Category: festival

Flying Canoe Volant 2023

2022-2023 was an exciting winter for me, a lot of events happening almost on top of each other. This edition of Flying Canoe Volant brought me to some new collaborations, and the realization of some long held dreams.

The Airship was a big project, a collab with GABS, another local Edmonton light based artist allowed me to work on a dreamed of upgrade to my Canoe Chandeliers. Last year after the event my brother Robin and I were looking at all the things we’d set up. That may have been his first time looking at everything set up in a while, so he was pretty excited about some of the work. We came up with the idea of an Airship Canoe, with flapping paddles for propulsion and flame (effect bulbs) for lift. Later that year I talked to GABS about collaborating on a crew, and she developed an amazing soft sculpture cast of birds and rodents. Apparently they were not on good terms with each other, so the title of the installation is “Squabbles” and features captured birds on a Squirrel lead ship. The birds may have been accused of stealing the squirrels nuts, but I imagine they would have an alternate explaination.

I also put together a new set of fabric lanterns, now called the Fab4 (cause there are 4 of them) and got to involve Marissa Mars in painting them. She came in for a day and sprayed the set with my stencils- I love seeing other artists us my stencil set because it always turns out so different than what I do with them.

I also got to make some cut up canoe installations. This is part of a bigger project that I hope to see develop, but that’s top secret. Anyway, first step has happened and they were super fun.

MoonDrops

MoonDrops is a new lantern style that I was inspired to create sitting in the hottub at Jasper Park Lodge. I’d been invited out to look at setting an installation up for them. That project got bounced from covid related changes, but the artwork more importantly got made. It was an adventure in curved surface modeling, not exactly what the tools I was using were best at, but some extra time and I managed to get a buildable system out of my dreams.

MoonDrops are made from aluminum, one of the more easily recyclable mediums, and post mount on a 2.5″ square tube. I have a set for event installation, and a couple available for sale. These lanterns were built at the end of 2021, and have now shown at a dozen events across Alberta and BC. You can check my store for the retail listing, but contact me directly for a larger scale permanent installation.

Light The Night CurrieYYC

The neighborhood of Curry in Calgary AB is currently in transition from a Canadian Forces base to a new residential development. Canada Lands Corporation was celebrating a big milestone in reopening a greenspace that had been fenced off for a year for a re-naturalization process, and wanted to put together a light based winter event to commemorate the occasion.

They hired me to co-ordinate a full site lighting project and work with Adrian Stimson -a member of the local Siksika Nation, artist, and veteran. I built a few new works for the event and did the technical side of 2 collaborative new works with Adrian. The lit up paintings in the gallery are Adrian’s work.

The installation was up from January 16 to March 22 2023.

Flying Canoe Volant 2017

2017 featured a lot of community art participation, I lead a workshop at Bonnie Doon Community League to make a series of “Church Steeple” lanterns (for the church steeples that the voyageurs were supposed to avoid running into on their canoe flight) out of cardboard and coloured tissue paper. These lanterns were featured on the street way into the ravine, in yards of community members.

Flying Canoë Volant 2016

Every first weekend of February, in my hometown of Edmonton, we have this amazing weekend festival in the woods of Mill Creek Ravine. This is one of my favourite places in the city, and it is such an honour to be trusted with lighting it up for tens of thousands of people to explore.

This is a short video from Explore Edmonton that highlights a lot of what our event is all about.
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U of A Alumni Association, Green and Glow winterfest 2015

laser cut lanterns, green and gold for the University of Alberta Alumni Assn's 100th anniversary
one hundred lanterns for one hundred years

Jan, 2015.  The University of Alberta’s Alumni Association turns 100 this year, one hundred years after the first class graduated.  I got a call to imagine something special for their Winter Event.  This became one of the best University events I’ve been to, and we produced a genuinely magical moment.

Had some deeper learning moments about high speed production of large numbers of objects… 100 lanterns is quite a lot of lanterns. Even when you have a cnc machine to laser cut your parts. The opposite side of that learning is that 100 lanterns is a good number of lanterns to have a parade with. Especially when they each put out 2 watts worth of coloured LED light. At the last minute I decided to walk in the parade with the prototype lanterns, and it induced a pleasantly expansive feeling

The Association produced a great video, and an image gallery follows below.
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Flying Canoe Volant 2015

coat of arms- canoe with crossed paddles and wings, moon over with crown of stars, snowflakes beneath
new design for the flying canoe volant

The Mill Creek Adventure this year was a major stretch for me.  Scheduled for a week after my other biggest winter festival commission, I had to juggle 5 workshops, up to 10 workers, a whole class of artists,  dozens of projects, and hundreds of details.  Sometimes I felt like I was driving between sites for a month.  But in the end, it worked out.  and the last two days of installation were surprisingly easy.  Delegation to competent staff pays off… except in the visceral sense of feeling like I’m focused on making art.  I suppose that’s what large scale art management is about.

