenerational resilience and empowerment is the true focus of Young Artist Warriors. Slater’s belief in the healing power of art to accomplish that mission is evident in every aspect of her work. “When we’re looking at the media, we’re seeing the suicide crisis, crime, devastation—rarely do we hear about the young Indigenous champions who are changing things for their communities,” she says. “For me, it’s about providing a platform, giving these youth space to speak for themselves. That’s what this art is hoping to do: make that space, hold that space.”

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Field Trip

Feature

WHY WE DESERVE SAFE SPACES words by sunny chen photograhy by joy gyamfi These minor instances of overt racism remind me that women of colour are very vulnerable in our society. Every individual exists under multiple layers of vulnerability, stemming from ethnicity, income, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. And every individual with a unique mixture of vulnerabilities deserves to feel safe in all spaces.

“You’re barely a woman of colour.”

That’s what my white coworkers told me one day during a smoke break. I had just expressed that I wasn’t feeling well, and wanted to talk about my recent experiences of racism and sexism. Unable to hide my shock to their response, I blurted out, “No, I am—I’m an immigrant,” and then resigned to smoking in quiet, too tired to open that can of worms.

As an artist, my work comes from my ongoing experiences of racism and misogyny, and is obstructed by both. Ethnic minorities and people who present as non-white are still being targeted for discrimination in this country that I call home. Even during high school, which I attended in Langley from 2006 until graduation in 2011, there was a distinct racial segregation between white and Asian students. I grew up thinking that girls of colour were inherently uglier and less popular than white girls, because Caucasian students never asked us to see movies or invited us to parties. The most demeaning experience in high school for me was when a white girl one year older sat on the stairs and hurled pieces of food at me, yelling racist slurs.

Don’t get me wrong; my coworkers are wonderful, intelligent women who have carved out their own spaces in the industry they work in and the social circles they exist in. But to minimize the trauma I’ve experienced by telling me that my skin is merely two shades darker than theirs doesn’t revert the ongoing effects of racism.

If I am not a woman of colour, why did that man single me out on public transit to accuse Asian men of having small penises? Why did he ask me, “Is that big for you?” as I ate my Cheestring? Why did he ask me, again and again, from three seats away, “Is that big?” with a jeer frozen on his grimy face, suggesting that my cheese snack was a penis, and it was too big for me? Even after I confronted him about his crude joke, he went on a tirade about how there are too many “chinks” in the city now, and that they all have small penises. He continued to spout fallacious racial stereotypes, changing his focus to the Indigenous population.

“All of you should be killed off,” was his conclusion. The tirade went on like this until he stepped off the bus. He smiled at me as he exited.

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As a f irst-generation immigrant, I choose to claim both Canadian and Chinese cultures as my own, even though everyone seems to have their own opinions about how Canadian or how Chinese I really am. Second-generation Canadians or people of mixed ethnic descent may find it much more difficult to claim a culture as their own, or find affinity and acceptance from any one cultural group. Chinese-Canadian author Fred Wah originates the idea of “living on the hyphen,” which describes what life is like for individuals of ethnic

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minorities. Like many other people of colour, I may never fully connect with a pre-existing cultural identity—we must create our own, through trial and error.

Sometimes I wonder how many other young women of colour have experienced the racial micro-aggressions that I have encountered. Have you waited at the bar of a busy club while white bartenders served multiple groups of white people behind you before acknowledging you? Have you showed off your dance skills at a party and overheard a group of boys say loudly, “I didn’t think she’d

Every individual with a unique mixture of vulnerabilities deserves to feel safe in all spaces.

Where can I learn to protect not only my body, but also my mind, from the trauma I experience? I am getting tired of defending my right to personal space on public transit. Thankfully, as an adult, I have found safe spaces to learn selfcare and receive protection. They are varied, ranging from conversations with close friends, to Booty Freedom wellness classes, to free counselling sessions at the youth clinic. A female counsellor taught me that I do not need to fight misogynists or racists every time I encounter them. I know now that I need to choose when I expend emotional and physical energy to combat misogyny and racism, and when I rest my mind and body. We all deserve to rest, and we all deserve safe spaces. Without them, I would not be able to process my experiences, or write them down.

be the one doing that”? Then at the same party, when you’re digging through your tote bag on the floor, have you had a girl ask you if you’re “doing the Asian squat”? And when you say, “No, I’m looking for something in my purse,” she proceeds with, “Only Asians can squat like that, though, because you have flat feet,” as if she is stating a fact? And this girl is not a white girl, but a woman of colour, too, although she’s not East Asian. Who do you talk to about these small yet complex instances of stereotyping, without feeling like a burden?

I have learned that I need safe spaces to speak openly about my experiences as an immigrant woman of colour. In the film/TV and music industries I work in, white men dominate the spaces, which results in frequent racial and sexist micro-aggressions that I immediately push aside in order to function on a day-to-day basis. This repression of trauma has, at times, affected my ability to communicate my emotions in healthy ways with my partner, friends, colleagues, and even strangers who are within my vicinity. Everyone has different privileges: I have the privilege of presenting as mostly heteronormative in a heteronormative society, being physically abled, being a socially acceptable body size, and speaking fluent English. I don’t have white or male privilege. I also don’t have the privilege of discussing racism and misogyny with my family—a common thread among people of diaspora.

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I have never relied on my family for emotional support, even as a child, because I am not able to. I do not have the Chinese vocabulary to express my experiences to them, nor do I have the emotional strength to speak about trauma with my mom. How would she understand my “western” lifestyle? In my mother’s eyes, the world is a dangerous place. She has always instructed me to never step foot outside after 10 p.m., and if I must, I should bring my boyfriend along (whether I have one or not). In her mind, I must protect my body by leaving it at home, or in the hands of a male guardian. Her logic dictates that I stay inside when the sun sets, to avoid being raped and murdered.

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The creation of safe spaces should not be the sole responsibility of vulnerable populations that are most affected. We need the help of venue owners, club promoters, teachers, business owners, students, writers, editors, musicians, photographers, commuters on public transit, and everybody else to tune into the importance of safe spaces and normalize them for everyone. We need spaces to process our unique and shared trauma, to give and receive advice, to release warnings about abusers in our communities, and to express pain without shame because it’s okay to be vulnerable. On a smaller scale, a safe space can be friendships in which you can discuss your lived experiences with each other without being denied, harassed, or pressured, either online or in the physical world. Try posting about a recent racial or sexist micro-aggression on Facebook.

Delete anyone who doesn’t support your right to speak up. Schedule hangouts with the ones who do, and perpetuate the existence of safe spaces with them.

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LOCAL LETTERING

BY ALANNA MUNRO

Field Trip

SPACE SHIFTING Observations in a new neighbourhood

words & photography by kerria gray I am in a new space. Seven hundred and fifty light-filled square-feet containing only my things and myself; there are high ceilings and hardwood floors and possibilities. I like the quiet of living alone again.

After a decade of residing in East Vancouver, the West End feels beautiful and weird and far from everything familiar. This neighbourhood is a thrift storefind, the almost-perfect t-shirt bought with the promise that I’ll alter it, maybe crop it a little to make it into the perfect thing I want it to be (I never do). It doesn’t feel like home, but there are birds that sing every morning, and in my first week here the magnolias show just the slightest hints of pink.

I begin a new routine of long evening walks with my camera to shake off, or process, the alienation and loneliness of this space and time. Once, I pass a man with a parrot the size of his chest; its bright reds and greens against his tight white t-shirt are alarming. He stands there talking with a neighbour or friend, casual, framed by the entrance to the gold-lettered lobby with its plastic plants and pink carpeting. I want to take his photo, composed and coloured just so, to preserve this moment of surprise and hopefulness, but I keep walking with a hand resting for comfort on my camera’s lens.

There are buildings everywhere that are old and crumbling, and there are buildings that are modern and tall. There are one or two charming houses with big porches, barely visible between the towering high-rises. Inside, through large windows, I can see that some of the walls are covered in books.

Maybe people I understand could be somewhere here? It’s hard for me to know yet because there are an overwhelming number of apartments and people inside of them, and so many dogs, too (the dogs and the old people are the best part).

The weather gets warmer. My runs on the seawall become more frenetic, less direct. There are people everywhere now to navigate, but fewer people who seem to be paying real attention to this place. The loneliness recedes in step with the grey skies, and for the most part I stop spending all of my savings on plants. It’s been a very long winter; I am glad it’s over. Unexpectedly, I find someone I understand here in this neighbourhood where I thought I was alone; it is a surprise bright like a parrot. The alley between our houses is a hallway and I’ve learned it by heart. Things feel quiet lately. There are fewer long and lonely walks, and fewer surprises here, but I keep paying attention to all the things that are not quite home.

