For Everyone a Fountain, E-catalogue, 2018

WORDS, THOUGHTS, AND ACTIONS THAT SHAPE TIME:

THOUGHTS ON BUILDING FOR EVERYONE A FOUNTAIN

For Everyone a Fountain is a nod to both Marcel Duchamp and Moshe Safdie. Duchamp’s 1917 artwork Fountain undercut the existing hierarchy of aesthetic values and disciplinary autonomies of his time. Safdie’s 1967 vision for urban living and the environment in his building design for Habitat opened up a new frontier of possibilities. Perhaps an odd mix of visionaries, but these are nevertheless two iconic bookends in my own understanding of creative/philosophical possibilities, bold risk takers, and true iconoclasts for change.

For Everyone a Fountain forms a volume of space determined by a set of tables stacked together in the appearance of a room. Tables are gateways to our private imaginings and aspirations—where plans and dreams are incubated. What if all the tables of a life lived were stacked one on top of another, one structure giving way to another in an ambivalent status of order and subject? What if everyday task lamps designed to provide light to desktops also surrendered their primary function of basic illumination, becoming instead a communication system for the flow of photographic representational colours? Can tables, lamps, a room, and all materially inanimate things of this world share consciousness with us in remembering things we can no longer touch? Can structure, material, and objects be thought of as more than stuff accumulated, as an anthropology of the self in symbiotic flux with the pictorial mirage of time? Does the current tsunami of advancements in AI technology possibly change the scope and dominance of human consciousness and its cleave upon our world construction?

I grew up in a big family where private space was not easily achievable. From the vantage point of my blue subterranean bedroom, shared with as many as three siblings at a time, I built my first foundational tier of consciousness in a world different from the one I knew or resided in. I began by imagining how the prospect of moving the furnishings in my shared room might begin a process of conditional change. I also made posters and badges, silk screened T-shirts, and produced strobe lights, all carriers of an identity to be telegraphed outward onto the moving field of life. My suburban neighbourhood of Deep Cove, North Vancouver, was flanked by industry, a First Nation reservation, and a beatnik/hippy counterculture of the Maplewood Mudflats. All these conditions existed together and were pitched precariously on the lower shoulder of a mountain, which met the sea overlooking the city of Vancouver. This vista from one shoreline of a somewhat rural cultural compression toward the seemingly bombastic and built urban sophistication of another coastline edge has persisted in my thoughts all my life. How looking at something can stimulate thinking about something else—or how artwork can provoke the temporary partition of the everyday, opening up questions onto future prospects.

ROBERT YOUDS

April 2018

FOR EVERYONE A FOUNTAIN , 2017

Thirty-five pieces of aluminium honeycomb sheet, forty task lamps, forty Wi-Fi LED bulbs, fifty-two galvanized steel sawhorses, forty electrical cords, Raspberry Pi computer, two speakers, amplifier sound recording, 144 legal-sized painted cardboard boxes, thirty lbs. of cloth, four electrical surge protection bars

YOUR BEST ROOM IS A GLOSSARY , 2017

Digital projection 180 x 180 in.

I AM ALONE IN IT, IN FRONT OF IT ,

2017

Aluminium frames, laminate glass, programmed LED lights

Two panels: 66.5 x 64.5 x 2 in. and 74.5 x 66.5 x 2 in.

EVENT PLANNING: FOR EVERYONE A FOUNTAIN

What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.

— ALAIN BADIOU

When Robert Youds was ordering aluminum sawhorses at the local hardware store franchise in Victoria, Canada, in the summer of 2017, a crowd of employees began to gather behind the desk in response to the size of the order. Rather than a handful of sawhorses for a domestic project, Youds had ordered sixty. One worker finally broke from the pack and asked, with both curiosity and some trepidation, what he was using them for. Youds replied: Event planning

Youds’ wordplay is not an addendum but a continued performance of his conceptual practice as it moves from the world and spaces of the everyday to aesthetic objects that relate to language, light, and information systems. This anecdote reflects the artist’s humour and also his generosity: why make the staff uncomfortable? He quickly located words that would slip across worlds, creating spaces of welcome and hospitality in both the functional and instrumentalized realm of objects and consumption, and toward the post-Fordist worker, still stymied in the current century by the obfuscated end result, whether it is a wedding, a staff retreat, or an art installation.

Using elements in his work as diverse as Plexiglas, natural and artificial lighting that includes neon and digital signage, aluminum, prefabricated doors, closed circuit televisions, and window frames, since the 1980s, Youds continues to perform this act of hospitality, using his knowledge derived from training as a painter to work with design, popular culture, and architecture in order to transform spatial environments. Describing his early

fascination with painting and the transition into an expanded field, Youds says, “I wanted my work to exist here in the world.”1

Youds’ art practice brilliantly acknowledges the quixotic, contagious, and numbing nature of contemporary life—from clickbait, surveillance, the instrumentalization of human labour, sensation and imagery, and the normalization of conflict,—as troubling signatures of our times and their instability, but not in the way that you might think—and he is interested in the long game. Youds responds to these conditions by constant invention, curiosity, risk, and fearlessness, reaching out and suggesting new ways in which we might approach perception and self-knowledge. As he states, “The most important work always carries with it the long curve of time—it may be a broken chain of time, but nevertheless, time.”2

Architecture also becomes a key feature of his urban archaeology. He says, “More importantly, [my work] is intended as a cinematic collector for the urban field, a sort of spatial poetry that is intended to disrupt the incomplete partition between it and the everyday. Stop and look and catch yourself looking; maybe your next task of the day will be slightly changed by this experience.”3 Youds imagines his work as a kind of architectural future, a building that is able to communicate with its observer or inhabitant, a building that can communicate its feelings or, potentially, remember.4

How does Youds’ art function within these fraught virtual and actual sites?