In the chaos, I managed to bring 3 new major lanterns to the event, and a much deeper colour palette to my older lantern work.  New LED colours… as fun as christmas for me!
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This gallery is from Paula Kirman; you can find her edmonton events photography on flicker


Winter Light 2012: Mill Creek Adventure Walk

People passing thru the Gate of Winter Light
January 27 and 28, 2012, myself and the rest of the Winter Light team launched an ambitious project; to do more with less at our now hopefully annual Mill Creek Adventure Walk. The story this year was seeded by Carol and Bill, and told the tale of an Eager Beaver’s attempt to build a Lodge big enough to Block Out the Stars.

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Mill Creek Adventure Walk Flys Again

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Adventure Walk Flys Again

February 1st and 2nd marks the 3rd Mill Creek Adventure Walk, and the first time this walk has been produced by La Cité Francophone. As you may or may not know, Winter Light, the previous producer has ceased operations in September, so myself and vast numbers of the public are grateful and excited that La Cité has picked up this amazing event.

This year’s event featured the legend of The Flying Canoe and The City of Light, an old French and native story about some Voyageurs who make a deal with the devil to fly their canoe home to visit loved ones. And they had to be back by midnight or they all turn into pumpkins. Or something like that, I never have much time to follow the story, to busy setting up lanterns.

Installation-wise, we had a limited new-work budget to play with, so the focus was on revising and re-arraigning. Fortunately I have a lot I material that has never shown in the creek before, so that plus some subtle upgrades and the new, shorter walking path made for fresh lighting experience.

The other big change was a fancy new home base at La Cité. Great venue for performance and gathering. Also an amazing workshop setup to develop and stage from.

I’m going to take this opportunity to
thank and recognize some people:
Robin, Brett, and Scott for throwing down without much notice, yet with enough understanding of my scene to deal with the work efficiently.
Memi for the use of her fabric lanterns.
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Winter Light for putting all that material into the hands of artists and event producers.
La Cité (Daniel, Mirielle, Shannon, and the rest) for picking this event up.
Matt for being the full time winter guy that makes it all stick.
Marissa for keeping track of batteries an all the rest.
Hydrosion, for supporting my design with the robot-assisted cutting you all saw.
Rose, my boss, for all the time off to make this happen.
The weather for being awesome.
And my wife Janelle and baby for coming out to enjoy the walk with me, and patience thru the way too busy develop and install phase of the work.
And you know, everybody …

You can see more at the city of lights.

Send an email to someone ( La Cité, City Councillor, Edmonton arts council) if you want to see this event again next year!


Spaceport Video Shop Tour

SpacePort Studio Pan/Tilt Video Tour

I do some fun geek support projects for various other artists, and the other day I got to play with a remote control pan/tilt unit (from servocity.com) that some fellow Edmontonian artists are using for a film project.  My job was to ensure that the parts for the motion control systems all talked to each other properly : batteries, transmitters, receivers and motor drivers. Intrigued by remote control toys, I taped my [relatively low-tech] camera onto this high-tech pan/tilt unit to take a scan around our studio (aka SpacePort), which at the time was covered with electro-mechanicals that we were working on for this film.

Big Fancy Camera Systems in Taiwan

In contrast to my “Red-Green” solution, the filmmakers will be screwing a Red Cam onto the system when they get to Taiwan.  They are filming in Imax-Ready format, with some fancy remote controlled systems to get their vast cameras out of the faces of their subjects.  The fly-cam they are building is pretty exciting – some heavy duty remote control car motors, a pan/tilt/focus and a gyroscope will all be mounted onto a hanging zip-line-like contraption. These devices will be controlled by a fancy Spektrum DX6 transmitter (a fancy remote control), and will take the camera on some long steady rides over the heads of the festival go-ers.  It’s amazing how a different perspective in the camera angle can have profound impact on the perspective of the movie viewer.  Maybe it’s about how our brain gets tweaked differently when we see something from a new angle.
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Spirit Medium , the film

So, the film they are going to shoot looks pretty amazing.  One of the group members did some sort of thesis work in Taiwan about this festival, and he is bringing the film crew back with him to get the story visually:

Taiwan is a small and often overlooked society with many gifts and treasures to offer the world. At approximately 5,000 years, Chinese civilization is the oldest existing civilization in the world. However in Mainland China, many traditional religious practices were purged as superstition during the Cultural Revolution. Although it is now being revived and treasured as a cultural tradition in Mainland China, these religious practices have grown in Taiwan along with its rise as a modern, economically prosperous, and progressive society. Taiwan shows in full colour its varied and extensive roots, which is vibrantly demonstrated in its ritualistic pageantry and deep-seated ancient religious traditions.

To check out their promo video and learn how to support their trip go to:

http://www.indiegogo.com/spiritmedium