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.

Jeremy Shaw first gained notoriety for dosing his friends with the powerful hallucinogen DMT. He recorded the results for an eight-screen installation that was shown in galleries around the world. His most recent work is a poster campaign in Vancouver that started last March. Since then, 25 different designs have decorated the city’s lamp posts with iconic and infamous imagery from Expo 86.

Andrew Pommier does a lot of things. He skateboards, he listens to T.I., he eats porridge, but most notably he does art. If any of Andrew’s work looks familiar, it’s because it probably is. Though Andrew’s roots are in skateboard art, he has done graphics for a number of different companies from the likes of Adidas to RVCA to Stüssy to Zune, and is also a successful gallery artist. ION recently got to hang out and have a chat with Andrew at his studio.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Norway. With its abundant natural resources, one of the world’s highest standards of living, universal health care and subsidized university education, Norway is a bit like Canada’s smarter, more attractive, Scandinavian cousin. We know that if we just hit the gym a little bit more, maybe learned a new language or two, we might be interesting and popular like Norway—heck, maybe we’d even get to pick a Nobel Prize winner—but we don’t and we resent them for their accomplishments.