On the occasion of his installation of his recent related public art project, For Everyone a Sunset, workers in the high-rise buildings adjacent to his activities onsite at the installation began to regularly stop their work to observe the

1. Robert Youds, in an interview with Karin Davie, beautiful beautiful artificial field (Victoria: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 2006), 19.

2. Diana Freundl, Robert Youds: For Everyone a Sunset (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2015).

3. Ibid.

4. Robert Youds artist talk at Open Space, Victoria BC, November 18, 2017.

evolving project, seeing their own labour mirrored in the artist’s activities below; Youds was excited at how “a beautiful visual conversation of materiality and labour” was “unfolding in time and space.”5 This experience points to the way in which Youds’ work articulates and manifests the conditions of a site in order to note and to value the simultaneous effects of presence, sensation, and cognition, as well as how individuals recognize and shape consciousness within these forces. Youds’ work is essential and incisive in decoding realms of neo-liberal self-expression within complex global Internet/web environments (deep and shallow), social media and collective forms of popular culture—reality TV, curatorial labour, and the regular circulation of matters of taste online, including forms of belonging as expressed by allegiances to this or that architectural, social, or political movement or brand—and yet he still allows aesthetics to hold a crucial place in assisting with these tasks.

Youds’ approach to his materials also forms a muscular political and aesthetic resistance; it may be said that throughout his practice, he has had a sense of how quickly a genre (or politic) can be instrumentalized and its meaning fixed. Youds states that “it is true that my work acknowledges the overlap between jurisdictions of pictures, objects, and things. I am attracted to complexity in general and not so interested in echoing convenient ideas and aesthetics we have already absorbed.”6

In a 2014 interview with Diana Freundl, he noted, “My work falls between the negotiation of aesthetics and the perceptual. This means we all carry with us a pre-existing knowledge, and this is largely a sensorial lexicon that involves matters of colour, materiality, light, geometry, space, etc.

These are the very foundations of consciousness and precede linguistic

5. Diana Freundl, Robert Youds

6. Ibid.

understanding.”7 His work combines his interest in temporality and materiality and “how there are often gaps between experience and our knowing.”8 He contends that colour is a core element of how we understand the world, and his elusiveness in pinning the terms of his practice to one art historical stream has allowed his work not to be tied to a specific genre or art historical allegiance but rather to a poetics of experience that moves effortlessly across disciplines and materials into the social and experiential realm. His titles in his latest work, For Everyone a Fountain (2017) and the related piece, For Everyone a Sunset (2014), as well as works such as Your Only Disaster Is Finally Here (2015), Say Nothing, Twice (2016), dirty words, salt air breath and all your midnight changes (2013), and Your constant waterfall (series) (2012), attest to his engagement in the poetics not only of words but of the affective and social qualities of language within these contemporary scenes and sites of engagement. In For Everyone a Fountain, Youds both performed and included a projected text work, set within a blue screen resembling a 1980s-era “no-signal” VHS screen. The title inscribes the work with Youds’ hope: that everyone will indeed find something that they need within his work. The title for this installation is drawn from architect Moshe Safdie’s principles of design and his broad, utopian inclusiveness and aspirational thinking about ways that things can be done better.

Youds’ experiential pieces also explore the schism between objects and lived experience, the ability within contemporary mediated life to “experience something and think about something else simultaneously . . . in this case a physical space imagining a landscape.”9 Within this, Youds is also interested in information and systems. For Everyone a Fountain is “a set of tables that want to be a room, and a room that wants to be a garden.”10 It is 7. Ibid. 8. Robert Youds, accessed December 8, 2017, http://www.robertyouds.ca/ 9. Robert Youds artist talk at Open Space.

both an image and a source of information within a network of task lamps, aluminum sheeting, and six dozen stacked galvanized steel sawhorses that resemble a proliferating (and possibly self-replicating) set of workstations, along with piles of chopped rags that suggest abandoned labour or a discarded living space.

A Raspberry Pi computer organizes the circuitry of the lights; compositions are being continually determined. A computer code reads photographic images of a garden through the four seasons, beginning with winter and cycling through until it begins again; at each new cycle, the code may alter or be reinterpreted by that system, resulting in a migrating set of illuminations made into an emotionally and visually enthralling sensorium: the lamps occupy every floor of this ubiquitous work space, turning into an ad hoc approximation of a building with an inaccessible courtyard. The top layer of the constructed element is a series of stacked rows of legal boxes, the kind that may contain archives—or the shoes, folded suit, and reading materials of the dead. A painted rectangle on the side of each box is a tamping down on the formal (rectangles are painted in arresting colours on the sides of the boxes that face the interior, while black rectangles face toward the outer edge), providing an interiority and exteriority that suggests privacy and introversion, but also another set of systems: information.

