The Eastside Culture Crawl is like having a party and having no idea who’s going to show up. It’s not so weird a concept for artists in buildings housing many studios, but the intimacy factor shoots up when walking into somebody’s house.
“But there’s no intimidation,” said artist John Dann, a first time participant in the Crawl whose enthusiasm shows in his preparation alone. The living room of the Strathcona home (which actually belongs to daughter Cristina) resembled an actual gallery with black sheets of paper carefully covering every inch of wall and window, with Dann’s detailed and layered paintings created by aging with a grinder which viewers were encouraged to touch if they wanted.
“I really like people but not the pretension of art,” said Dann who handed out information sheets to Crawlers outlining his disdain for traditional galleries and museums: how entrance fees, security guards, and surveillance cameras are not conducive to one’s “spiritual artistic encounter” and how the Eastside Culture Crawl is a good thing for art as it provides accessibility and community.
Safe to say, both daughter and father had no qualms about opening the doors to strangers during the annual Crawl this past Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but for others such as Kathleen Murphy it took some time to get used to.
Up steep concrete stairs, Murphy’s Union Street character home living room was set up to showcase her classic ceramics made with high fire stoneware and porcelain clays. It’s the 17th year for the Crawl, and Murphy has opened her front door for 14 of those years.
“It can get overwhelming because it is your home,” she said while tallying up a sale of a small red vase. “I’m used to it now but once in a while people bring their dogs in and it gets a little hectic.”
Resident studio dogs don’t tend to love the Crawl so much. Photographer and artist Ross Den Otter of Pink Monkey Studios, which he runs with his wife Sarolta Dobi, had to dash to a relative’s to drop off Macchi, a shiba inu, whose brain was evidently going to explode from not being able to defend his territory from the onslaught of Crawlers.
Pink Monkey is a converted garage with polished concrete floors and white walls, separate from the couple’s living space so Den Otter says the Crawl is no intrusion. In fact, he prefers it to a traditional gallery show for the simple reason that he’s able to converse with people all day long about his processes. “I like the fact that I get to talk more.”
The Eastside Culture Crawl not only gives sculptor Sandra Bilawich a deadline, but also relief from the hours of isolation toiling in her studio located in an lonely industrial neighbourhood. “I make a lot of dust and noise so I’m wearing ear protection, eye protection — I’m in a little cocoon,” she said while two people in two minutes interrupted to ask about an owl sculpture made out of Remington typewriter parts perched on a shelf in her living room (it had sold hours previous).
Going from weeks of isolation to three days of thick crowds in her house is a welcome extreme for Bilawich who said she enjoys witnessing reactions to her art. “It can be an overwhelming amount of people but I enjoy people and I enjoy seeing how my work affects people. Sometimes there are these wonderful experiences that happen by opening your door and letting somebody come through, there are these wonderful stories.
“When I sell a piece in a gallery I don’t actually get to see why somebody bought it. Did it buy them because it moved them? When I sell things in my house, I hear things like a sculpture of mine reminding somebody of their grandmother who had passed away.”