Passing the busiest streets, the light turns into something intense and hallucinogenic, a lava lamp purple-blue. I find myself, unexpectedly, in Stanley Park. I didn’t even know it was there, just beyond the apartments. The trees have labels; up above me there are dozens of blue heron nests. I wonder if I’ll still be here in this neighbourhood when the babies are born or if I’ll have given up by then and gone back home to East Van, dragging with me once again my couch and bed, my plates and mugs, and the many plants I bought this year, one for each time I felt sad (I live in a little forest of green).

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At the convenience store on Denman I am drawn to all the colours of tulips, especially the yellows and oranges. There is an odd feeling in my gut, an absence and a presence. Something is shifting. Walking towards home, a tall older man on the corner yells, “Nice flowers!” His friendliness seems crooked and stumbling, but I edit my judgements and stop to respond. He is gentle, cheerful, and we talk for a minute or two before moving on. I forgive myself for the hesitation: I am only in a new place, after all. I am not a new person.

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Kodak Portra 400

“If we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.� ti-fu tuan

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Block——Pascale Laviolette

Oil on canvas

Essay

CLAIM TO

SPACE

STREET

ART

PLACE

AND

MAKING

WORDS BY MEGAN JENKINS PHOTOGRAPHY BY FLORY HUANG If you want to see the guts of a city, look to its alleyways. Peek around its corners and mind the stoops of its apartment buildings. Ride on its transit, look at its railcars. It’s in these places that seem unimportant or mundane that street art speaks volumes. Not the bright, beautiful, meticulous art that has the luxury of production during daylight, or the hyper-modern neons atop preserved heritage buildings—the unsanctioned stuff. In Vancouver, between the unequal distribution of wealth and faltering public services, and underneath the glossiness of city-approved murals, unsanctioned street art functions as a crucial marker of time and place, maybe now more than ever.

This is not evident anywhere more than it is in the Downtown Eastside, where artists and locals armed with spray paint can make a physical mark on the areas they inhabit—a brightly coloured and illegal claim to space. Unsanctioned street art is a record of who, where, what, and why— an indexical self-portrait of people with stories but no platform. Where the transition from Gastown melds into the drug-addled and badly impoverished DTES in the span of one block, tags and street art are often more permanent than residents, but exist to drive home one message: I was here.

Given its usually sudden and unforeseen appearance, unsanctioned street art surprises the unsuspecting commuter into participation. As artist or as witness, street art draws everyone into the narrative of conflict—once you’ve seen a cry for help or a wry commentary on gentrification, you can’t unsee it. Your recognition of the words or image makes it real, and the shared understanding of the space expands person by person, day by day.

This is important in a city like Vancouver, where big rocks are regularly placed outside retail shops so people can’t sleep there—where public space is becoming increasingly inaccessible for the underprivileged, and the underprivileged are becoming increasingly underserved. Street art creates a shared knowledge of the city in a grassroots, counter-cultural narrative, like a new map. It diversifies the vocabulary through which we can discuss the conflicts that plague the city presently, like homelessness and the opioid crisis.

What does it mean when public initiatives harness the medium of street art and the aesthetic of graffiti with funding from the city? It’s a bit like sticking a Banksy in a museum—it’ll bring people in, but it is so ironic it’s almost painful. The works are beautiful, and they elevate their surroundings, invigorating dark neighbourhoods with life and colour.

These initiatives also re-map the city and its districts, but this is different from the mapping done by people whose communities have, for instance, been decimated by fentanyl.

This city-sanctioned map belongs to people that didn’t popularize graffiti as a tool of rebellion and revolution in New York in the 1970s, and they don’t use it to prove their existence in impoverished neighbourhoods.

These works are the ones on lists titled “The Prettiest Walls + Street Art In Vancouver.” This is not to say, of course, that city-funded art is not worthy or valuable, but it is to say that we mustn’t conflate the two. Graffiti and street art is democratic because of the low barrier to entry, and at present, Vancouver is commodifying it like it has everything else.

By nature, unsanctioned street art is a fixture of democratic expression. If the streets are where humanity is reflected back to us unfiltered, street art organizes (and adds to) the chaos, like the wall text of a particularly overwhelming art installation. Street art is the manifestation of conflict, a marker of time and place at the edge of an alley that calls, “I lived here once” to passersby—because without those reminders, we are likely to forget.

Street artists—classically trained or otherwise—colour the city for what it is: a place of inequality, violence, pain, and the possibility of improvement.

But while several crises rage rampant in very tangible ways on the streets

There are two kinds of street art that are often conflated into one picture of artistic democracy. There are the unsanctioned works, like the graffiti and clever stencil pieces that appear overnight; and then there is

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sanctioned street art, commissioned by the city, festivals, or businesses to add colour to drab, bare walls. When considering street art and how it functions, this difference is important—because one is a tool of counterculture and space-making in a city where public space is increasingly unavailable, and the other is a tool that co-opts a presumably democratic medium—the street—to expand an image of community-building that often effaces the grittiest neighbourhood conflicts.

every day, unsanctioned street art remains an anchor in reality. You can’t avert your eyes from something you’re not expecting.

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Fuji Superia 200

GIVEN ITS USUALLY SUDDEN AND UNFORESEEN APPEARANCE, UNSANCTIONED STREET ART SURPRISES THE UNSUSPECTING COMMUTER INTO PARTICIPATION.

Kodak Portra 400

Interview

TOTAL IMMERSION In conversation with artist Jim Holyoak

words by christina gray photography of jim holyoak’s work by tess roby colour again, or just look outside, it causes your perception to change a little bit. That sense of immersion is exactly what we’re going for.

Jim Holyoak draws on walls, leaving behind inky phantasmagorias of curious creatures in fantastical landscapes. Often working closely with his collaborative partner Matt Shane, Holyoak—raised in Aldergrove and currently residing in Montreal—regularly works at the scale of room-sized installation, sometimes completely papering over interior spaces or labyrinths. Here, he discusses how his drawings inhabit space.

In July [2016] we were at a cabin in the Laurentians at a sculpture garden in the forest. We spent the whole month there. We were burning lines onto the inside of the cabin, so the cabin was full of smoke as we were filling it with drawings.

Now if you go into the cabin, it has all these burnt drawings on the wall.

christina gray: In some situations you create an installation piece onsite, and in others you create the work elsewhere and then install it in the exhibition space. Do you see the difference between these two processes as significant?

There we were, drawing more trees, but also little houses and lots of weird bugs we would find in the forest. Then on the exterior of the cabin, we hung 30-something birdhouses. So there are houses all over the house, and then on the inside of the house there are all these depictions of houses and non-humans.

I’ve been thinking about the inside and outside a lot, because even the forest is, in a sense, architecture. You have to move through all these spaces in the forest, and then you go into this house in the forest, and then inside the house there are more things to go into. So it’s a journey between inside and outside, a sense of travel.

jim holyoak: When we can, we try to inhabit the space during the time that it is being installed. I think of that as almost environmental, that I live there while the work is coming out. Then it’s a double ecology of a physical space and a mental space, and how the two spaces combine.

In Victoria from 2003 to 2004, we wrapped our apartment in paper and drew all over our walls for an entire year. Anybody who came into our house could draw on the walls too. It would collect all the residue—in the kitchen there would be dried spaghetti splatter, and around the doors there would be fingerprints. The paper in the bathroom was all wrinkled from the moisture in the shower; there would be places where it caught on fire because somebody left a cigarette next to the paper. It recorded not just what we intended to draw, but also the evidence of having been alive inside of it.

cg: You have done a lot of work that deals with interior spaces. Is considering exterior space a new concern for you, or has this always been embedded in your work in less literal ways? jh: It’s true, we haven’t often done exterior spaces. But in a less literal way, I like how these scale shifts happen, often within time scales that are too hard to actually envision. What will earth be like in a million years, or even two hundred years? It seems really hard to picture. And scale shifts, too.

I like to think about the extremely small and the extremely big. Thinking about inside, outside is always environmental. That’s the key about ecology.

It is how things are leaky and things move between other things. Even our brains, what we think about, what we wish for, what we envision, affects what we actually do and create, and our attitudes about it. So the imaginary has tangible effects, and of course the tangible world informs how we imagine.

Sometimes, however, that is not an option. Often times, I’ll have to make it in my studio, in which case I’ll usually have to make it piece by piece. Sometimes I won’t even know what it’s going to look like myself until it’s installed. Then it’s more like the exquisite corpse game and involves an element of surprise. cg: Do you think of your art pieces as spatially immersive environments? jh: Totally. It should be optically, physically, and psychologically immersive.