A sound composition melts as equally into hearing as the lights transmit the beauty of a garden into a series of illuminations—digital encounters made friendly, hospitable, welcoming—an apprehension that sits mediated between the “real” of the garden photographed long before and the experience in the gallery. Equally, the sound registers something that could be cinematic: each tone registers a body moving through space and time and is taken from the melodious turnstiles the artist encountered during a visit to Hong Kong. This register of bodies passing through, lights that melt

on and off, is a system of charting time and space that also edges on a feeling of nostalgia in its most academic sense: the longing for something which may not have been directly experienced, an idea of a time not necessarily encountered in one’s own lifetime. It is possible for someone to feel nostalgia for the nineteenth century while living in the twenty-first. Beyond Proust’s madeleine, this nostalgia seems most fitting for both Youds’ work and the mediated contemporary.

A fountain itself is aspirational, a form of civic beatification and an expression of hope. In classical times, water diversion was an expression of wealth and power: Hadrian’s Villa, an elaborate garden retreat with fountains, ponds, and architectural follies, as well as statuaries and living quarters in ancient Tibur, was also display of political power meant to dissuade his enemies. Contemporary cultural theorist Lauren Berlant addresses desire in the twenty-first century as a conflicted state; she suggests, “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project,”11 and yet continuing in the face of adverse conditions, despite being unable to effect structural change on a mass scale, is also a form of resistance.

Within his installation are also two wall pieces: windows that host a mesmerizing cycling of light, resembling his earlier work, Plato’s Cave, a reference to the fugitive, the trapped, who are only able to experience the world by watching reflections on the cave wall. Youds is interested in the synthesis between object and image as a root of consciousness; perhaps this is as Plato imagined long ago, a capacity to both look at something and imagine something else: nostalgia and advanced consciousness require both operations. As Youds says, “We do this 100,000 times a day; like every

11. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 1.

experience it is unregulated. We all navigate space and time every day and make decisions based on that moving through the world . . . art I don’t see as

May 2018

any different.”12

LISA BALDISSERA

12. Robert Youds interview recorded at Open Space, August 2017.

FOR EVERYONE A FOUNTAIN , 2017

Thirty-five pieces of aluminium honeycomb sheet, forty task lamps, forty Wi-Fi LED bulbs, fifty-two galvanized steel sawhorses, forty electrical cords, Raspberry Pi computer, two speakers, forty-nine amplifier sound recording, 144 legal-sized painted cardboard boxes, thirty lbs. of cloth, four electrical surge protection bars

ROBERT YOUDS: FOR EVERYONE A FOUNTAIN

URBAN SPACE AND STORAGE, DISPLACED NATURE, AND A TELEMATIC APPROACH TO REALITY

“What does it mean to experience something and then think of something else simultaneously, which in a lot of ways is symptomatic of the condition we live in today?”1

—ROBERT YOUDS

With our everyday existence being punctuated by tweets, vibrations, and urgent notifications of various digital platforms, our current relationship with reality is often one step removed. The yearning to “mentally travel” or escape one’s physical surroundings, however, is nothing new. As technology becomes a great “enabler” of simultaneous occupation of two spatio-temporal spheres, the need for a real connection to nature becomes increasingly desirable.

Over the last decade, Robert Youds has developed a body of work, which includes three significant installations that address his ongoing dialogue with the built environment through the use of materials—those associated with industrial construction and utility. His material vocabulary revisits a previous era, when labourers from farms or villages migrated to factories and workshops, eventually forming cities and even megacities. In time, the urban sprawl would oblige city dwellers to travel hours in search of a landscape that even remotely resembles nature.

1. Robert Youds, artist talk at Open Space, Victoria, BC, November 18, 2017. https://vimeo.com/246091957

For Everyone a Fountain’s sculptural form, both its verticality and seriality, recall the architectural vernacular of a metropolis—one that shares a similarity to Hong Kong as viewed in Michael Wolf’s Architecture of Density, a body of work that fuses documentary photography and anthropological survey. Like Wolf’s images, Youds’ installation similarly acknowledges the city’s overwhelming concentration of crowded residential towers and soaring skyscrapers. The tables are stacked in a manner that at once recalls the DIY nature of Kowloon’s Walled City2 and the intense geometry of Hong Kong’s New Towns (a cluster of towers with more than half a million inhabitants). The painted cardboard boxes echo the palate of social housing blocks, with colourful hues assigned to the task of bringing levity to these concrete columbaria. The cardboard storage boxes, the kind found in archives, frame this architecture as “human storage facilities” where people can be neatly compartmentalized and organized in order to facilitate privacy and hygiene, as well as prevent social conflict.

Yet the tower blocks of these “new towns” present an interesting juxtaposition: they are at once brutal, almost violent in their uniformity, but like beehives, they swarm with life. Inside the individual concrete units, individuals live out their normal lives as they would in any other dwelling— lighting incense on their shrines, simmering medicinal Cantonese soups, binge-watching Netflix, or slaving over multiplication tables.

