Steven Hubert

Let’s talk about your latest exhibition, Basketball, Pickle, Router, Horse. It’s a wild combination of iconography, not because the objects are inherently wild, but because they take on this odd, funny internal logic when they’re brought together. Why these four figures? To state an obvious point, the four objects function as supports for the chair-table used to view the paintings, but they also reappear inside the paintings.

SH. The iconography isn’t necessarily planned but emerges mostly from formal concerns, like trying to balance a composition or heighten a narrative. I think that’s what makes the internal logic funny in a way, at least to me, because I don’t set out to make a basketball painting but then again there’s all this orange colour to deal with. Or its cumulative, like I had written a paragraph from a snake’s perspective over here, and then I see I’ve got something of a hill that the snake might live in. And then the snake needs friends so I add more snakes. But all the time I’m asking, “why snakes?” Surely everything you can think of doesn’t deserve a fully realized picture? Maybe it’s just the things you can focus on for long enough until they get encoded in long term memory. As for the bench, well because this is a fairly conventional show of paintings on the wall, I wanted to make a bench for viewing— (and you’d be surprised how popular that’s been! People love to sit at galleries). Then you think, what’s the most appropriate bench for this show in particular? Why it’s one that carries forward elements in the paintings into ever more useful places—in this case legs that can support the weight of sitting. 

AW. How would you describe your painting style — collage, montage, something else? You’ve mentioned elsewhere, quoting a common saying, “paint what you know” (an extension of that thought is that a lot of what you know — not exactly everything — is in these paintings). In that sense, these works feel as though you are also painting everything. I find that refreshing. How do you think about that expansiveness in your work?

SH. It’s maybe less “paint what you know” and more “first idea best idea”—a la Kippenberger—but of course my first idea is probably something I’m going to know about! And care about. The expansiveness you’re sensing might come from me trying to keep an open mind about the painting for as long as possible, while I’m painting it, until the decisions finally start to close in. 

The process is something like this: I begin slowly with just a few dashes here and there. It probably looks abstract, a blob, some little lines. Then, as I keep adding bits and pieces to the painting, I’ll look for a space, a scene, a story slice to emerge, so I’m thinking montage is the better term for these paintings than collage, in the sense that I’m building a cohesive world more than making deliberate juxtapositions. 

AW. One painting I loved from the show is flower smeller. It’s beautiful! The light washes of pigment create an atmospheric field, and then the figures appear as if by apparition, the floating heads, the dog, the flower smeller, and what looks like a UFO in the top register (although it is probably not). The heads feel as though they emerge from the painting, but then they appear as if they were slipping away again. Can we talk about the process here? 

SH. I think this painting is a clear example of the process I’m talking about. Those atmospheric shapes and washes are me putting something down just to get going and then noticing a certain kind of scene emerging. I’ve painted the motif of someone smelling a flower before and some of the marks were forming into a flower shape with a head nearby. If objects and things appear and then slip away I think I’ve done it right. Ideally I’d like the painting to be both a picture of a scene and also a collection of marks in the process of forming the picture. The slightly ridiculous dog head was the last thing I put in there and I think the reason it works, even though it goes a bit overboard, is that nebulous hazy bottom edge of yellow and olive green that forms the horizon and messes with the scale of everything (like Redon’s Cyclops). And the shadow that extends only from the dog’s nose. There’s just enough air in that line.

AW. I have two questions that might seem broad. First, does this way of working begin to form a theory of painting for you? More specifically, does it shape how you think about what painting is — what it’s trying to be, what it can say, where it might be going, and the possibilities or capacities it holds?