You experience it best by moving, so you’re slipping in this thing. Even when your senses start to shift, when you leave the gallery and look at things in

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This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Feature

Wonderland Series watercolour on paper

I’D RATHER BE A RADIO

words by mica lemiski art by caitlin mcdonagh terms like “biochemical machine” and “physical law.” I’m fascinated that my father, a self-proclaimed “man of science,” believes in some kind of afterlife.

I’m fascinated by what feels like faith.

In darkness, Dad and I sit in the truck with the headlights on. The radio doesn’t play. Beyond the Ponderosas, stoic and protective as soldiers, the sky is full of stars. One shoots across the blackness then disappears. Of course, it’s not really a star. It’s a meteor—a molten rock that, having rubbed up against the earth’s atmosphere, releases a kite-tail of space dust into the sky.

Why have science and spirituality long been pitted as enemies? Both are products of the same human impulse: curiosity. We want to understand the world, and to rationalize the universe and its energetic properties. Is it even possible to study space or physics without faith? These fields require engagement with concepts and objects that are completely mysterious. Just look at the stars (except our sun, of course): massive collections of hydrogen and helium coalescing in their own gravity, visible yet so far away we’ll never even come close to feeling their heat. We can understand stars as functions of the physical universe, but doing so requires faith in our individual and collective perception, believing our means of measuring and computing are apt to analyze bodies that preclude our existence by billions of years.

“When I die,” Dad says, “I want to go to space.”

At first, I think he’s talking about cremation, as in he wants his ashes loaded into a tiny rocket and launched into orbit. I picture the rocket exploding, Dad’s ashes fireworking into the atmosphere and raining down like confetti.

What if the brain were not a computer generating its own consciousness, but rather a radio?

I’m not undermining scientific methods—I think it’s miraculous and a credit to our species that we can manipulate aspects of the invisible world to work in our favour consistently. We shoot electrons through a circuit, produce a current, power a light bulb. We predict the orbital period of Halley’s Comet and when we’ll see it next: July 28, 2061. But what about aspects of the world that are not just unreachable or invisible, but imperceptible? We can’t travel back in time to witness how this all began, nor can we travel forward to see what happens next. We can study the hell out of a Martian rock but in the end we’re mainly left with questions. Because while we like to think we know a lot, we ultimately know that we don’t know very much.

I question the likelihood of pulling off this request—I can’t imagine getting a stowaway past NASA—but then Dad says he’s not talking about cremation.

“Once I’m free of my body, I’m going to space,” he says.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Well, presently I am confined to earth by gravity. I exist within a biochemical machine. But when I die, my consciousness will no longer be bound by a container and subject to physical law. I’ll be able to go wherever I want. And I want space.”

I was four years old when my Grandma Shirley died of a heart attack. I don’t remember a thing about it. This makes me sad, angry, and a bit confused. My earliest memory (me in the backseat of my mother’s enormous bronze Cadillac, fiddling with a tape recorder we’d bought at a garage sale) precludes her death.

Why did the tape recorder have a larger imprint on my consciousness than my grandmother’s death? Maybe because a consciousness has no physical properties; it cannot be imprinted in a literal sense. At least not to our knowledge.

I look out the window and imagine my father among the stars, his body sloughing off into the sky like the meteor’s tail. I feel something twist inside me, a sensation I get whenever I imagine a loved one dying. It’s like momentary vertigo: my brain rotates itself 30 degrees or so, misaligning until I’m able to shift my focus. This time, though, the twisting is eclipsed by a full-body sinking feeling. Would Dad rather be up in space, all alone, than here on earth with me?

Within the scientific community, the general consensus regarding consciousness is that it is created solely by the brain. That is, what we experience as thought and awareness is a product of electrical and biochemical processes occurring between neurons, in folds of soft tissue, in a seven-millimetre-thick case of bone. This is a materialist perspective, consistent with the belief that everything on earth and beyond—every aspect of reality—either has material properties or is the product of some kind of material. Scientific materialists say that matter is the only reality. They say when the brain dies, our consciousness dies with it.

He answers before I can ask. “The only thing I’m nervous about is finding my people. You and Mom. Your brother. Grandma Shirley. If I can, I’ll send you a signal. To let you know where I am and that it’s all OK.” Again, I see the flash of the meteor’s tail. Or maybe I imagine it.

For the next few days, I chew on Dad’s space theory like a piece of gum I can’t spit out. When I’m out with friends or serving drinks at the bar, I store it between my bottom gum and my lower lip, feeling a malleable pressure that never completely dissipates. What I’m chewing on is the tension between science and spirituality. The idea that death is a purely physical occurrence, a gateway to space travel, is a salvation narrative cloaked in scientific rhetoric—

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Others take what’s called a post-materialist approach—scientists like Stuart Hameroff and Gary Schwartz, who say, but wait, isn’t that a bit reductionist?

Isn’t it a bit short-sighted to believe that everything shaded beneath the umbrella of reality must be tied in some way to the material world and our perception of it?

Our perception cannot represent the entire equation. What if the brain were not a computer generating its own consciousness, but rather a radio, receiving

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Feature

consciousness like a signal? In other words, even if there is no conduit for the signal, it still exists. We just lack the capacity to perceive it. So what happens when we die? Maybe our consciousness continues on, oscillates back into the universe, looks for another radio to play its music.

Was I the radio that day, receiving and relaying the consciousness of my dead grandmother? I don’t know. I remember nothing. It’s possible it was all a highly sophisticated plan to entice my mother into a backyard Lightsaber duel, but I don’t give myself that much credit. I was four. I regularly ate dog treats.

One of the things Grandma Shirley constantly told my mother was, “Always put your children before your housework.” Grandma followed her own mantra.

Her house was a mess. Her kids thought she was the world.

There are so many stories with spiritual overtones like this. That time on the bus you thought of an old friend, only to have her text you five minutes later; or when you felt lonely, homesick in a new city, and next thing you know your mother is calling. These things have happened to me, and they’ve probably happened to you. It’s synchronicity. The question is whether we read it as pure coincidence or as glimpses into some kind of universal connectedness: a feedback loop of consciousness, more complex and miraculous than the most intricate spider’s web.

A couple weeks after she died, my family moved across town. With Dad busy at work, Mom had to do most of the packing and cleaning by herself, and knowing my brother and I would be a distraction, she told us stay outside for the day. Play on the swings. Dig for worms. Make a potion out of wet leaves.

But I was an attention-hungry child obsessed with my mother. I kept asking to come in and help. “No,” my mother repeated. “Go play outside.”

He rubbed the top of my right shoulder and said, “Hey, did you know you have an Orion’s Belt?”

This happened several times before I told her I’d heard Grandma Shirley’s voice in the wind. I didn’t say what I’d heard, just that I could hear her voice.

I looked down at my shoulder and saw three freckles aligned in a near-perfect row, spaced equidistantly like the stars in the constellation. At the time, my excitement barely exceeded that of a shrug, but over the years I’ve become somewhat obsessed with these three points of concentrated pigment. They make me feel like I’ve been marked. I’m not saying I’m some kind of chosen one, or that I’m a celestial consciousness materialized as a woman on earth, or that

My mother froze. Here I was, four years old, and the subtext of my interruption was Grandma’s old mantra: “Always put your children before your housework.” My mother put down her broom, or maybe her bottle of Windex, or maybe the box labelled “Kitchen Miscellany,” and took a break to play with us.

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I think we were in the studio when Michael found the freckles. I was sitting on his lap in a tank top, watching him pitch-correct the sound waves of a vocal line.

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I guess I’d rather be a radio than a computer, and I guess that I believe my tangible and intangible selves are separate yet intimately linked entities.

By “tangible self ” I do not simply mean “physical self ” or “body,” but rather all the ways my body presents itself to the world. Appearance, speech, movement, touch—these are the ways we interact with our environment, the channels by which we come to understand ourselves as individuals. But these presentations often feel insufficient, or in some way discordant with what’s going on inside, within consciousness. I read my journal entries, see myself in a mirror, hear myself cry in front of a lover and think, but wait, that’s not actually me. The discrepancy between my self and my presentation of self makes me want to cut a circle in the top of my head, lift it off like the lid of a jack-o’-lantern, and show you what’s really inside. “Aha,” you’ll say, gazing into pink folds of cranial tissue. “There you are.”

Just because you can’t see something from one point of view doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist from another. the Orion mothership is going to suck me skyward after I save humanity or whatever, but there is something about the freckles that seems transcendent.