After first documenting the external facades of social housing in Hong Kong, Wolf turned his lens on the humanity that resided within the walls of this all-consuming concrete. Lost Laundry, HK Breaks, HK Flora, and Informal Seating Arrangements are all series that provide snapshots of the everyday:

2. A settlement in Hong Kong that began as a military outpost during the Song dynasty, the Kowloon Walled City later became a Chinese enclave for political refugees who were excluded when the New Territories were leased to Britain in 1898. By the 1970s and 80s, this area developed into a densely populated and largely selfgoverned settlement prior to its demolition in 1993–94.

a crippled chair bound together with plastic string, a plant in a broken planter hanging off a water spigot, or an errant pair of underwear that has fallen off laundry poles to be caught by wall-mounted air-conditioning units. Created by the residents of the neighbourhoods, these site-specific street installations are monuments to the potential for human creativity within the concrete box.

Youds’ monolithic housing complex also bears these same traces of human existence: piles of rags, their soft forms bringing warmth to the gleaming steel composition, act as a symbolic reference to the labour inherent in the work. As explained by Youds in an online video documentation of his artist talk,

How traces of humanity settle in a human realm is interesting to me. [This] pile of rags, they are a gesture; they are a remnant; these were objects I used to clean the metal, and I became conscious of my own labour in the piece. And there is that trace of humanism which exists in the rags.3

The installation illustrates not only the idea of the city as a structure for human storage but also its logistics. In addition to the metal structures and the lights, there is an audio component—found sound from the hallways of Hong Kong’s subway system, procured during a trip to Hong Kong. Youds’ sound composition is created from different tones produced when passengers enter the subway turnstiles. What fascinated him was how the passengers’ demographic information was communicated through sound with the tone of the turnstiles: a student metro pass would have a separate tone to that of a senior pass or a tourist card. Public transit, in the context of the city, can be seen as a human delivery system; one which seeks to

3. Robert Youds, artist talk at Open Space.

unite humans with their homes in the most efficient way possible. Though we often see ourselves, “humans,” as masters of the urban environment, perhaps the environment—through the design of buildings, arteries, transit systems, and pedestrian pathways—is driving us?

The tension in Youds’ installation lies within the essential need to store, categorize, and transport humans and the need for humans to express their humanity, their individuality, and their connection to the natural world. In titling his work For Everyone a Fountain, Youds borrows from Canadian architect Moshe Safdie’s idealist design theory presented in For Everyone a Garden. Youds shares Safdie’s utopian notions of architecture’s potential for social transformation or at least has faith in the power of design to enhance community, be it through the introduction of concrete thoroughfares or green spaces, which act as small yet important footnotes to a pastoral existence. In an article about an earlier series of paintings, handmade ultramarine mantra, in Canadian Art,4 Youds speaks of “a rustic modernism, encoded with an urban patina of longing for a self once imagined and enabled within nature”—a sentiment that seems very present in For Everyone a Fountain.

Urban living necessitates a kind of trade-off: jobs, enriching cultural opportunities, and variety in exchange for green, blue, and tranquility. However, in many Asian countries, and in particular in China, this simultaneous desire for density and serenity has lead to interesting innovations in design and horticulture that seek to satisfy the two competing desires. Chinese gardens, bonsai, and landscape painting all attempt to replicate a sense of sanctuary and spiritual enlightenment through different artistic forms. Unlike English- or French-style gardens,

4. Gary Michael Dault, “Robert Youds: Carpenter Gothic,” Canadian Art, September 10, 2013, last accessed March 1, 2018, https://canadianart.ca/reviews/robert-youds-diaz-contemporary/

which prioritize characteristics of open spaces, intricate pathways, colour, and flower selection, Chinese gardens possess a labyrinthine, gnarled sense of space and have limited interest in flowers. Navigating a garden pathway, one gazes upon a landscape of lakes, rivers, and mountains, all made small: the mountains are represented by complex rockeries made of “wrinkled rocks,” and the lakes are manifested as small ponds, often featuring boats made of concrete or stone. For those who cannot afford their own private garden, there are bonsai, carefully pruned to look like pines clinging to the sides of windswept mountains, and landscape paintings depicting transcendental scenes of mist-enveloped peaks—all designed to transport the viewer to another spiritual plane.

This sense of “mental travelling,” which one might call a “telematic approach to reality,” inspires the artist’s question: “What does it mean to experience something and then think of something else simultaneously?”5

Living in an urban environment, we experience nature in “degrees of separation.” We make forays into it—through the idyllic images on our screensaver, through documentaries narrated by David Attenborough, or through an afternoon visit to our local park. The City Beautiful and garden city movements6 posited that this kind of “nature tourism” would bring about a utopian society and eliminate social ills. For Everyone a Fountain explores “displacement of nature” further, using images of Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia, taken during spring, summer, fall, and winter to create a durational light composition. An algorithm crawls through this source material, transforming it into colours that are fed into the Raspberry

5. Robert Youds, artist talk at Open Space.

6. The City Beautiful movement was an urban planning reform movement in the United States during the turn of the twentieth century. Its founders believed that beautifying a city would promote social order and increase the quality of life. The garden city movement in the United Kingdom was focused on promoting landscape architecture in the urban centres.

Pi (a small, single-board computer) and outputted as brief glows of colour in a series of adjustable desk lamps, which dot the base of the installation. The soft chromatic choreography of entrances and exits mimics the movements of inhabitants in a faraway tower block turning lights on and off.