SH. Paintings have this multi-valent life: they live in the mind and body of the painter, as an artifact for the viewer, as one possible answer to a conversation with other painters past and present, possibly as a comment for historians and theorists to unpack. I’ll ignore the commodity angle for a second. But there’s another very simple way that painting exists for me, and that’s as a way to picture something that can’t be seen any other way. Before cameras etc. a painting offered a way to glimpse someplace faraway. Or in a religious context, for better or worse, they spoke of a spiritual or cosmic reality in place of words. With painting you can rejoin this pre-modern sensibility if you want to. It’s time-travelling. You can look forward toward new possibilities by going backwards. So maybe I tend to come at this question from more of a historical/literary perspective. Maybe less of an overarching theory in this case. But maybe the various theories and arguments for painting combine to make this dense network that comes to life when you sit around with friends and riff across history, art, music, trends, whatever. I’m not overly romantic about the past but I do like the realm of pre-digital slippage that painting, as a mode of knowing, and interacting with, the world, has come to embody for me. Most of my adolescence is from before the internet, so everything was conversational, and unverifiable.  Rhetoric and hearsay.

AW. Building on that, does this approach begin to develop a theory of knowledge or of experience — a way of knowing the world through painting?

SH. One thought I have is the perhaps unique way that the process of painting can be an instrument for thinking in real time. It’s a thinking that leaves a trace (so maybe not totally unique since this also sounds a bit like writing?) But also, even if you’re not an action painter, painting can be quite physical too—standing, moving around, going out for some wine, calling your mom. But it’s still always there, a puzzle that waits. You can reach inward and move outward simultaneously. The kind of painting you get comes from your state of being mixed with your understanding of painting itself: its traditions, its techniques and materials, its subjects, the full spectrum of what’s good and bad from different times. For my state of mind, it’s, “how porous can I be, can I get out of my own way, can I take this chance, can I be extremely present, slow down, speed up. But then as a student of painting myself I’m carried away by how other painters would do it or think about it. I’m interested in trying out this kind of knowledge—the kind where you are open to the trip but you’re not just tripping out. Am I describing art therapy? A little bit but not entirely, since I am looking out more than in. And I’m also asking the painting itself to tell me a little more about itself!

In looking at the work of others I’m also learning something about the world. Maybe more! I’m most impressed by works I cannot immediately understand. Maybe I wonder, “why does this exist?” “What’s the background?” And I won’t even look for the answer because I am beholding a mystery. I get great joy from the non sequitur. Too often I have been let down by the explanation.  

AW. One of the questions you ask in your gallery write-up is: Why these pictures? Why now? I suppose the answer to that question comes from an elaborate anecdote you provide in the write-up, which is staged as an interview, where you mention the A&B Sound CD buy-back program. In a strange twist, you imagined that they housed their bought-back CDs in a warehouse in Calgary, and only later, through a conversation with an A&B Sound worker, you found out that they did, in fact, have a warehouse in Calgary.

Again, when you are asked in the interview about this coincidence, you offer another story, this time about how a computer mouse can function like a Ouija board — a device through which unseen forces seem to guide the hand. You relate this back to another painting of yours, An Invisible Force Works Upon a Person Who Computes in Public, where these ideas converged before you thought of them. 

You answer the question — Why these pictures? Why now? — by providing a story of circulatity and serendipity. Can we pose the question again: Why these pictures? Why now? 

SH. Oh dear—after I wrote that I realized some people might be pretty annoyed that no real answer is given! That text had more to do with my process than my destination. So bait and switch (so clever!). But also I think every artist should be asking “why this, why now?” So let me try to elaborate.  We’ve heard that art should give a nod to the past while suggesting a path forward so that it’s both recognizable and novel at the same time. This makes the artwork generous to the viewer, by playing into their expectations on some level, while also challenging them and maybe just giving them a prick of excitement or surprise. But maybe this formula is not enough? The past/present juxtaposition strategy, by itself, feels a bit “1+1=0”. So to circle back to my last answer, I guess I would define a “now” painting as one that has these two criteria out the corner of one eye, but also sets out to explore, by its own idiosyncratic set of rules, or postures, concerns from within its own internal framework. And if there is a bigger non-painting theme, like identity or politics or social constructs or the environment, or the apocalypse, it still plays games according to its own unique formal and material milieu.

