#edmontonpubliclibrary

(Working on a section of the Norman Yates mural test install)

For the first time in two-and-a-half years, the Norman Yates mural, currently undergoing an extensive restoration in the Edmonton Arts Council conservation lab, is upright.

In February 2017, the EAC conservation team spent a week at the Stanley A. Milner Library cutting the 160 square-foot artwork from the wall it had adorned for nearly 50 years. Since then, the team has spent months meticulously grinding about three inches of architectural plaster from the back of each panel, then stabilizing each and addressing losses to the edges.

“We are exactly where we wanted to be on the timeline,” says Public Art Conservator Andrea Bowes. “The dry fit stage is complete. That’s when we tested the system we developed for attaching the mural to the wall, saw how well the panels fit together from end to end, and figured out what we need in terms of resources – that’s equipment, people, and time – and how much work we’ll have to do [once we start installing at the renovated library].”

(Most of the Yates mural standing upright)

The latest project milestone is the successful development and testing of the attachment system. It was developed in-house, says Bowes, and should hold the mural in place for at least another 50 years. “We are working with a mechanical and an adhesive system. We have cleats on the back of each panel, which will slot into recipient cleats on the wall. This hanging system will be reinforced with mortar – the cleats will hold everything in place while it dries. It’s very secure – we estimated that we needed to support 10 pounds per square foot, but the actual weight is much less than that, so our system is more than adequate.”

(Detail showing gaps between the panels, which will be filled in when the mural is installed at the Stanley A. Milner Library)

Although upright, the artwork itself is not yet visible as the tissue paper and fish glue facing applied by the team in 2017 is still in place and will remain so until the seams between each panel are assessed and filled. “The paper protects the paint layer so when we fill the areas between the panels, we can take off the excess and not worry about scratches.” After that, the work becomes even more painstaking and laborious. “The filled areas between the panels will be in-painted, integrating them with the intact mural. We have the artist’s original shopping list, so we know what his colour palette was. This is very useful as a starting point to understanding his work. It will be about finesse, patience and the ability to read colours. Luckily Jenika [Sobolewska, Conservation Assistant] is a master at this work.”

(Yates mural in 2017 before the EAC Conservation team removed it from the Stanley A. Milner Library)

Although the work won’t be completed for another six months at least, Bowes feels satisfied as she surveys the work so far. “When we started this in 2017, we weren’t sure what would happen. There was a chance the mural would not be recoverable. [I] had to do a lot of problem solving as the work went along. I’m pretty excited now by all the work over the past two-and-a-half years, that everything we’ve planned will work for us!”

This is the fourth article in a series

Click here for the first article from February 2017. 

Click here for the second chapter from April 2018.

Photo credit: Yulia Skogoreva

This morning, it was announced that Nisha Patel will be the City of Edmonton’s eighth Poet Laureate. 

Nisha Patel is an award-winning Indo-Canadian poet & artist. She is the 2019 Canadian Individual Slam Champion and Edmonton Slam Champion, and a recipient of the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund Award. She is also the Executive Director of the Edmonton Poetry Festival.

Nisha has performed across Canada and the world, sharing her work on multiple tours and international features from Glasgow and Berlin to Seoul. She is also published in two chapbooks, Water and Limited Success. Her poetry speaks to themes of race, feminism, and identity, focusing strongly on her struggles and triumphs as a woman of colour. She strives to build strong relationships, mentorship, and opportunities for artists around her, believing in the possibility and forgiveness of the Edmonton arts scene. She is the former artist in residence at both The Sewing Machine Factory as well as The Nook Cafe.

We chatted with Nisha about her poetry, being appointed Poet Laureate, and what she has in store over her term.

Q: What most excites you about the role of Poet Laureate? A: I’m most excited to find new audiences to work with. It’s been exciting to be an artist in Edmonton because it’s a city that really allows you to experiment. I want to bring those new ideas to a wider audience with my new platform and really uplift people who might not have had the opportunity to access poetry or literary arts before. 