In the cinematic realm of science fiction, it is common to see individuals inhabiting alienating black boxes with very few personal items. Often, in such circumstances, the window is represented by an LCD screen of a waterfall or some other idyllic natural landscape. Applying an abstract filter to this concept, Youds began to explore natural simulations in 2009 with For Everyone a Window—a large picture window frame with digital-signboard arrows that guide visitors through a six-minute durational experience with changing colours and day/night alterations. In For Everyone a Sunset (2014), he took this concept a step further with a monumental public art installation that utilized industrial materials to create cinematic plays of light.

Employing the natural, the industrial, and the digital, Youds’ works manage to simultaneously occupy three different temporal spheres. Like a bonsai pruned to look as if it has withstood hundreds of winters, his work attempts to compact and chorale different periods of time into one space, making reference to the “chronology of nature and man” in the same way that Chinese landscape painting uses a visual and symbolic language to speak of “natural time.”

In traditional Chinese culture, nature and time were always inseparably linked. The lunar calendar, for instance, divides the year into twentyfour “solar terms,” which foretell both climatic and natural events. For instance, during the season of jinzhe, when the sun reaches the longitude of 345 degrees, thunderstorms are said to awake hibernating insects. This seasonality plays an integral part in Buddhist and Taoist philosophy,

literature, and poetry, as well as in Chinese painting, where the seasonal shifts are represented by certain symbolic plants: orchids for spring; lotuses for summer; chrysanthemums for fall; and plum, pine, and bamboo, known as the Three Friends of Winter. The depictions of these plants are often more schematic than realistic. A full tree is never fully rendered: a few branches with leaves or blossoms are shorthand for the idea of “tree.” The purpose of these paintings is not to create a facsimile of reality but rather an atmosphere to be filled in by the viewer’s imagination. Similarly, For Everyone a Fountain offers us the outline of a cityscape, the aluminum work tables signifying the architectural grid of the city—the city being a symbol of work and economic productivity. Though today work tables have been replaced by cubicles, the labour of crunching numbers, welding pixels, and transporting cartloads of data still exists.

Youds’ work embodies this distinctly modern conundrum: the urge to return to a simpler state contrasted with the drive to remain within and often ahead of or our temporal framework—driven by the compulsion to install the latest mental or technical updates. Though we know that these artificial replicas of nature are not “the real thing,” we seem quite comfortable with our selfdelusion. After all the physical labour required to live completely within the realm of nature—free of modern conveniences—leaves little time for contemplation or meditation.

DIANA FREUNDL

March 28, 2018

FOR EVERYONE A FOUNTAIN , 2016

Thirty-five pieces of aluminium honeycomb sheet, forty task lamps, forty Wi-Fi LED bulbs, fifty-two galvanized steel sawhorses, forty electrical cords, Raspberry Pi computer, two speakers, amplifier sound recording, 144 legal-sized painted cardboard boxes, four electrical surge protection bars

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

The best room, For Everyone a Fountain.

I want to be here in this room that holds the hidden and the visible simultaneously. I needed to know what the physical footprint and overall scale would feel like to witness. Over the duration of building the room, it became larger in size than I had anticipated at first. More and more of the future and the past pushed inside, needing each other, yet space was going to be short. Soon I found I was only able to look upon the room; my entry was no longer possible. Only the best room is ineffable and fleeting— everyone has theirs. I have lived here; you can too. See pictures. Hear time. Feel surfaces. Light finds shadow. For Everyone a Fountain is the best room you’ll ever know.

FOR EVERYONE A FOUNTAIN , 2016

Thirty-five pieces of aluminium honeycomb sheet, forty task lamps, forty Wi-Fi LED bulbs, fifty-two galvanized steel sawhorses, forty electrical cords, Raspberry Pi computer, thirty lbs. of cloth, four electrical surge protection bars

LIST OF WORKS

FOR EVERYONE A FOUNTAIN , 2017

For Everyone a Fountain is a system-based sculptural artwork designed to be assembled and reassembled, contingent on the physical necessities and limitations of the space where it is shown. This FlatPAC artwork is mutable. To date, it has undergone three iterations of its install potential. Its material parts include thirty-four sheets of aluminium honeycomb sheet, forty task lamps and forty Wi-Fi LED bulbs, forty-eight galvanized-steel sawhorses, forty black electrical cords, a Raspberry Pi computer and code, two speakers plus amplifier and a sound recording, 144 legal-sized painted cardboard boxes, thirty pounds of cloth, and four electrical-surge protection bars.

YOUR BEST ROOM IS A GLOSSARY , 2017 15 x 15 ft. projection.

I AM ALONE IN IT, IN FRONT OF IT , 2017

Aluminium frames, laminate glass, LED lights. Two panels: 66.5 x 64.5 x 2 in. and 74.5 x 66.5 x 2 in.