I love to see a painting where the artist was really paying attention to choices along the way, and seems elastic to these changes. Maybe takes a detour along the way. Sometimes thick, sometimes thin, sometimes one thing, sometimes another. And it should look fun. Or like the artist had fun doing it. You can always tell when I painter felt like what they were doing was a chore. 

AW. Let’s talk about some of your specific paintings: Trouble in Wordsworth Country — what’s the trouble?!? The disembodied heads haunting the landscape? The dark mood? The ruined structure? 

SH. That’s supposed to be a wormhole through which Wordsworth himself has appeared in a faraway land! Definitely did not set out with that in mind. But now I must admit something: I’m not well-travelled. Meg and I were always too broke or in school or having kids to ever go anywhere. I’ve joked before that I’m very much a regional artist. And this was back when artists were supposed to be nomads! Anyways, here I had in mind the Wordsworth poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles from Tintern Abbey”. But in this case a few miles away turns out to be all the way to Morocco, maybe? When they weren’t talking about Truth in Nature, those romantics (and maybe artists in general from this colonial period) had as their subject the exotic “out there”. So maybe that impulse is the trouble I am talking about!

AW. Snakes Appearing at Dusk immediately brought to mind the idea that twilight (or dusk) is the time when things happen in a painting. I’m thinking of the 19th-century scholar Brian Woolf, who wrote about the American painter, John Quidor, and how so many scenes unfold at the edge of the woods, in the darker recesses of the forest. At first, I actually thought the snakes in your painting were worms, as though you were tapping into a type of “bog formalism” that has surfaced in recent Vancouver art (Rebecca Brewer, Vanessa Brown, Michelle Helene Mackenzie), but then I realized they were snakes, which I guess doesn’t rule out the bog-like quality of the work. 

SH. A ha snakes and worms are not the same! But yes that painting is pretty murky. Actually, we have a Laura Piasta watercolour at home made with bog water and I look at it all the time. My bog sensibility is maybe closer to amateur water feature maker? Which I fear may situate me slightly closer to irony on the irony-authenticity spectrum. And then nocturnes are another thing, not only for the spooky edge of woods quality, but as a way to use a limited colour palette that happens to occur naturally at night. But to get back to water features, especially ones near a cave, this is perennial territory for me. Liquids and solids, near to each other but not mixed together, and natural formations that are closer to architecture. Bog is the primordial ooze to my hardened clay cliffside with pool bubbling up from an aquifer.

AW. Fame is a hall of mirrors, for some.  Is this where the pickle comes in? Full on display like some stone monolith, illuminated under the bright lights of fame? Infinitely reflected in what looks like a hall of mirrors, or what?! 

SH. Once again I certainly did not set out to paint a pickle! And maybe it isn’t a pickle. Or it is closer to becoming a pickle in that bench than in the painting. The preparatory painting was a 4”x4” tile I made for our kitchen, so at that size the green was just a paint blob. And the recurrent horizons were these quick gestures I drew to put pressure on the blob, which led to more green blobs like echoes and as a way to distribute that green through repetition. But the blob as a character is quite imposing so I made it facing away from us, which is where the stage-like quality came from, and eventually lights and a piano. These embellishments are on the verge of going too far though. The keyboard is almost too obvious. But I wanted to push myself to live with it. Sometimes I’d rather be embarrassing than cool. 

AW. If we stay with the iconography for a moment, there’s a larger conversation unfolding among some of your contemporaries and colleagues. I’m thinking of the wackier, far-out side of Vancouver art. Perhaps a good example comes by way of that great Belkin exhibition, The Last Waves, by Tamara Henderson and Kasper Feyrer from a few years back. There’s a wild, associative cosmology in that way of working that is close to yours — personal, intuitive, and drawn from everyday life, dreamy, yet never quite surrealist exactly. When these elements are combined, they take on an otherworldly charge. Could you say something about this mode of working, and why it now feels like it has a distinctly Vancouver feel now?

SH. I wonder if it is unique to Vancouver, or maybe the west coast? But I’ll attempt to connect, perhaps foolishly, utopian 70s spirituality, the human potential movement, authenticity/irony debates, late modernist formalism (postmodernism?), The Vancouver School (still?), OOO, and the internet. 

