Interviews

Icelanders are a rare bunch, and with a population just over 300,000, their global profile betrays their modest numbers. Said to be the most literate people in the world, they are a nation of over-achievers, but in recent years, the little green island’s capacity for the exceptional has been smothered under a blanket of disaster.

SUPER FURIE ANIMALS

David Choe is someone you should get to know as he’s one of the most talented artists around. His work can be seen in galleries all over the world, Facebook headquarters, the White House and alleyways behind convenience stores. He recently released a 288-page monograph with Chronicle Books that needs to be checked out for the introduction alone (it consists of disses he found by Googling “David Choe”).

Toronto artist Vladimir Kato is an animator by day and a glorious painter by any-other-time-of-the-day. Vladimir’s twisted and hilarious creations include concepts from the far reaches of his mind such as R-rated movies and dark-humoured Italian comics. Luckily, he keeps some of that stuff out of his animation work, as he works on a lot of childrens’ programs. Recently I had a chance to chat with him following his most recent solo art show, titled Wilderness.

Montreal-based painter Jonathan Bergeron has spent many years working under the celebrated moniker of Johnny Crap, but it’s a name he is no longer content with. As he moves further and further away from the graffiti and poster art world to focus more specifically on painting for gallery shows and such, the stigma attached to Johnny Crap does not bode well with potential buyers and gallerists alike.

Justin Gradin makes Vancouver a more interesting place. He runs Cassette or Die, an anachronistic micro label that only releases music on cassette. He fronts the band Random Cuts, a rock outfit where two of the band’s members are mannequins. And for years he ran The Emergency Room, a now defunct studio, jam space and venue that was a hub for this city’s weird punk music scene.

Vancouver-based artist the dark (aka Devitt Brown) has had many evolutions over the course of his career, changing mediums from stencils to posters, oil pastels, photography and more. He has spent years as one of this city’s most impressive and consistent street artists and has shown at many contemporary fine art galleries both at home and internationally. Throughout these transitions the dark has maintained a strong and immediately identifiable through line to his work.

When Brian Donnelly titled his most recent show “Blasphemies, Monstrosities and other Perversions,” he was bound to start some dialogue. Factor in his actual artwork, which consists mostly of large portraits of nude people with animal heads, and you’ll have more dialogue than a Tarantino movie. This young Toronto painter’s relationship with his work is complex in reception and creation, which can often lead to polarized audience reactions—sometimes intrigue, sometimes disgust, sometimes both.

Perched above that little slab of Main Street where Mount Pleasant greets the Downtown Eastside, a young man is working (and drinking) industriously amid a camp of artists known as the Cartalera Talent House. It is here in his ghoulish grotto that Danny Vermette awakens the misunderstood souls of a paradise lost: creatures furry, frozen and towering as high as eight feet. Danny conceptualizes and crafts larger-than-life creatures, then, when they have reached maturity, releases them into the wild.