I like to imagine the stars speaking to me, not verbally but symbolically; I don’t hear a celestial voice in the wind, but I see it on my skin. I bristle against phrases like, “I’m one with the universe,” but what if the stars are telling me that I am, and we all are? Sometimes I ride my bike home in the dark, spot Orion, and yell into the void, “I am your daughter!” I breathe in the night and exhale loudly. It’s an audible reminder that my air is no longer inside me, but part of a bigger entity.

It’s the future. I’m not sure what year, but if all has gone well—for myself and the earth—it’s at least 2070.

I am looking at the body I used to live inside, the one I used for running, eating, kissing, wiping the tears from my daughter’s cheek. The body is lying on a bed.

There are people around it. I love them.

I guess humans have a limited scope of perception and always will. Just because you can’t see something from one point of view doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist from another.

I’d like to tell them, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, but I don’t have a voice, and I can’t stay here long. Where is my father? Somewhere. The universe has unfurled itself like a daffodil in sunlight. I can see down its throat, and I am ready to be swallowed.

I guess I hope my father and the post-materialists are right. Without the limitations of a bodily container, I hope our conscious selves will be able to travel to times and spaces we can’t even conceptualize.

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Essay

STARRY NIGHTS Free stargazing parties at Simon Fraser University

words by madeline barber illustration by brit bachmann Standing there above the city while the sun dips behind the surrounding mountains, you truly feel alone with the sky. Most of the observatory’s funding went towards its design, which comes to life as soon as it gets dark.

Concrete blocks that run across the plaza project beams of six different colours, representing a spectrum of elements integral to astronomy. Also illuminating the courtyard is a gallery of seasonal star charts, which is lovely from a visual standpoint alone.

It turns out the corpse of a star looks not unlike a donut covered in powdered sugar. This celestial shrapnel is known as a white dwarf, and because it’s invisible to the naked eye, it is an utter delight to witness. Luckily for us earthlings, two years ago Simon Fraser University cut the ribbon for the Trottier Observatory: a space in the heart of the Burnaby Mountain campus for the community to discover our solar system.

The science department hosts recurring stargazing parties, Starry Nights, that are open to the public. If you’re struggling to even afford a glazed donut from Lucky’s, don’t worry: these events are 100% free. Their mandate revolves

Everyone that visits has the opportunity to peek into the quarter-of-amillion-dollar telescope. Standing in line builds the type of anticipation a 19-year-old may have waiting outside the Roxy on country night. It’s a small room, allowing only so many people in at once, but there’s usually 10 to 12 amateur astronomers from the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada set up with telescopes around the plaza. You can casually stroll up to any one of them and walk away having seen Saturn’s glorious rings.

Standing there above the city while the sun dips behind the surrounding mountains, you truly feel alone with the sky. around public outreach so that learning about space can be accessible to nonscientists. This was important to Dr. Howard Trottier, a physics professor at SFU and founder of the Starry Nights program.

SFU students are also there to guide guests through the experience. Take Kyle Dally, for example, who studies physics at the university. He takes ridiculously complicated theories and explains them in a way that even the kids can grasp— seriously, ask him how black holes are made, and then prepare yourself for a mini live-action episode of Cosmos.

“Of all the sciences, astronomy is very uniquely placed to reach out to the public because it’s a visual medium in part,” he said in an interview on Fraser Cain’s Weekly Space Hangout. “You look through a telescope and you see nature yourself— you don’t need someone to come between you and that experience. So the idea of getting kids and families out to view it can be a very powerful experience.”

The times of the star parties change depending on daylight hours, so the best way to stay in the loop is by joining the mailing list, or checking the website or Twitter feed. Weather also plays a big role in visibility, so the observatory’s Twitter offers up-to-date information on cancellations. Because, you know, it tends to rain from time to time in this corner of the blue planet.

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Nasty Brutish & Short——Komboh

Art

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Field Guide

STARRY

EYED

A GUIDE TO THE MODERN CONSTELLATIONS Words by Anthony Casey Illustrations by Karen Shangguan

How do I make this all about me?

Bound together by the stars Extra One and The Most Extra Two, this constellation can be observed from any point on Earth, at any time of day—especially when you think it’s your turn to share what’s going on in your life. Modern mythology says this clusterfuck of stars was birthed when a person, not unlike yourself, completed a few mundane tasks on a Sunday morning without a hangover. When your zodiac is dominated by this conversational vampire—because it visits us all at some point— you will find yourself asking, “How do I make this about me?” since its power is very on-the-nose. You can generally find this obnoxious ball of gas suspiciously close to other constellations, regardless of time and space.

I can’t believe this is really happening Miraculously, this constellation can be seen at all times of the day.

Keep an eye out next time you’re around someone who insists on talking with their mouth full or chewing with their mouth open.

I mean, were you raised in a barn? What makes you think it’s OK to take a call at work while you’re jawing away on some dried chickpeas, or smushing whatever god-awful creation you brought for lunch, into that poor caller’s ear? Oh, and a special shout-out to the mouth-breathers who have to struggle to inhale through their noses for a few minutes so they don’t choke. Here’s a hot tip from the universe to you: SLOW DOWN AND TAKE A MINUTE TO CHEW YOUR FOOD. Oh, and stars and stuff.

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You don’t have to go home but...

All of us know a friend—but most likely an acquaintance—who can’t take a hint about when it’s time to stop the party. Maybe they’ve pulled out a fresh bottle of tequila at 3 a.m., or insist you accompany them to the bathroom. Or maybe they’re stroking your hair and talking about how glad they are to know you well into a sunrise. Please, don’t hold this against them, for they are under the power of a VERY persuasive constellation. It’s a little hard to make out next to the other clusters that keep a regular, reliable schedule, but this lil’ one will sneak out when you least expect it—although I would recommend expecting it between 11pm on Saturday evenings and 10am Sunday mornings. The mythology of this loveable screw-up has been lost to time, but suffice to say, there were definitely some outside influences that contributed to its final form. Maybe take a taxi home if you start to see its darker side appear around 2 a.m.

Read the room You know the one I’m talking about. They say it was birthed from a Facebook post in 2009 when someone you know eagerly shared a favourable opinion and someone who you kind of know decided that it was the perfect time to post a counter view.

Normally, I’m all for a healthy discourse, but sometimes it’s nice to just let a person enjoy themselves and their new discovery in a public forum before letting loose the rains of piss all over it.

Take a peek at the sky when you next see this online phenomena and tell me you don’t spot the shape of a person leaning over their computer, shoulders hunched as though the weight of the world is upon them, warming up their talons to scratch away at the facade of another person’s happiness.

Where the hell have you been?

The next time you’re speaking to someone who’s completely oblivious to what’s current and happening in the world, look to the sky and see if they’re under the Where The Hell Have You Been constellation. You can’t miss its arc-like shape that looks like a rock, if you squint really hard.

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Essay

I’M JUST BROWSING Why small-space shopping is not for me

words by michelle cyca illustration by bryce aspinall in here!” I would like to be a cool, collected shopper, unconcerned with price tags, confident in her ability to pull off a pair of diaper-like shorts. But I’m not; and even if I didn’t feel insane in those shorts, I would never buy them. I don’t deserve your kind, pointless attention. Please, leave me to my private shame and this shelf of expensive candles.

My sole criterion for entering a boutique is not how expensive it looks, or whether I need anything in particular; there is no joy in practical shopping, which can be done on the internet. What I check for, as I peer through a window display of diaphanous linen garments, is the protective presence of other shoppers.

To me, entering a shop—especially a small shop, where there is nowhere to hide—as the only customer incites the kind of dread that others experience on a blind date or at the dentist. I know I’m about to become the centre of a very focused, purposeful attention that I am bound to disappoint. Because in truth, I am nearly always just here to browse. No, I’m not looking for anything in particular. Yes, I am pretending to admire the craftsmanship of this ludicrous romper while surreptitiously checking out the price tag and stifling a tiny scream.

Even if I can afford something in these austerely minimal boutiques, online shopping has primed me to compare and deliberate endlessly before purchasing.

Maybe I can get a better deal elsewhere; or maybe I want to read reviews to find out if this item is prone to warping or pilling or disintegrating in the washing machine; or maybe I just need more time to consider if a drop-crotch romper is a good look for me. I’m certainly not just going to buy it without spending three hours researching it online, like some pre-Industrial peasant. And on those rare occasions I do come in with the intent to buy something—hand lotion; lipstick; a pair of delicate printed socks—I certainly don’t need input. I just need 15 to 45 minutes of silent contemplation to compare every single option, and maybe a break to get a coffee while I think about it some more.

Being alone in a small shop makes it difficult to conceal my aimless intents.