The model for this kind of working could be the bog, as you mentioned, which contains all things, ancient forgotten things, or new things that have melted down and joined the ancient things. This is the field of precognitive potential that could evolve into something, anything, even the hybrid monstrosity of The Thing.  Or the field could be like T.S. Eliot’s pantheon of literature, but maybe the great western writers have been replaced with outdated technology. Or the field is non-hierarchical, or consciousness expanding in various ways, or like the (not just) political form of the arcades in Benjamin. 

In The Last Waves there is something so relatable, and silly, like a coffee shop, and then the whole things opens up into a wow state. I feel such joy when I look at Kasper Freyer’s work. There’s the poetical activities and arcane processes. Tangents. Research that doesn’t “look” like research. Abundance with restraint. Mysterious associations. You could say it’s about elevating the mundane, but what isn’t? It’s the specific “aboutness” of these works that is blurry. You could even ask, why?  It seems so earnest about something that should be ironic but is not, to my mind, presented as such. 

So maybe there’s this set of associations, individual to each person, that act as points on a scaffolding. And maybe the scaffolding is form. The form could be borrowed from formalism, or Aristotle for that matter. Or a found form (like a coffee shop). Or psychological evaluations. Or geologic time. The form could even be pop cultural maybe. But only as a structure. In contrast the subject must be specific and even personal. Pop culture itself is too basic to be a subject. Identity is only the tip of the iceberg. (Is it too soon to say this?) For me the spirit of each work should be contiguous with its unfolding form, should have rigorous processes involved, material choices that are intrinsic to meaning, things appearing as enthusiastic experiments by a fan of art, things that make it hard to distinguish between good and bad unless you know what to look for. Is it intentional or an accident? Eschewing clarity in favour of being on a trip that led you down a road that is actually kind of hard to explain. The subject is deep and unclear. 

I’m making it sound complicated but maybe it’s simple: show don’t tell.

I mentioned The Vancouver School off the top. I’ve heard the current milieu articulated as a corrective to the over-theorized/interpretive framework erected by Vancouver’s greatest export. (I’ve also learned from artists of that time that they did this work of interpretation mainly because no one else was there to do it.) Also I’m not sure the move away from interpretation/clarity is unique to Vancouver anyways. But The Vancouver School was context for the aughts when I went to school here. And it might even be responsible for the “look of research” you see in Vancouver as, in a way, its own form or aesthetic. But the knowledge flowing through that “research look” is esoteric, outside the canon, occultic, but still controlled. 

AW. Speaking of Vancouver, could we reflect on your experience in art school? A huge chunk of your life has been spent in art school. First at Langara, no? Then at Emily Carr? And then returning to Langara as a professor. In a separate conversation, I was just speaking with Rebecca Brewer, and she mentioned being at school with you at both institutions. When I think about Rebecca’s work alongside yours, there seems to be a revived interest in painting. How would you historicize this trajectory, both within your own work and within Vancouver more generally? How do you think about painting as an advanced art?

Although they might not be stated outright, there are different sub-schools of painting in Vancouver. One might think of the hard-edged painting of Neil Campbell, or the more observational style of Elizabeth McIntosh or Ben Reeves (I’m thinking of Emily Carr professors in particular), though now McIntosh is also adopting a harder-edged style. Where do you see yourself fitting into this landscape? What do you feel you learned at school? What lessons have stayed with you, and which ones have you carried forward?

SH. In 2003, when I started school, I was under the mistaken impression that painting was dead. So I decided to paint because I thought it would be very uncool! Right away though the VAG put on a big painting group show that included the teachers you just mentioned. And then there was that Barry Schwabsky essay at the beginning of Vitamin: P that described the triumph of painting and how all forms of painting were now simultaneously acceptable and so on. So I guess I should have started painting earlier! So when I started school at Langara I was taking every studio course—painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, media (not ceramics for some reason)—and they all kind of melted together. I’ve heard from many Langarans that taking all the studio areas at once is what made them a post-medium-yet-still-studio-based artist and I can certainly relate to that. You got to try everything there.