ROBERT YOUDS BIOGRAPHY

Robert Youds (BFA, University of Victoria, 1978; MFA, York University, Toronto, 1982) has exhibited his artwork professionally since the late 1970s. While Youds began his career as a painter, by the early 1980s he became interested in issues of colour and space beyond the limitations of the picture plane. This interest led Youds to examine the conditions of the spectatorial and its relationship to constructed objects and images situated in real space. At that time, perhaps with the exception of a handful of major artists such as Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Blinky Palermo, Anne Truitt, Dan Flavin, and Gerhard Richter, there were not many artists significantly contributing toward this new jurisdictional aesthetic in art that exists between the areas of sculpture and painting. (Youds draws a distinction between his preoccupations and the generalized area of installation practice that also blossomed in the late 1970s.) While he was acutely aware of the contributions by these artists and their works, he developed a growing interest in architecture and design as holding possibilities for larger social and interactive implications for art—to infuse significant new fuel into his perceptual and aesthetic query. While the aforementioned minimalists’ work had really only opened the door of possibilities for Youds, there was, in his mind, much more to do. His current practice combines the areas of architecture, design, painting, and sculpture at the foundational core of his artistic work. Within the disciplinary specifics, and their limitations, he believes colour and space hold greater communicative roles to play. In this manner, Youds follows a path of exploration involving the combination of pictures, objects, and things, as well as their cultural relationship to issues of colour and light in space. This claim places his career more accurately within the realm and specificity of objecthood, including its intersection

and its absorption into the changing roles of art within a broader cultural, phenomenological, and everyday-viewer experience of the world.

In 2015, Youds was commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery to produce a major outdoor project as part of their ongoing Offsite series. The work was entitled For Everyone a Sunset. It involved the use of materials such as twenty tons of salvaged glass, aluminium, and neon, and it was designed to capture and mirror the city’s own evolving image, including buildings being built and coming down around the site. With special project assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Youds created For Everyone a Fountain at Open Space—a similarly sized architecture-like piece. It engages the spectator in a dynamic tension of seeing and experiencing—where the physical object intersects with the illusory realm. The work features a computer-activated lighting program that translates a set of photographic landscape images into changing light and colour. There is also a sound component to the work that unravels against the simultaneous light display occurring in real time. In these mutual works, Youds’ aim is to create a situation where an incomplete partition of the everyday happens between the viewing experience of the built structure and the work’s own reciprocity of human presence and poetic communication.

Work by Robert Youds has been presented by influential galleries and museums such as Power Plant, Toronto, Ontario, (1995); SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (1999); Museum of the City of Mexico, Mexico City (1999); Oliver Art Center, CCA, Oakland, California (1999); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario (2003); Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta, (2006); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, (2010); Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (2013); Xi’an Art Museum, Xi’an, China (2014); Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia (2015); and Today Art Museum, Beijing, China (2015), among many others.

Robert Youds’ art has been represented by Sable-Castelli Gallery, Toronto; Post Wilshire, Los Angeles; Diaz Contemporary, Toronto; William Turner, Los Angeles; and, most recently, Barbara Edwards Contemporary, Toronto.

His work has been included in EXPO CHICAGO, Art Los Angeles Contemporary, and Art Toronto.

Youds’ work was the subject of a major survey, beautiful beautiful artificial field, 2007, at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. The catalogue included essays by writers Saul Ostrow and Barry Schwabsky, artist Karin Davie, and curator Lisa Baldissera.

SELECTED COMMISSIONS: Royal Bank Building, Toronto (2010); TorontoDominion Centre, Toronto (architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, 2014), Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite (2014–15).

Robert Youds’ work is held in twenty-two public collections and has been published in twenty-seven exhibition catalogues to date.

For detailed CV, visit www.robertyouds.ca/exhibitions/collections/ catalogues/.

CONTRIBUTORS’ BIOGRAPHIES

LISA BALDISSERA has worked in curatorial roles in public art galleries in Canada and as an independent curator, consultant, and writer for over eighteen years. She was curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and chief curator at the Mendel Art Gallery, and is currently senior curator at Contemporary Calgary. Baldissera has produced more than fifty exhibitions of local, Canadian, and international artists. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in art from the University of Saskatchewan, and is currently a PhD student at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has served on contemporary art juries across Canada, including the RBC Canadian Painting Competition, the Sobey Art Award, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, the Hnatyshyn Foundation Awards in Visual Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council. She was also a professional affiliate at the University of Saskatchewan and contributing editor for the Art Canada Institute online art book series, where she produced a publication on Emily Carr.

Baldissera is co-curator, along with independent curator Joanne Bristol, of extratextual, an international exhibition on art and writing at Contemporary Calgary, as well as co-producer of the symposium Never the Same: what (else) can art writing do?

DIANA FREUNDL is the associate curator, Asian Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 2014, she curated Unscrolled: Reframing Tradition in Chinese Contemporary Art, in addition to co-curating the major retrospectives Lee Bul and Bharti Kher Matter in 2015 and 2016, respectively. Recent exhibitions include Pacific Crossings: Hong Kong Artists in Vancouver and Howie Tsui: Retainers of Anarchy. She is the curator of the gallery’s public art space,

Offsite, which has included site-specific installations by MadeIn Company, Reena Saini Kallat, Asim Waqif, and Tsang Kin Wah, among others. Prior to the Vancouver Art Gallery, Freundl was living in Asia, where she was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Shanghai and the artistic director of Art+Shanghai. She has an academic background in comparative religion, philosophy, and graduate studies in journalism.