I always hope there’s someone else around who is there on a mission, ideally an expensive one, as if they might shop enough for both of us. Stores I enjoy aesthetically—with their slender racks of carefully-chosen impractical garments and shelves of beautiful, delicate objects—make almost no sense to me as a consumer. I am nowhere near the income level where a pair of $521 pants seems like something I might actually purchase. But I like to look at that stuff, and touch it, and try it on. A beautiful shop is like a museum, except you can caress all the objects you admire. If only, like a museum, no one ever expected you to take them home with you.

Much ink has been spilled on imposter syndrome in the workplace, but nothing triggers it for me like a tiny, beautiful boutique. “How’s it going?” asks a perfectly polite shop employee, and I want to yell, “I can’t afford to be

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All this is to say that nothing a shop employee can say to me is helpful. All of it is intruding on my private contemplation and financial self-flagellation.

Do you want to tell me where this designer is from? Actually, I don’t mean to be rude, but my phone contains the entirety of the internet and I can look for that information myself, thank you. I don’t need you to explain the sale to me, either; I can read the 15 per cent sticker on this tag. I don’t need anything, except a few more moments alone with this jumpsuit. Actually, wait, come back; yes, you can put this in a fitting room for me. Just don’t hold your breath that I’m actually going to buy it.

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Fuji Provia 100

Essay

A SPACE CALLED SPACE Collaboration and creativity on Clark Drive

words by pat christie photography by pamela rounis surrounded by people with supplementary skillsets who were pursuing their own missions. Over time I’ve discovered many others who want this too, and that’s the gravity that has kept us together.

The first thing I noticed was the height. My imagination fired with potential as I looked towards the amazing 22-foot-high ceilings supported by solid Douglas Fir timbers. Hanging by their lonesome were these chains, left over from fluorescent lights that used to run in rows when the space was an automotive repair shop. I wanted to hang things.

In September 2017, SPACE expanded next door to include 554 Clark Drive; this address has allowed us to grow our focus from a strictly playful and

I took over 552 Clark Drive in August 2015. The concept of SPACE, as it is now called, emerged when, at the tail end of an extra year at Emily Carr, I began looking ahead to future possibilities. In Vancouver, there was (and still is) a lack of growth and accelerator environments tailored towards art- and design-led initiatives. I kept wondering where I would go next, and if could I participate in building a new model tailored for here.

We see collaboration and cooperation as the answer to overcome the challenges we face in our pursuit of a creative, sustainable Pacific Northwest.

While on exchange in Germany for my third year studying industrial design, I participated in and observed an integrated industry and education model. It appeared to be more permeable and cooperative than how we operate in British Columbia and the rest of Canada. Europe has a design-centric culture, and more specifically, industrial design plays a crucial role in the cultural production of objects, material goods, and experiences that contribute to the identities of its regions and countries. Why couldn’t that also be true in Vancouver?

exploratory place to a professional coworking environment. Within these two locations exists an essential dichotomy, which we believe helps foster growth and creativity in a city that can at times be stifling.

SPACE is accelerating around the formation of people with a common direction and a purpose of creating positive change today and in the future.

It is home to numerous interdisciplinary artists, designers, and oddballs with a collective goal of activating the cultural potential of Vancouver. We see collaboration and cooperation as the answer to overcoming the challenges we face in our pursuit of a creative, sustainable Pacific Northwest. We are proud of our city, and that which lies within all of us—for we are humans before we are anything else.

My time in Europe resonated deeply with me, and helped channel my aspirations for my own city. I wanted to make things, too, but not just any old things—meaningful things that added value to the lives of the people in the communities around me, while contributing to an emerging identity for design on the Canadian West Coast. I wanted a place in which I could grow not only my professional practice, but my art practice, while being

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Kodak Portra 400

Poetry

Dear Emily, I’m sorry I haven’t written back yet. With all the minutes

I’ve spent picturing your face and taking notes

on the days, I could have written a novel about us, a few

chapters at least which wouldn’t be outlandish because

you have the effect of a protagonist on your surroundings.

If there were a novel maybe we could be on a moor or in an

industrial complex but I’ll ask you to design the setting because you’re

a real-thing artist. Sel and Faith will be with us and there will

be no digital interruptions, no power needed, just our boots announcing

the ground like that night we left the bar in high spirits and

linked arms and let slip our family histories and catcalled the world

in general terms, tore up city blocks and chucked them

over our shoulders like dolls we’d outgrown before we got them

and anger and sadness didn’t feel like they came

from fear for a moment because we were lifting up, our arms

stitching our sides and backs to form one young

person’s wings with four souls for bones. We did not break ranks,

we were obnoxious, we let people find their ways around us.

—By Anne Denning photography by Dylan Maranda

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m’girl be gentle with yourself or not spend the next eight months beating yourself up because you took a leap and want to forget that you were brave for a moment

remember the last time you held unblinking eye contact as a challenge to a man sitting across from you remember when you broke that eye contact because you were afraid of being challenging and you have learned that the only way you can be angry is when you’re silent and small and you have been taught that your anger should never hold its own space

i thought being soft was supposed to make me beautiful but tenderness doesn’t work for me so i guess we will have to get used to personal boundaries being negotiated like treaty lines

i think it gets lost in translation from my language to yours that just because i have avoided being tender does not mean i don’t seek tenderness but how am i supposed to be tender when i have been taught to never make eye contact with a rougarou and there are wolves in every forest

remember the last apology letter you received from someone who should have apologized a year before but you accepted it and instead of reminding them that you’re not ceded territory you made sure to hold them with your words to never make them feel as bad as they made you feel

remember the last time you had to seek justice quietly whispering secrets to other iskwewak making sure that justice was swift but silent because you can’t let your justice be loud and violent because you have to ensure that your kin are protected from fallout you whisper your secrets to the rivers and lakes hoping that these stories will float downstream

remember how you have spent your life raising grown trees when you should have been worried about tending your own roots

—By Samanthan Marie Nock

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m’girl don’t let them cross your rivers

m’girl you are more than forced niceness

m’girl know that you don’t have to pick up the pieces of others and sew them back together with sinew that is meant for you

m’girl you can’t teach someone to love you in the ways that you need let them teach themselves how to whisper into the dark to find their answers like you have done since you were an awasis

Essay

House 1 pencil on paper

MOST LIKELY TO BREAK words by meghan bell art by christina james The day before my first day of high school, my older sister, Sara, gave me some advice that I still follow today. “Be nice to weird people,” she said. “You never know who will end up being a school shooter.”

I realized why: I still looked up to her the same way I had when I was twelve and she was sixteen. To me, Sara embodied a sort of I-don’t-give-a-fuck authenticity that I could only mimic, which was in itself a humiliating failure.

I don’t know whether she meant this literally or not, but I understood her meaning to be: Don’t be the sort of person who provokes vengeance in others. I wasn’t sure whether she was referring to herself as the provocateur or the provoked. Sara was sixteen at the time, in the final tailspin of an angst-ridden punk-rock phase that culminated five months later when she was suspended for digging her nails into the arm of a grade twelve boy at a school dance, drawing blood. When I asked her why, she said that he’d assaulted her, but when I told her to go to the school or to the police, she recanted and clarified: “It was the sort of thing that wasn’t consensual, but also wasn’t bad enough to be entirely non-consensual.” I said I was confused and she told me that I would understand when I was older. And true to her word, one day I was older, and I understood.

For years I’d kept a careful eye on those who I perceived to be volatile: the drunk, the drugged, and the entitled, the hyper-masculine and those that adopted the narrative of victimhood to justify their behaviour. I practiced a sort of intellectualized kindness that curdled in my mouth. I looked for cracks in people; I always picked at least one person in every room who I labelled Most Likely to Break.

At work, that person was the owner’s son, Jeremy. Jeremy was a small, immature man trapped in an oversized, intimidating body. Conversations with Sara had me thinking about how our personalities are shaped by how we move within the world and how the world reacts to us. For example, would Sara have become so conventional, if she had not, by sheer coincidence, been born into a body that was conventionally attractive? Even she admitted that her confidence most likely stemmed from a history of acceptance.

By the time I was twenty-two and she was twenty-five, Sara had gotten rid of her dark clothes and let her natural honey-brown hair grow out to replace the black she’d dyed it twice a month throughout her teen years. She got her degree in physiotherapy and moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Kitsilano with her boyfriend, a preppy law student named Dave who talked a lot about politics, the environment, and human rights, and seemed to think that this verbal demonstration of self-awareness was enough to cancel out his family wealth and WASP-y whiteness. My parents loved him but I was indifferent. He was the sort of good person who believed he was better than he was, and while his high expectations of Sara struck me as a kind of hypocrisy, I had to admit that he brought out a version of her that some might call her best.