When I switched to Emily Carr I noticed gestures were en vogue—poetical materializations of a thought process that seemed to fit my thinking too. Although perhaps better with my non-painting activities—like sculpture or media. Some students were certainly exploring painting more conceptually, in material or optical ways, but I always kept painting separate for some reason, as a picture making exercise. I was not an abstractionist, and proudly so! Or I was annoyingly contrarian? I was, and to some extent continue to be, a bit pre-modern about painting. And I think that’s because my imagination was formed primarily through history and literature—the two things that got me really excited after high school. I took art history courses before I painted very much. 

So because of this I think my best early work was in other areas. All my first shows involved sculpture, video, drawing, photography. Never painting. Even when I did my first painting show at CSA, which was well-received I think, someone told me it would have to be my last painting show, and I think that’s because I might have presented the show as “painting” instead of just owning it. I think I was nervous. I wasn’t sure where my more intuitive paintings fit in. They didn’t seem rigorous because they weren’t self-referencing enough or something: they weren’t preconceived and then executed. Now I can see I work in an equally plausible area of painting: the picture zone. And maybe that’s the oldest reason of all to paint! 

It’s interesting to note the impact of all these teachers you mentioned. At Langara it was Lesley Finlayson who taught me to see, work quickly without judgement. And to always paint over the best parts of a painting so you don’t get stuck. She took Rebecca and I on en plein air field trips. Any evidence of drawing in my paintings I can trace back to her. Neil Campbell had a big impact on many in my cohort, especially the ones who went abstract or optical. I would sometimes paint a good neo-geo abstraction which once prompted some devotees of Neil Campbell, and Peter Schuyff, to encourage me to abandon representational painting. So I guess I dug in of course. But the upshot was that I unfortunately avoided Neil Campbell’s classes, which was actually pretty dumb since I could have learned so much from him. I had Elizabeth MacIntosh and Ben Reeves at the same time and it was so cool to hear their different takes on things. Formalist but from different sides. Colour, contrast, and composition were big. And scale. Because of them I still think formally before anything else. Even though they are certainly not merely formalists. “Aboutness”, to the extent that it matters, always emerges from form. Which reminds me of another painting teacher I had who was not a painting teacher at all: Liz Magor. She made you think about when painting is even necessary and, if you’re using paint, how to make it intrinsic to the process and not merely illustrative. Or maybe this doesn’t need to be a painting, please! 

AW. You teach at Langara, but you’re also involved in the project space at 4277 Fraser Street, now called People, previously DUPLEX. First off, why the name change? I’m interested in these spaces that have appeared across Vancouver over the past decade — Sunset Terrace, Liquidation World, 221A — studios that double as exhibition sites, places to show works-in-progress or work that doesn’t quite fit in elsewhere. In my opinion, some of the best work in the city take place in these contexts. There’s a real DIY, or maybe Do-It-Together ethos, a sense of mutual support.

These spaces seem to cultivate a new kind of artist-run culture outside the traditional artist-run spaces, many of which—still important, of course—have become more bureaucratic and increasingly dependent on Canada Council funding, now structured around directors, curators, boards, and the broader machinery of professionalization. These newer spaces emerge partly out of necessity, but also from a need to simply showcase work, even as many of the people involved are graduates of Emily Carr, SFU, and UBC.

Why do you think these spaces are emerging now? What conditions are producing them, and what kinds of encounters do they make possible?

SH. First the name change: (sorry a bit convoluted) 4277 Fraser, where I am, came a few years before Duplex and had no gallery. Just studios. Then the folks from Avenue moved in to the building next door to 4277 and it became Duplex because there were two identical buildings side by side (along with the establishment of the gallery on their side.) When this “second half” of Duplex was renovicted they moved to the current location of Duplex down on Victoria and took the name Duplex with them. 4277 Fraser went back to just studios. People (4277 Fraser) began in fall of 2024 when Jordan Milner decided to sublet his studio back to a group of us who all share the rent for the space. So people gallery is actually Jordan’s old studio…

With people we just have a google calendar that you can sign up for to host a one-night event, put on a 2 week show, or set up a crit with all the members. There is no curatorial oversight, meetings, grant writing, nothing. It’s more of a coop under the control of 10 people who all pay the same amount: $30 each. Many of us have been on boards or been part of funded spaces and honestly the focus of people has been to just trust each other and see where it goes. And there’s been some great stuff with much more to come!