REGAN SHRUMM is an independent curator who is currently an uninvited guest on the unceded territory of the Lekwungen peoples. She received an MA in art history and visual studies from the University of Victoria. She is currently an assistant curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Shrumm has previously held curatorial positions with Open Space and Legacy Art Gallery in Victoria, British Columbia; the Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Art Museum and Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, Washington; and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. Her essays have been published in exhibition catalogues such as The Art of A. Banana Unpeeled (Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Open Space, 2017), Indigenous Influences (Museum of Northwest Art, 2017), and most recently, Forgotten Females of Salt Spring Island (Salt Spring Arts Council, 2018).

Curator, arts administrator, and occasional writer HELEN MARZOLF was the executive director of the artist-run centre Open Space from 2005 to 2017. Previously, she was director/curator of the Dunlop Art Gallery (1991–2001) in Regina. Marzolf has contributed to publications by the Mendel Art Gallery and the University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon), the Mackenzie Art Gallery (Regina), Open Space, and Carleton University (Ottawa).

TARA NICHOLSON incorporates photography and video to investigate remote and often disputed territories. The notion of modern-day pilgrimage has

been repeated throughout her large-scale projects for the past five years to invite reflection on the desire to retreat and escape. Nicholson has exhibited and attended residencies internationally; notably, in 2013, Nicholson was invited to be the artist in residence at the Künstlerhaus Dortmund in Germany. Recent exhibitions include Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre in Kingston, Ontario; as well as Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George, the Burnaby Art Gallery, and the Vernon Art Gallery in British Columbia. Tara Nicholson has taught at the University of Victoria since 2010.

NAOMI KENNEDY interviews creative minds to grasp the essence of a concept, to then be relayed for digestion by the passive viewer. Kennedy bridged into the medium of film in 2017 with the assistance of MediaNet. She has been in active creation in the Victoria community for the last seven years, completing a post diploma in fine arts from Victoria College of Art in 2014.

SOPHIE POUYANNE is a graphic designer and copy editor with a BFA in visual arts from the University of Victoria and an MPub from Simon Fraser University. She has designed and edited artist books for Open Space Arts Society and Legacy Art Gallery in Victoria.

AFTERWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“[Contemporary] sculpture insinuate[s] itself into the texture of the world. There isn’t time or distance enough to perpetuate monuments. We live in a world of half gestures where there is no definitive stance and the sands sift incessantly over a desert of evidential truth. . . . Rawness and anxiety trumps the autopsies of the acceptable and the negotiable. Sculpture is the medium that knows best how to live in the present and find the future.”

– RICHARD FLOOD 1

Robert Youds has been building For Everyone a Fountain for three years, and I suspect he will continue to work with it for years. As we prepared for the Open Space presentation, I encountered three successive iterations, each absorbing and complex, each intimately tuned to site. Mutable and transforming, For Everyone a Fountain will find unexpected places to inhabit, adapting to the places where Youds rebuilds it. As Richard Flood’s comment suggests, contemporary art—sculpture—has the capacity to settle anywhere and to renegotiate conditions of locale and site. As a serial sculpture, one could say the armature of For Everyone a Fountain is an inbuilt tensile flexibility, a purposeful unfixedness.

At Open Space, Youds augmented For Everyone a Fountain with other works: three wall-mounted light boxes and a projected text. He engineered an interdisciplinary, technology-rich, and colour-saturated Anthropocene ecosystem. Recharging the formal and quieter dimensions of art and spatiality, For Everyone a Fountain is unapologetically contemplative. Youds’ work evades easy categorization and resists a simple declarative narrative. His work embraces its visitors but doesn’t tether them. In turn, visitors

1. Richard Flood, “Not About Mel Gibson,” in Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century (New York: Phaidon Press Inc. in association with the New Museum, 2011), 13.

navigate a radiant stage of compounding possibility. In equal measure, Youds’ work alludes to twenty-first-century anxiety, precarity, fear, and transitory communities and lives as markers of the complex conditions of late capitalism’s cultures. Performance insinuates itself throughout Youds’ project in the constantly changing algorithmic lighting, “performing” an interpretive act. In addition, Youds himself performed a voice camouflage soliloquy as a component of his artist’s talk at Open Space.

Youds uses sound and text to derail an overriding narrative. For example, the sound in For Everyone a Fountain originates in the engineered tones of the Hong Kong subway systems, amounting to a continuous composite portrait of the system’s millions of daily riders. In Victoria, this sound is abstract and its representative origins are obscure. It reminds us that invisible knowledge systems saturate our lives and environs. These systems are natural, microscopic, aural, technological, cultural, and historical. We may be affected by them or not; we do not register or internalize them; we are oblivious and unaware; and sometimes, completely preoccupied, we do not have the literacy to comprehend them. In encountering For Everyone a Fountain, we are simultaneously captivated and disoriented. Youds nudges us to think and experience perceptually and, more significantly, encourages us to prioritize this mode of engagement during the moments we inhabit his installation.

To complicate the viewer’s experience, Youds included the poetic and mischievous text projection Your best room is a glossary. Traditionally, a glossary acts as the reader’s guide, defining arcane, technical, or obscure terminology. Rather than defining, Youds’ glossary unravels and seriously messes with easy or seamless definition. His glossary feeds the perceptual imaginary rather than rational strategies of interpretation. In his installation, Youds releases us from the confines of provisional and transitory

conclusions. For Everyone a Fountain invites us to live, for a time, in an elemental garden with panoramic imaginative views.