Jeremy was prime for this sort of theorizing. He was the sort of person who frequently tripped over both his feet and his tongue, and while he might have been dismissed as irritating in a smaller body, his height (6’5”) and thickness (well over two hundred pounds) meant that he frightened people, and the frustration and resentment that this caused him created a feedback loop that gave people—in my opinion—reason to be frightened. He was a cliché, bemoaning how women always fell for the “bad boys” and ignored “nice guys” like him, and even though I knew it wasn’t his fault, the deepness of his voice and the way his neck muscles flexed always made this sound like a threat.

I was in my last year of an English degree, paying my way with contract work for a small company that cleaned out foreclosed homes. I wasn’t as efficient at hauling out furniture as the guys, but they kept me on because I was willing to tackle the spots that made them cringe, like the kitchen and the bathrooms.

The three men I worked with could transition from flirtatious to aggressive, chivalrous to condescending, respectful to exclusionary with the same ease with which a professional dancer can shift their weight from foot to foot. They over-pronounced my name—Nah-tah-lee-ah!—every time they used it. I kept the job for the money and for the stories, and I turned the stories into poems, which I sent to literary magazines, which turned the poems into rejection letters. I played it up as an act of feminism, but Sara called me out on my internalized misogyny. “There’s a part of you that believes you’re a better sort of woman because you can play one of the guys,” she said. Across the table, Dave snorted with laughter.

The other two men on our team of four hated him and made no secret of it, but I was pathologically friendly. When one, a lean philosophy major named Noah, asked me why, I told him about Sara’s advice and he laughed so loud he rattled the closet doors in the bedroom we were gutting and called our third co-worker, Peter, over to share what I had said. Their laughter felt like acceptance, but I realized Peter and Noah’s friendliness towards me might have had more to do with ganging up on a common enemy than respect. I wanted to take back my words, but the damage had been done.

I excused myself, passing Jeremy in the hall as I descended the staircase towards the kitchen. I felt his eyes stick to me like a drop of sweat rolling down my spine. I wasn’t sure whether he had heard or not but decided to play innocent. We were out in the Fraser Valley on a relatively easy job. Over half the houses we cleaned had once contained a grow-op or a meth lab, but this one seemed to have suffered nothing worse than wine stains, children, and animals. The former owners had taken as many items of value as they could with them. There were long, thick scratches in the laminate floor from the laundry room through the foyer, where they had dragged the washer and dryer outside.

“You’re one to talk,” I said.

“How so?”

“All the co-ed sports.”

The kitchen was bare on the surface, but when I started opening cupboards I found moulding loaves of bread, musty cereal boxes filled with crumbs, an empty bag of flour, and other waste. The trash bin under the sink was full and so rancid I gagged and nearly bit my tongue.

“For fuck’s sake, Nat, we’re talking about your attitude. I don’t parade around pretending I’m some sort of pioneer just because I can catch a ball thrown by a man.” After she moved out of our parents’ traditional stronghold, Sara had learned to channel her natural tendencies towards violence and self-harm into beer league sports. I once came out to watch one of her and Dave’s flag football games, and wasn’t at all surprised to see her elbows flying into the jaws and guts of her opponents when the ref wasn’t looking.

I grabbed a box of black plastic bags from the front entrance and began emptying the kitchen, dragging each full, stinking bag of garbage out to the curb as I filled it. Upstairs, Noah and Peter pulled a yellowed mattress out to the balcony and tipped it over the side so it fell and landed with a squelching sound on the muddy grass below.

Sara’s comment upset me, and not just because her criticisms of me eerily echoed my criticisms of her and her boyfriend. It wasn’t until much later that

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Essay

I went back to the kitchen and filled half a bag with the rotting contents of the “Do you?” I said. fridge. Then I opened the freezer door and I couldn’t stop myself—I screamed.

It worked. Noah released my head and spun me around so that I was still Inside was a large, orange tabby cat. It was curled up as though it was sleeping, pinned against the fridge, but now we were face to face. If I were Sara, I—but and its face had the relaxed look of a natural death. Its fur, however, splayed out I didn’t know what Sara would do. I wasn’t Sara. in all directions, like it had been shocked. The freezer had iced over around the creature, locking it firmly in place by its hair. It still had its collar on. I could “Please let me go,” I said gently. see that his name had been Rupert.

He stared at me. I could feel him—all of him—against me.

“Holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck,” I said. I started to shake with laughter and revulsion. “Holy shit motherfucker!”

“Noah,” I said again. “Let me go.”

I heard someone rush down the stairs behind me. I turned and expected to see Jeremy, but was relieved to see Noah instead.

He blinked and nodded slightly. I felt his grip loosen.

Then Noah was pried off of me with a force that knocked me to my knees.

Jeremy flung Noah across the room. He landed in an awkward crouch and scrambled to his feet just in time for Jeremy to punch him straight in the face.

“She said let go!” Noah crumbled to the ground and blood began to pour from his nose, which hung crooked.

“What happened?” he asked.

I moved back so he could see into the freezer.

“What the fuck,” he said. He took a step closer. “That’s so fucked up. That’s the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.” He started laughing too. “Do you think they killed it like that?”

“Jeremy, holy shit, Jeremy, stop,” I said. I grabbed the back of his T-shirt to both hold him back and pull myself up. “I’m fine.”

“Oh my god, no,” I said. “Who would do that? It must have been dead before they put it in the freezer.”

We heard a muffled groan. On the floor, Noah held both hands over his nose, blood and mucus seeping through his fingers.

“How the fuck are we going to get this thing out?”

“I think we need to take him to the hospital.”

I was nearly crying. “I don’t fucking know!”

Tears pooled at the bottoms of Noah’s eyes.

“I dare you to touch it.”

“Jeremy? Jer? Do we have an ice pack? We should go.”

“No fucking way. I dare you to touch it.”

Jeremy nudged Noah with the toe of his massive boot, then turned around and stuck both hands in the freezer and ripped out the cat, leaving most of its hair behind.

He took another step closer, and before I could react, Noah grabbed my arm and shoved my hand into the freezer towards the frozen cat. Individual hairs broke off as my palm collided with the scruff of its neck.

He dropped it on the floor next to Noah with a clunk, and then walked out of the room and out of the house. As he left, I heard him say, “Ungrateful bitch.”

Noah released me and broke away, laughing hysterically. I stared at my arm in the freezer until my vision tunnelled, then spun around and slapped the hand that had touched the cat over Noah’s face and rubbed.

Peter had come downstairs at some point during all of this, and after Jeremy left, he helped Noah up and we walked him outside only to discover that Jeremy had left with one of the vans. I told him to take the second one to the hospital.

“I’m going to bus home,” I said.

He coughed and spat. “That went in my fucking mouth.”

I realized I’d miscalculated. “Oh god, I’m sorry, I meant that as a joke— I didn’t mean—” But then Noah pinned me front-first to the fridge with his body. His hand snaked over the back of my skull and pulled out the elastic that held my ponytail in place. My blonde hair fell over my face in sweaty strings. He shoved my head into the freezer so I came face to face with the tabby.

Peter nodded. A trail of Noah’s blood wandered down his shirt, but he didn’t seem to notice. “What about the job?” he said.

“What about it?”

Noah clambered up and into the passenger’s seat, his head tilted down. He picked a hoodie up from the floor and held it to his face. Peter climbed in on the driver’s side and they drove away.

“See how it feels?” he said.

Later, when I told Sara what had happened, she clenched her fists until her knuckles turned white and said, “I’ll fucking kill him. Both of them, maybe.” Rage had always looked good on Sara. Her eyes were vibrant and intense. Her skin glowed.

I pinched my eyes and mouth shut. A nervous giggle pushed against the back of my teeth, and bubbled back down into my throat.

“Do you like that?”

“No, you won’t,” I said.

I wanted to be violent but I didn’t know how to be. I couldn’t move.

“I’ll beat him within an inch of death.”

I remembered my sister’s advice.

“I’m fine, Sara, I’m fine. It wasn’t that big a deal. Besides,” I said, “I kind of started it.”

His groin pressed into the top of my ass. I could feel his erection through his jeans and my yoga pants. “Do you like that, Nah-tah-lee-ah?” Noah said again.

Sara looked at me for a long time. I couldn’t read her expression, but it made me want to sink so far into her sofa that I disappeared.

My chin ached where it had scraped against the ice.

Finally, she spoke. “If that’s a narrative you can live with.”

I let my lips part, just a fraction of an inch.

I told her I didn’t understand, and she told me I would when I was older. And true to her word, one day I was older, and I understood.