People, Duplex, Liquidation World, Sunset Terrace and others are maybe what ARCs used to be like. DIY spaces with less oversight and freedom from the drudgery of organizing a more official space. ARCs are bound by restrictive funding structures with many boxes to check. But of course they contribute so much. But yes, the experience seems to be that the moment you go for non-profit status and apply for grants, many more hoops need to be jumped through and every decision you make, curatorial or otherwise, becomes the object of scrutiny. 

So you can see the appeal of diy spaces, especially for artists who have their own work to think about, and also usually have other jobs. And their own grants to apply for! I think the work is great, still very rigorous and attuned, but also precarious, cheeky, experimental. With topics that are not necessarily easy to sum up. You can afford some of that mystery I keep talking about. And they are, as you say, super important to the community.

AW. You’ve spoken about your affinity with Winifred Nicholson, especially her still lifes and window paintings. I see those echoes most clearly in your smaller works. How do you feel you’ve taken up her vision — extended it, adapted it, or maybe even refined it? There’s also an excavation of modern art in your work that can tilt into something wilder, as in Still Life Finds Echo in Redon’s Cyclops. How do you see these references at play in your work?

SH. My introduction to Winifred Nicholson came from Lesley Finlayson, our instructor at Langara, who I mentioned earlier. I love how you can see the brush stroke in objects. The objects and the strokes are almost interchangeable, to which I ascribe a beautiful economy of effort. The light is special and observed, but you never feel like it’s for some cheap visual effect. Material and vision happen at the same time. She was part of a group called the Seven and Five Society, in 1920s England, who started out espousing traditional values, stating that certain modern painting styles went too far. I love that they were willing to go only so far! Cubism is too far! Eventually they moved on but this early conservative moment, making pictures of observable things and places, struck me as a crucial subject matter for painting. And such an arbitrary limit, which seems funny to me. At the same time though I’m into something a little different: I work from pictures that are fully imagined which I guess means I’m trying to apply the same painterly sensibility to things that cannot be immediately observed. How will I do it? Because I have all these limitations. I’m not really good at transcribing what I see in my mind onto the canvas. For example, when Rebecca saw that painting of all the horses converging on a point she thought they were aardvarks. So how do I paint it like I’m looking at it? Like Winifred Nicholson? I don’t know. Maybe it’s more the feeling I’m trying to convey that maybe it was seen somehow, because of this shadow or that very specific detail. Redon’s Cyclops is a touchstone for me because of the scale change in the cyclops. It’s huge. Or is the whole world just a model? Who’s in charge? But it looks more real than surrealist painting. Like someone was painting en plein air and a cyclops happened to walk by.

AW. Let’s talk about your sculptures. There was that whole contraption with the ski boot, smoke, a pool, and a door, all connected together. A lot of this material is cobbled together from found materials gathered from an alleyway, but there’s also something distinctly sculptural about the work — like the large head blowing into the tube, the tube moving through the piping to reach the boot and the e-cigarette. Some of your new sculptures exhibit this same cobbled-together quality, but they’re also working objects, mechanical contraptions. It almost feels as though sculpture, for you, needs to be something that is operational. 

Of course, this operational logic is not at play in one of the City of Vancouver’s greatest public artworks (although it no longer exists) — the moment when you added an extra zero to the centenary sculpture 100 at Granville Loop. If you have time, could you also address the production and reception of that sculpture as well?