Q: What has your journey as a poet and an artist been like so far? A: I started writing almost five years ago when I graduated from the University of Alberta. I have a Bachelor of Commerce, not an arts degree. I spent a summer living on a First Nations reserve up north and I found the experience very moving and I started writing poetry while I was on this reserve. When I came back to Edmonton I looked for a community to share it with almost immediately because I really enjoy the social aspect of art. I found the Breath in Poetry Collective and started competing in poetry slams and I came up in the poetry slam community and now I’m writing and performing full time. 

Q: You’re the new Executive Director of the Edmonton Poetry Festival. Why was that opportunity exciting to you? A: I love event planning and on the best and worst days I’m the person who gets to give opportunities to poets to have their work heard. This is one of the best jobs you can have in the poetry world. 

Q: What are some projects you’re hoping to take on as Poet Laureate? A: I want to invest quite a bit of time into mentorship. Mentorship is something this city thrives on in the business community, and I think we should treat art the same way. Art is work, art is a commitment people have made, and we should honour that by offering them the same opportunities for development as we would any other profession. I’m also excited to have deep learning workshops and hosting them both in-person and online to reduce any barriers to entry so that anyone who is serious about improving their craft can really access those opportunities. I’m also just excited to perform for new audiences in the city. 

Q: You had done a mentorship residency at The Nook earlier this year, can you share more about that? A: Having a residency in a physical location that the public frequented meant that that location became a place for our profession. Poets started treating The Nook as a place to gather as a side effect of my residency there, so more people started to frequent The Nook as a business and as a performance venue in the city and that’s helped to establish a reputation for The Nook. Personally, it helped me grow very, very quickly into a role where I teach others. 

Q: Your chapbook, Limited Success, is in its second printing. How has your work evolved since its publication? A: I called it Limited Success because when it was published (May 2018) I felt like I had achieved a limited amount of success but I was still really happy with the amount of progress I had made. It was also a farewell to a style of writing I had become really comfortable with. Since then my work has evolved to take on very deep and complicated meditations on the stories of my life and the topics that I encounter every day. Themes like being queer or being a person of colour or being an immigrant now take on additional layers of complexity that I hadn’t been able to explore through the medium of spoken word before. 

Q: How would you describe Edmonton’s arts community? A: The Edmonton arts and poetry communities are so forgiving, if you have an idea and you want to go through with it and it doesn’t work out, there’s always an opportunity to try something else or try again. I find in other arts communities there can be a lot of competition, but Edmonton is a community that really wants to grow together and pull everyone up along with them so you’re not leaving anyone behind. 

(Artists Sergio Serrano [left] and Alexander Stewart [right] with one of the sculptures for their Capilano Library public artwork)

Libraries are radical, say Edmonton artists Sergio Serrano and Alexander Stewart. Caught during the final stages of fabrication for their as-yet-untitled artwork for Capilano Library, the duo dove into a spirited discussion of their project, which connects people, data, technology, and visual art to tell a nuanced story of the Capilano community. The piece will be installed over the coming weeks, suspending more than 10 abstract objects, sourced from the neighbourhoods surrounding the library, in the facility’s community room and common area.

“That radical idea comes from the current global conversation about access to information and democratized tools,” says Stewart, “Libraries are also going through a technological shift becoming maker spaces. So, anyone can go in and access any type of information or tool. We wanted to talk about the Capilano community within that context, and that conversation has driven the process all the way through”.

(A selection of the sculptures that will be part of the Capilano Library public art installation)

Capilano community members were invited to bring valued objects to workshops facilitated by the artists who collected data about each item. In keeping with the maker space concept, the artists then worked with participants to create 3D scans of their object using readily available technology such as freeware and cellphone apps. “As artists working with the community, we didn’t want to access any tools that would be beyond the means of anyone living there,” says Serrano. “That’s why we used apps that people could get on their phone. The idea is that when you see the artwork, you can think that this is something you can do yourself, and we’ll share all the information we’ve gathered as a way of giving back to the community.”