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Essay

TAKE THE STAGE WHY I TAKE UP ALL THE SPACE I WANT AS A STAND-UP COMEDIAN

WORDS BY JACKIE HOFFART ILLUSTRATION BY HANNAH CAMPBELL My mother recently visited the apartment I share with my partner, and although mom is 100% sweetness and light, she also has a preoccupation with trying to take up less space physically—she always feels in the way.

I find it sort of exasperating and heartbreaking. I want to constantly yell: “Mom! You are not in the way! You deserve to take up all the space on the couch you need! You are our guest! We love you! Take up space!”

Still, some of that feeling-the-need-to-shrink has rubbed off on me.

Whether it’s pitching a short film or thinking about writing a book proposal, I often doubt whether what I say matters. Does the world really need to hear from me?

Against all odds, however, stand-up comedy is the one area where I do not feel any paralysis vis-à-vis imposter syndrome and white privilege.

In fact, my identity as a queer/fat/roughly-80%-woman-identified person is precisely what motivates me to take the stage and “speak my truth,” because I’ve realized that if I don’t show up (to painful open mics especially), the space will literally automatically fill up with random white guys (sorrynotsorry, random white guys!).

But the quirk of comedy is that variety (and storytelling/joke-telling ability) is king. So, at least in theory, people who book shows are always looking to make diverse line-ups—if only because it’s boring to hear the same old (random white guy) shit every night.

The beauty of stand-up is that you entitle yourself to it. There are show-up-go-up shows (open mics) almost every night of the week in Vancouver. Do enough of those and people will book you on their shows—or you can just ask to be put on shows, and most folks will say yes unless you have a reputation as a sexist/racist jerk. It is really like that. You don’t have to be very good. Trust me! I’ve been doing it off and on for three years and still don’t feel like I’m any good. My imposter syndrome is my co-pilot!

I feel like even my five minutes of talking about my weird pubic hair is somehow pushing back against all the grossness that exists out there.

And if I don’t show up, then I’m letting grossness win. And that’s not OK with me. For an evenings-only unpaid (or very rarely paid) hobby, I am weirdly motivated to tell better stories and improve my craft, which I’m told takes seven to 10 years, lol.

And the more women and queers I see onstage, the more I feel supported—like there’s room for me if I want it. I kind of want to do a girls rock camp for comedy. We have been mobilizing and taking the stage for some time, but like, now is our time, surely? Like, angst is at a high these days, so GIRLS/QUEERS/WEIRDOS TO THE FRONT is a sound way to approach art-making. It’s the ensemble piece of a comedy night that also reinforces the idea to me that there is room for me. At best you are always sharing the stage—even the world’s biggest comedians have warm-up acts. Literally no one is the only voice. There are many stages and many mics, and we need to flood them with as many different voices as we can. So I’m going to keep being my awkward queer/fat/roughly-80%-woman-identified self and bear witness to my experiences, five minutes at a time.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There are plenty (and I mean plenty!) of amazing straight white comics in town. (We really do have a juicy crop of good feminist boys here.) Of course that makes a lot of sense, if men are typically not taught to question whether or not the world really needs to hear from them.

So why do I feel like stand-up needs me? Well, to be clear, I don’t exactly think it does. But acknowledging that I wasn’t raised to think the world needs to hear from me means I have to push myself twice as hard to be

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heard. And if part of the charm of comedy is its ostensible relatability, well then I guess I have to step up and expand it. And maybe, just maybe, I can inspire other folks with broader experiences than my own to do the same.

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Essay

Future Tense III collage

OVER THE MOON The waxing and waning of our fascination with space exploration

words by jessica johns art by aimÉe henny brown Before human beings stepped foot on the moon, it was full of potential. Up until then, all we knew about the moon was how it affected the earth. But what we didn’t know really enticed us.

Was there life on this giant, glowing orb? Could it be habitable for the people of earth? There was excitement in the unknown. So we did as any enamoured lover does: we became f ixated.

We tracked lunar phases as the days of the month ticked by, we watched the ocean’s tides rise and fall, and we waited with bated breath until, in 1961, the United States president John F. Kennedy announced that he wanted to land people on the moon.

made up of rock, dead volcanoes, impact craters, and lava flows. There is no atmosphere, wind, or weather, and it’s unable to support life of any kind.

Maybe people were disappointed that the moon was essentially just a giant rock. Maybe taking away the mystery, the chase, killed the infatuation.

Compare this with our sustaining fascination with Mars. Though Venus is actually closer in

So, despite Earth’s familiarity with Mars, there is still mystery and, perhaps more importantly, possibility. Elon Musk, for example, believes that humans could be living on Mars by 2060 (I mean, he also believes we’re living in the Matrix, but that’s another story). NASA is planning on landing humans on Mars by the 2030s. Taking these future plans into account alongside the nonexistent ones with the moon, there is a potential of over 65 years of fascination with Mars compared to the moon’s decade. The dreams we once had for the moon dissipated after we actually landed on it, but they are still possible for Mars. Will the appeal end once we finally get there? Once we achieve these goals, is it possible that Mars will go the way of the moon?

The world lost its collective mind.

For the next eight years, despite the Kennedy assassination and NASA’s under whelming photographs of the moon’s surface, our attention never waned. We hadn’t actually been there yet; the facts weren’t tangible.

Finally, On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped on the moon. The world became even more engrossed, and we started burning the candle at both ends. In the next three years, NASA landed six manned missions on the moon, returning an abundance of scientific data and 400 kilograms of lunar samples (not to mention the numerous unmanned missions still collecting lunar photography). Anything moon-related—information, news, photos— we devoured.

So why did we soon fall out of love?

On April 10, 2017, Wendy’s tweeted, “Tell us the fourth person to walk on the Moon without Googling it.” Nobody knew. This did nothing but spark a petty, if funny, tweet battle with Hardee’s.

Why does no one remember Alan Bean, the fourth person to walk on the moon? (Yes, I had to Google it.) Or Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, or James Irwin? After the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, NASA stopped sending people to the moon altogether—that was only three years after the initial landing. And now, 40-some-odd years later, we basically don’t even care.

Maybe it’s simply that we learned all we could about it. We know the surface of the moon is

eight months to travel to Mars. Among a variety of other factors including money, technology, and world powers, ultimately it comes down to risk.

NASA is continuously learning more about Mars, the hazards of its environment, its atmosphere, and how to build the technology to adapt and survive, but there’s still so much we don’t know.

Every time NASA’s scientists and engineers come close to understanding something about Mars, new research and discoveries force them to revise and re-theorize.

distance to Earth, Mars as the next target for our attention makes sense. Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, being so close to the sun, so any probe that NASA has sent to Venus has been destroyed in minutes. Mars, however, is still close enough to be reachable by NASA’s spacecrafts, and even has likenesses to Earth such as ice caps, clouds, canyons, and seasonable weather patterns.

NASA had unmanned spacecrafts and rovers active on Mars from 1964 to today, with the next rover due to be sent in 2020. But no people have been sent, and that’s partly because of distance.

It takes about three days to travel to the moon and

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Perhaps loving something too much and too fast means we run the risk of morphing the initial feelings into disinterest, or burning them out completely. On the other hand, there is also the argument that we’re not over the moon (and of course, some religions, including Judaism and Islam, follow the lunar calendar). There are writers who believe that the moon is making a comeback, at least in literary circles. They say it’s moving beyond the romantic cliché it got stuck with during our initial enthusiasm, and is now being reclaimed as profound.

I hope this is true. Every year, the moon drifts over an inch away from earth. Even though it would take billions of years to affect our planet, it’s a sad thought. With our sights set further into the solar system, we’re taking our moon for granted. But it is no stranger to hardship, and has the perfectly embedded imprints of asteroid assaults and astronaut boots to prove it. The moon is probably tak ing the earth ’s ghosting in stride. After all, we need it more than it needs us.

Essay

ELUSIVE BEASTS An incomplete recollection of Vancouver’s shuttered galleries, 2009-2015

words by alison sinkewicz illustration by benjamin t. stone Forgetfulness is a symptom of urbanity. Streets are triumphantly named, and over time, we all forget what Mr. Cambie even did. People come and go, some leaving sweet lament, others only vague recollections of some European city they migrated to (probably Berlin).

Maybe the most ephemeral of a city’s collective memory is the commercial art gallery. Often chasing or charging gentrification, the commercial gallery location is an elusive beast. In a place like Vancouver, where ubiquitous unaffordability is as mundane a conversation topic as the rain, small galleries are lucky to have a show past the one-year mark. ”If you’re opening up a gallery, you’re going to get kicked out,” artist Randy Grskovic laughs. “People have this unrealistic expectation that it’s not going to happen to them, but it happens to everyone.”

Before Grskovic opened his now-closed Good Luck Gallery on Union Street in 2012, he had galleries in both South Granville and Crosstown.