SH. My sculptures come from assembling a variety of unrelated parts into a system. As you said, from things I find in the alleys and modify to some degree. And other parts that I fabricate from wood, clay, building materials, electronics, and so on. But I gess you could say I like to start with something I find. No nothing. Some received form. Then, I want the sculpture to appear to function for some unknowable reason. That’s because I want my choices to seem more than merely aesthetic—they must appear to also provide a function—to be for something. Maybe there’s the latent industrial designer in me? They are made of assembled parts, modular, in part because I need to take them apart after to store them. Another practical non-aesthetic aspect! But I find sculpture to be endlessly diverting with so many possibilities. I have wished before for a gymnasium-sized room to work in for a year where there are hundreds of modules all looking like something important and like nothing at all that recycle a thousand parts of things that are only somewhat recognizable. Maybe someday I’ll do this in a barn somewhere. Or maybe I’ll just start somewhere outdoors in a secret corner of Everett Crowley park (by where we live). The park is built atop the original Vancouver city dump and I guess my sculpture would be a displaced realization of what lies beneath?

Such a project would be only my second public artwork, the first being the addition of the ‘0’ to the 100 sculpture. The ‘0’ was my perfect public sculpture for Vancouver: at once looking backwards (this land goes back further than 100 years!) and forward (what will be here in 1000 years?) 

I was looking at the 100 one day and thought all these things at once. And the follow up thought was: why don’t I make another 0? So I measured it all out (8 feet tall, 5 feet wide, 4 feet deep) and made a faux, hollow concrete 0 with plywood, 2x4’s, plaster finish and paint. Then I built a platform to extend the existing platform to fit with the natural grade of the hillside. A group including myself, Meg, and Steve Bedard, rented a Uhaul truck and took it over there in the middle of the night and set it up just as the sun was rising. Then it stayed there for around 3 months before someone from the city apparently noticed. A friend, Sean Arden, lived across the street at the time and noticed some city workers checking it out and went over and talked to them. He said they thought it was really cool but now they had to take it down. Sean sent me an amazing photo of the 3 workers each posing in one of the 3 0’s. I haven’t done another public work since. Maybe I would if it weren’t for all the hoops you have to jump through. And the sometimes dubious politics! 

AW. Lastly, part of the book I’m writing looks at the crossover between visual art and music in Vancouver, particularly within the ambient and experimental scenes. You’ve had a hand in these worlds as well, though perhaps more from an art-rock position. Do you have any final thoughts on how these two disciplines intersect, overlap, or inform one another?

SH. When I think about the Vancouver art scene and the more experimental and ambient sound projects I’ve heard at places like Deep Blue, I think there’s a lot of overlap for sure. There’s something about the modularity of synthesizers, the idea of a signal moving through filters that can be rearranged and manipulated that provides such a compelling model for thinking and by extension, making art. The (micro) generation before this one liked to reference music, bands, movies directly—but as a person who was an artist who also played music, I always found this annoying. All this referencing. But when you dig deeper into the mechanics of music, there’s this whole subterranean world you can connect to that seemed to be missing.

But as you say, my own experience in music has been more band/song centric. Even jam band-centric, like JSN: an improvisional band trying to make a succinct 3 minute song!

I started playing music in Kelowna in the 90s where there was a healthy skepticism of mainstream music, infused with post-rock Chicago, classic folk, and skaterock from the 80s. So Gastr del sol was the closest thing to experimental for me. And Scott Walker. My brother and I had a 4-track recording project called Rockband that I think was not Sonic Youth enough and not Sea and Cake enough for some, but I loved those groups. Years later I heard Cleaners from Venus and thought I would’ve liked to have been like those guys. But that music my brother and I played formed how I approach visual art for sure” knowing for sure what you don’t like but not being totally sure of what you do like! (Is this Gen X?) 

But in terms of process: we recorded layers of regular acoustic and electric instruments via analogue processes that were not easily edited. Played in real time. Sounding like something familiar, avoiding cliches, but also sometimes leaning into cliches. So authenticity in terms of performance but with a nod to what came before. The name Rockband sounds ironic but we saw it as more of a label, like margarine. 

December 15, 2025