In the end, Serrano and Stewart scanned about 200 objects or pieces of data. That number shrank to +/- 14 as they worked to determine which pieces would be most representative of themes, and which would become part of the final artwork. To map connections and stories, the artists organized the images and metadata into spreadsheets, then fed them through a Markov machine learning system, (https://towardsdatascience.com/introduction-to-markov-chains-50da3645a50d) which created an image map connecting the objects through commonalities of theme, materiality, sentiment, and story.

(One of the image maps generated by the artists of objects brought to the Capilano Library public art workshops - courtesy of of the artists)

The process allowed the artists to extrapolate feelings of value from specific items like religious symbols, and find the sentimental undercurrents that linked them with less specific objects evoking the same themes. “There’s the commonality of people going to Disneyland or even the Bahamas and bringing home a souvenir,” explains Stewart. “That became representative of a time and place, a set of values linked with connection to family as well as geography”.

(This china figurine represents a myriad of emotions, beliefs and memories)

“We also tried to balance the different ways people represent sentiment,” continues Serrano. “There’s the commercial industrial angle – an object has deep meaning for the person who brought it in, but there are also thousands of clones around the world because the object came off a conveyor belt. You also have things that are knitted by hand or made by a child in an art class. We also looked at concepts that are very ancient like the geometry of a seashell and the development of eons of slow change. We found exciting connections and contrasts in the data we pulled out to resolve the final set of objects.”

(A fidget spinner will be part of the final artwork)

Two of the objects selected for the final artwork are a toque and a fidget spinner. “Those objects seem completely unrelated,” says Stewart. “But the ties between them are quite close. The toque was brought in by one of the Girl Guides we did a session with. It was converted from an old sweater by her grandmother and given to her. The fidget spinner was given by a granddaughter to her grandmother because she liked it. Both are gifts from one generation to another.”

(Larger than life - Alexander Stewart with the giant lobster claw sculpture)

Serrano says unpredictability also informed the creative process. “The lobster claw was unexpected! It came from one of the seniors’ residences we went to, and it’s one of a pair brought here from the East coast. The claws are huge and were kept because they are beautiful objects. There’s a materiality that expresses strength and fragility, like some of the delicate ceramics we saw.”

“The cowboy hat is interesting because it represents a specific object story from the library itself,” continues Stewart. “Essentially the library became a person with a story. There’s a patron who is there every day and is quite a tall man who always wears a cowboy hat, so you can see him as he walks through the stacks with this hat that bobs through and over the books. One of the librarians was talking about the project and told him he had to participate. He said he didn’t know what to bring so they said, ‘you should just scan your hat!’ The object is iconic, but also very specific.”

(Sculpture of a toque brought to a workshop by a Girl Guide)

Working representationally meant that the artists weren't concerned with creating minutely accurate models of the objects. The artwork’s themes and meaning are not necessarily dependent upon the physical objects say Serrano and Stewart, because the artwork’s story lies within the initial community-based concept and the process that generated the final form. “I do feel like the community engagement and workshops are more the art than the objects,” notes Serrano.  “The objects are almost like a documentation after the fact.”

Stewart continues: “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a moving, breathing human being is a million. We had this great task of reducing all those millions of words down into something very open to interpretation while also containing all that information. The artwork is not like a list at the back of a book, it’s more like a collection of stories that create a single tone. We found those tones or threads and pulled on them to realize the concept we were working toward.”

The Capilano Library Grand Opening is Friday, November 23 at 10:30am. The library is located at 9915 67 Street.

We’ll post more stories about the Capilano Library public art as the artists proceed with installation.

If you’re interested in exploring the world of DIY 3D scanning, here are the free applications used by the artists in their workshops.

TRNIO - app based photogrammetry

Photoscan (published by Agisoft)

Reality Capture (ultimately used for the bulk of our scans)