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Man of the Month Before – Luke Detheridge

Saturday, October 1st, 2011

October’s Man of the Month is:

'Inner Clown' - Nelson, BC Photo by: Erin Leigh Pasternak

Luke Detheridge

Here’s a little bit about him:
Luke Detheridge is a performance/interactive media based artist, currently living in Vancouver, BC. Raised in St. Catharines, Ontario and fueled by his love of motion picture, he journeyed west after high school for film education. After graduating Capilano University for set decoration he re-immersed himself into education focusing on his BFA from Emily Carr University. Since then he has explored his craft of various types, earning him noted roles as a set decorator, costume designer, performer, interactive media artist and child educator/entertainer.

His contributions include: regularly teaming up with Holopath Productions, setting up interactive installations at the ‘Shambhala Music Festivals’ Aug, 2007-2011.

Child education with ‘A Bright Red Crayon’ in combination with Vancouver Science World and Maker Faire focusing on alternative energy installations and recycled craft workshops 2009-2011.

Event organization, stage design and installation, performance and open learning workshops with ‘Gropp’s Gallery’ 2009-2011.

Luke continues to maintain a practice of interactive costuming and sculpture for the past 8 years, which have attributed to numerous awards, scholarships and public swarming and enjoyment.

And here’s how he answered my 6 questions about creativity:

What does it mean to you to be creative?
We create, everyday of our lives, our story, our journey. To be creative is to act upon that which inspires you to create. To allow our perspective of reality to diversify, expanding and encompass alternative ways of living and our relation to others. Co-creation is something to strive for, it brings out the best in us and asks us to rise to the occasion of something far greater then just our own creative ideals.

What triggers your creativity?
Smiley and excited faces. When I see wonder in people’s eyes and their minds churning, it stokes my fire! I love to energize the public and enhance community with my art, while inspiring the individual with their own acts of creation. It’s a cycle that I am happy to take part in, which influences the focus of my art towards illumination and celebration. I also dream big, especially with costuming, pushing my own physical and creative limits. I find that costumes have a considerable way of bringing out what I like to call ‘child eyes’. I feel especially happy providing a dynamic and visual stimulating touch to this city.

What hinders your creativity?
Social constraint is right up there, I see more laws being passed restricting personal freedom, irresponsible forestry and oil expansion, and the condition of the earth changing. That tends to bum me out a bit. In those disempowering moments I try my best to except the state in which everything is and in turn, deepen my purpose within it. I hold courage and love, for the future, and I feel privileged to share my journey with so many beautiful people.

Ork Costume debut at Aedan Gallery’s opening night of “Aliens and Monsters” October, 2009

What’s the wildest journey your venturesome spirit has taken you on?
Burning Man. To any burner, that statement sums it up. To everyone else I invite you to take part in the experience and find out for yourself.

I traveled down to Burning Man for the first time in 2007. Blake Shaulhauser and I, as well as a few others from the Cosmic Elves camp, designed and built a 3 story tetrahedral hammock village. A week in Black Rock City, Nevada Dessert, truly changed what I thought of as a possibility for interactive installation. As well as giving me overwhelming examples, left, right and centre of the beauty of a loving community and positive social change. I left with something to reach for, in life, in art.

What does being bold and provocative mean to you?
Having the balls to stand up for what you truly believe in, alone if necessary.

Video of a 16′ Snake-Creature made from 50 milk jugs…’Illuminatus Draco’ as part of the Maker Faire, June 2011

What’s next for you?
I plan to continue working with fellow artists and community groups, as well as expanding upon installation and costume productions into festivals, art, theatre and film. I will continue to explore and to challenge myself where ever my journey takes me.

And here’s a video that inspires Luke’s creativity:

Terence McKenna – Free Your Mind

Check out Luke’s website.

Many smiley face thank yous Luke, you are a social positive!

To hear about the next Man of the Month, follow DollyFaye on Twitter!

Posted in Man of the Month | No Responses »
Tags: creativity, Inspiration, Luke Detheridge, Man of the Month

Woman of the Month Before – Marina Szijarto

Saturday, October 1st, 2011

Presenting October’s Woman of the Month:

Marina Szijarto

Here’s a little bit about her:
Marina Szijarto is a Visual and Celebration Artist with a diverse and eclectic arts practice who works within the medium of Theatre, Dance and performance (Set, Costumes & Poster design) and Community-engaged Rites and Celebrations.

She is the Art Director/Designer at Vancouver’s Mountain View Cemetery’s ‘All Souls’ event and Creative Director of ‘A Midsummer Fete’ a community celebration at Colony Farm Regional Park.

Marina has been exploring the artist’s role in rites of passage (specifically death, funerals and mourning) for the last 12 years and has pioneered the use of Shrines to honour the dead in Vancouver community based events.

Marina has received 2 Jessie Richardson Awards, plus 7 nominations for outstanding costumes design, set design and mask/puppet design within the Vancouver professional theatre community

Originally from England, Marina is now blessed to live in a beautiful heritage floating shack on the mighty Fraser River with 2 little dogs, a large fluffy cat and a lovely human, surrounded by plants, birds and good neighbours.

Marina has a degree in Fine Art Embroidery, has previously been know to belly dance on stilts and play a little with fire. When she grows up she would, amongst other thing like to be a milliner for drag queens & little dogs, and travel the world making flower mandalas.

And here’s how she answered my 6 questions about creativity:

What does it mean to you to be creative?
I see everything I do as a form of Creative Alchemy. I am passionate about the ongoing work of mixing creativity (both thought and form) with community and environment. I feel bringing beauty, function, laughter, ritual and art into (hopefully) everything I do is how I want to live. I have observed that making connections, fostering creativity in others and looking for creative solutions to social and global issues does make change, and a much better place to live in.