For this publication, Open Space commissioned three essays by Lisa Baldissera, Diana Freundl, and Regan Shrumm. Lisa Baldissera draws upon her long association with Robert Youds and his work to overview For Everyone a Fountain. She articulates his continuing aesthetic preoccupations, especially regarding the interplay of site and locale. Diana Freundl, who curated For Everyone a Sunset in Vancouver, focuses her analysis on urban environments, specifically the histories, surprises, and adaptations of Hong Kong’s dense urban environment. Regan Shrumm grounds her essay in ideas of idealistic structures, drawing upon the histories of Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 and Vancouver Island’s Butchart Gardens.

For Everyone a Fountain echoes many of Open Space’s founding aspirations. It evades a designated disciplinary alliance; it activates interrogative [ad]ventures and, in turn, stimulates speculative interpretation. It is approachable and rigorous; and it is borne of, and subsequently encourages, mentorship and collaboration, as well as performance, both human and algorithmic.

Open Space is honoured to present this major work by an artist of Robert Youds’ experience and stature. During the 1980s, Youds’ work was curated as part of group exhibitions at Open Space, but For Everyone a Fountain is his first solo project here. Throughout the planning, installation, and publication phases of the project, Robert Youds has been unfailingly flexible and understanding during a time of intense transition at Open Space. Youds, as you might guess, has a finely tuned sense of humour. He has been articulate and generous in assisting all of us to step beyond the threshold of For Everyone a Fountain, inviting us into “the best room we will ever know.”

There are many others to thank. Technical consultant Steven A. Bjornson built the algorithm supporting the interpretation of four photographs—a core aspect of the work. For helping during the installation, Open Space thanks Robert Youds’ team Bleda Baris, Elizabeth Charters, Ryan Hatfield, and Rachel Vanderzwet. Youds frequently consulted with his team, and his respect and confidence in their observations was inspiring. At Open Space, technician Miles Giesbrecht, program coordinator Breanna Fabbro, administrative coordinator Regan Shrumm, and curatorial assistant Margaret “Greta“ Hamilton carried all aspects of the project with professional diligence and enthusiasm. Graphic designer Leah McInnis helped us with the marketing materials. Producing this publication involved extensive contributions by photographer Tara Nicholson; videographer Naomi Kennedy; essayists Lisa Baldissera, Diana Freundl, and Regan Shrumm; editor and designer Sophie Pouyanne; and executive director Kegan McFadden. Robert Youds and his partner, Christine Toller, assisted with visuals, graphic design, and editing, and advised on this publication throughout, in countless ways.

Open Space is grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council, the Arts Development Fund of the Capital Regional District, BC Community Gaming Grants, Young Canada Works, and the Victoria Foundation, as well as our members, board of directors, and volunteers.

We recognize that the work of Open Space is carried out on unceded First Nations territories. The City of Victoria and surrounding CRD municipalities lie on the territories of the Lekwungen and Coast Salish peoples, including the Esquimalt, Songhees, and WSÁNEĆ First Nations. We are fortunate and grateful to live, work, think, and create on these lands.

HELEN MARZOLF

CREDITS

2018© Open Space Arts Society, Robert Youds, and the essayists

Open Space Arts Society presented For Everyone a Fountain by Robert Youds from November 10 to December 16, 2017. Open Space is an artist-run centre with a mandate to support the contemporary arts, engaging artists in the visual and media arts, literary arts, and new music.

CURATOR: Helen Marzolf

TECHNICAL CONSULTANT: Steven A. Bjornson

COMPUTER GRAPHICS ASSISTANCE: Christine Toller

INSTALLATION CREW

Bleda Baris

Elizabeth Charters

Ryan Hatfield

Rachel Vanderzwet

OPEN SPACE ARTS SOCIETY TEAM

Kegan McFadden, executive director

Helen Marzolf, former executive director

Miles Giesbrecht, technician

Regan Shrumm, administrative coordinator

Robbi Smoker-Peters, administrator

Breanna Fabbro, program coordinator

France Trépanier, Aboriginal curator

David Shively, new music curator

Kara Stanton, literary coordinator

Doug Jarvis, guest curator

PUBLICATION DESIGNER AND EDITOR: Sophie Pouyanne

PHOTOGRAPHERS: Tara Nicholson, Robert Youds

VIDEOGRAPHER/INTERVIEWER: Naomi Kennedy

ESSAYISTS: Lisa Baldissera, Diana Freundl, Regan Shrumm

THE ARTIST’S SPECIAL PROJECT FUNDING

Canada Council for the Arts

BC Arts Council

OPEN SPACE OPERATING FUNDERS

Canada Council for the Arts

Capital Regional District

BC Arts Council

City of Victoria

BC Community Gaming Grants

Victoria Foundation

Open Space Arts Society

510 Fort Street

Victoria BC V8W 1E6 250-383-8833

www.openspace.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Robert Youds : for everyone a fountain.

Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Open Space Arts Society from November 10 to December 16, 2017. ISBN 978-1-895532-39-5 (HTML)

1. Youds, Robert--Exhibitions. 2. Exhibition catalogs-I. Open Space Arts Society, issuing body, host institution II. Title: For everyone a fountain.

N6549.Y68A4 2018 709.2 C2018903905-1