“It was always about this idea that there was a hole in Vancouver that needed to be filled: the space between an artist-run-centre and a commercial gallery. I billed [Good Luck] as a kind of artistrun gallery, a hybrid between the two.”

In Vancouver, even just a few years can feel like decades. In 2006, Bob Rennie made little waves when he purchased the historic Wing Sang Building in Chinatown. In accordance with either the chase or charge theory of gentrification, artistrun centres like Unit/Pitt, Publication Studio, and Access had begun to relocate to the neighbourhood as well (the commercial bigwigs moved to what is now hollowly marketed as “The Flats”).

Surrounding the non-prof its, smaller start-up galleries with less-defined commercial modes also began populating the area. Trench Contemporary Art on Alexander Street focused on showcasing Vancouver’s seminal artists of the 1960s and ‘70s. A standout show featured new photography from Jeff Wall exploring the East Vancouver studio of the late sculptor David Marshall. Around the corner, Lee Plestad and Erik von Muller’s The Apartment ga l ler y next to Wing Sang was exhibiting theoretically audacious shows with artists like Derya Akay and Vikky Alexander.

“I was seeing this kind of weirdness happening in Chinatown then,” Grskovic, now located in

long.” Throughout the challenges, d’Angelo and Kaczkowski put on shows with Walter Scott, Soledad Munzo, Patrick Cruz, and Guadalupe Martinez.

Toronto, recalls. Good Luck Gallery’s signage was in both Mandarin and English. “We just wanted to let people in the neighbourhood know what we were doing and that we weren’t trying to gentrify the neighbourhood.” Good Luck ran on a kind of incomprehensible turnover in order to combat the high rent and low sales that plague the commercial gallery model. “The idea was that every week we would f lip a show,” Grskovic explains. “So we would open every Friday night, and then it would be open for the weekend and then it would be a short run, but every artist that showed at the gallery would also have work at the gallery.” In its short but influential span, Good Luck showed the very early (and much more punk) work of Andy Dixon and Ben Skinner.

Peppering the shows with performance work and other experimental mediums meant sacrificing a chunk of change to help foster the next one.

“I had been involved with exhibition spaces in Toronto before arriving in Vancouver, and was not new to this type of challenge,” d’Angelo explains.

“However, with a much smaller pool of artists and creative supporters to pull from, we had to be constantly on our toes with contemporary ideas to keep patrons coming through the doors and spending a bit of money in support.”

Chinatown’s foremost DIY venue was Shudder Galler y. Run by Sylvana d ’Angelo and Mysa Kaczkowski, it was the kind of space now rarely seen in Vancouver: a mix of living space (upstairs where Kaczkowski lived), a storefront (where Shudder was located), and a multi-use basement fit for shows and performance-based experiences.

“Money was absolutely the biggest challenge,” d ’Angelo says. “The community was extremely supportive in attendance of the exhibitions, shows, and workshops, and without this we would have been unable to keep the doors open for so

Others, too, have passed out of our memor y.

Mount Pleasant ’s Ga ller y 295 and Hot Wet A rt Cit y number among the recently fa l len.

Heck, who even knows what happened to the phenomenon that was once The Cheaper Show?

(Did we all end up buying cocaine instead of art after all?) In resilience, as well statistical ignorance, art spaces in the city continue to open, through old and new models. The closed galleries of Vancouver’s past are not tombstones or warnings, but, ultimately, success stories.

After all, you can always move east.

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Dispatches

DISPATCHES illustrations by nicola mcneil

INDIA zero centimetres

Even as the bus lurches over hills and sweat seals my thighs to theirs, it’s a treat to be this close to women.

Some mornings, Lee wakes me up by laying his entire body on mine, matching my sprawl perfectly, like a cut-out. His cheek is on my forehead.

“Wake up, cucumber,” he laughs. We take 20 minutes to make breakfast and eat it on the couch, legs tangled, before the day startles awake.

one centimetre

The Indira Gandhi airport in Delhi is a necessary jumping point to get further south. The Goan beaches and Kerelan backwaters beckon, though really all I want is a slice of pizza. Pizza Hut, sadly, will do the trick, but not the men in line with me who stand so close their arms brush against mine. When the cashier hands me my pizza, I realize it isn’t the only relic of home I’m craving.

zero centimetres

When the bored-looking girl at the ticket counter gets fed up and slides the window closed, the line at the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve in Ooty, India becomes the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. People surge forward, their bellies to my back, money clenched in their fists. They demand to see the animals! I extricate myself just in time to watch, across the sloping hills, a wild boar disappear into the woods.

11,130 kilometres

Boarding the plane to leave India, I can’t say I’m sad. I’ve planned what I’ll tell curious friends and coworkers: “The place was certainly a challenge.” I’ll laugh in a way that says, “But that’s travel!” I’ll tell them about the lack of personal space, a nicely packaged anecdote. And then I’ll re-adjust to the much wider measurements in Vancouver—the way people apologize when they pierce your space, the fact that I’ve never spoken to the other people who live in my apartment building, the echoes of the city at night.—veronica ciastko

0ne centimetre

There are only men in Panaji. Every waiter, tuk-tuk driver, mango-cart guard, and silk sari merchant. When I just barely catch the bus from Vagator, there are two women at the back who part wordlessly to let me sit in between them.

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CALIFORNIA We had booked a trip to Integratron—a “resonant tabernacle and energy machine sited on a powerful geomagnetic vortex,” as described on its website— weeks earlier, and now in the kitchen of my friend’s family vacation home in Palm Desert, it was just hours away. I was impatient to get there, and every distraction bothered me: the filling of water bottles; the application of sunscreen; the conversations that could wait. By way of too many wrong turns and a detour to Joshua Tree National Park, we arrived in Integratron’s home of Landers. A pantone of earthy hues south of the horizon met a clear blue sky, the line blurred by a thick haze. It was impossible to miss the large white dome that marred the vacant skyline—it was overbearing, dominant, odd.

A group of 20 or so, we made our way one by one up a set of thick, steep stairs so wide that my arms fully stretched out would not meet both handrails at the same time. I emerged at the summit wide-eyed and intrigued. I entered the dome, lay down, covered myself with a blanket, and sank into a spongy mattress, ready for the sound bath to begin. A woman named Nancy, her voice melodic and soft, led us through our chakra-cleansing experience. From the sacrum to the top of the head, the vibrations became heavier; the sound was encompassing, almost sinister.

I placed my hands on my abdomen and they bore down on my skin like weights.

As Nancy drew another note from the quartz bowl, I drew further into myself.

I didn’t move and I didn’t feel, but tears streamed from my eyes, and the noise enshrined my body as I lay paralyzed. Inside I felt full, claustrophobic—no room for food, no room for water. Three days after returning from the desert, I found out I was pregnant.—ashley jardine

LONDON I finally left Vancouver, like most Vancouverites say they are going to (give me a dollar for every person who told me they were moving to Berlin, Montreal, New York, L.A. Whatever, give me a nickel, I’d still be rich). But I’m not that proud of myself, because the city I chose is Vancouver’s twin. Twins don’t look right alone, and being somewhere with all the trappings of home leaves me feeling suspended, like one of the bubbles of the London Eye. People don’t think about it, but London is a waterfront city, too. Last summer I ran along the Seawall every night, sometimes in rain that I described as “Shakespearean”; here I jog along the Thames, past Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. I don’t necessarily think that’s an improvement.

On the West Coast, everything is so beautifully gloomy, like a dark smudge over something happy.

Vancouver is a beautiful secret—there is still a feeling of the forests even in the concrete plains—whereas London celebrates its secrets, turns them into tourist traps. That’s enterprising, I guess, and characteristically British. I have been trying to define Britishness since I got here, and I think I’ve got it: controlled exposure. Every confessional moment disguises a deeper admission.

Self-deprecating humour throws a cloak over real pain. On the West Coast, everything is so beautifully gloomy, like a dark smudge over something happy.

Here it’s the opposite—there is something chipper and peppy covering up the grey. The national temperament is like tin foil on top of soot.

I love being a bitch in London. It’s so antithetical to this city. It’s absurd to say I feel out of place when I blend in so much more than other newcomers, when I have every advantage thanks to a home not all that different. But I feel out of something, and I think it’s space. I feel like a ghost in London, a wisp or a scratch on a leather couch. I’ve never loved my city so much as I do now that I’m away from it. And I’ve turned London into an apparition of Vancouver. My homesickness is physical, in the coffee shops I go to that play the same music, in the parties and f lat concrete rooms that remind me of East Van, in the markets and canals where I can drink juice and listen to lapping water.

All the cute boys I meet turn out to be Canadian.—meredyth cole

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