What triggers your creativity?
I love learning new things – new mediums, new ideas, new practices. Those who know me well will be thinking about how I have “my latest obsessions’! The interesting thing I have found is that these obsessions, then move into just becoming part of my creative makeup and slowly shift into what I am working on, or at least help inform the projects.

This year I have been studying collecting and making plants and herbal medicine with the Urban Herb School …and have just signed up for a woodcarving class this fall!

Researching images or cultures/time periods etc for theatre and events is fascinating to me. I have come to learn about many things that I wouldn’t have come into contact with because of ‘having’ to for a project – why else would I study what people wore in Persia in 1860, and what the political climate of the time did to what different characters in a play would then wear!

I also like to work creatively with others, especially people whom I can ‘play with’ in the aesthetic and conceptual realm. The energy that sparking and playing creatively together can produce is amazing – time disappears, and magic happens!

What hinders your creativity?
Being or feeling isolated. On the other hand, being overwhelmed and too busy can also hinder my creative process – I guess it is (as usual!) about balance! The mixing of right brained work and left brained work in a project can also be tricky and can make the creative process be a bit harder to click into.

What’s the wildest journey your venturesome spirit has taken you on?
I have noticed that when I am able to be connecting with others and ‘in the zone’ of feeling curious, interested, free, happy, creative and friendly, that beautiful adventures unfold. That synchronicities and amazing connections happen, and so wild journeys can occur just walking to the corner store and chatting with neighbours, or teaching a shrine building workshop – as well as traveling to small villages in Guatemala to meet textile artists, or Trinidad to ‘play Mas’ during Carnival with some incredible artists. It’s all a state of being, and how we connect together…now if only I could remember to do that 24/7!

What does being bold and provocative mean to you?
What an appropriate question coming from Ms Dolly…the Queen of Bold and Provocative!

I feel that being bold and provocative has changed for me over the years. I am at present interested in being more of a ‘gentle ARTivist’ in the sense that maybe in the past being Bold and Provocative meant making giant puppets and being on stilts as Ms Demeanour (my drag queen persona!) “Queen of White Collar Crime”, blowing kisses at the police during an APEC rally in 1997. Today I think being bold and provocative is more along the lines of seeing all beings as family, creating beauty wherever one goes, noticing the sacred nature around us and living peacefully moment to moment, while working for social and environmental change.

In comparison, the stilts are of course easier to pull off!

What’s next for you?
As I live in a Slough with a woodstove, the next thing today is chopping firewood and getting things ready for winter in this floating converted net-loft.

Project wise, We (Paula Jardine and myself) are gearing up for the 7th annual All Souls event at Mountain View Cemetery this coming October – a project near and dear to my heart that is an honour to be able to work on.

I am also making a piece of ‘Edible Fashion” for a Sustainability/food security conference at the Roundhouse this fall.

I am planning on continuing to develop a relationship with the natural world, by working with the AILN (Art Is Land Network) in Vancouver, hopefully getting into a community garden, continuing studying herbal medicine and maybe getting hold of an essential oil still (if my obsession hasn’t shifted to something else by then), so I can literally do some creative alchemy!

And here’s an article and a few websites that inspires Marina’s creativity:

An Interview by Anna Wilkinson, Celebrating Life and Death: All Souls at Vancouver’s Mountain View Cemetery

Green Museum Website

Plant Based Medicine Website

Urban Herb School Website

Thank you Marina! For the colour and energy and light and beauty and all of it!

To hear about the next Woman of the Month, follow DollyFaye on Twitter!

Posted in Woman of the Month | No Responses »
Tags: creativity, Designer, Inspiration, Marina Szijarto, Woman of the Month

Woman of the Month Before – Dyana Valentine

Monday, August 29th, 2011

Presenting September’s Woman of the Month:

Dyana Valentine

Here’s a little bit about her:

Dyana Valentine is not for the faint of heart. She’s spent the past 12 years instigating entrepreneurs and teams to complete seemingly impossible projects—we’re talking major brand overhauls, six-figure product launches, full-fledged manuscripts. She serves up straight-from-the-hip advice in online magazines and columns all over the ‘net…in a past life, she was an idiot-savant microsurgery tech, worked for the Olympic Games organizing committee, and was personally approached by the FBI with a recruitment invitation—for classified reasons – on two separate occasions.

And here’s how she answered my 6 questions about creativity:

What does it mean to you to be creative?
I don’t really tease creativity away from the other parts of me, so this is challenging to answer. A friend of mine talks about Project Runway (an obsession of hers), especially the part where Tim Gunn goes to visit the designers at home–and their family tell stories and say, “Ohhhh, yess, we always knew that he was going to be a designer. He always made clothes for Barbies and prom dresses for all of his friends.” While the whole family nodded in oh-yes-that-was-strange ways. My friend suddenly realized that OH WOW, not everyone was born like we were–making up stories, waking up and telling cinematic dreams, having all ages of friends, simultaneously holding hobbies in science, drama and horseback riding. It’s true–I take it so completely for granted that it always surprises me when someone asks what it means to be creative. So, all that hubub of an intro to say–thank you for asking. I think it means that I am being fully myself, that I am exercising my cosmic gifts for good, not evil.

What triggers your creativity?
4am, sex, chocolate, travel, quiet lakes and loud oceans, flirting, very large crowds of humans organized into a common objective or together by agreement.

What hinders your creativity?
Folks who lead with “no”, sitting still for long periods of time, eating mayonnaise and feeling sorry for myself, spreadsheets, driving in rush hour, liars.

What’s the wildest journey your venturesome spirit has taken you on?
The Woke Up Knowing Experience. It has been a trust trip, for sure.

What does being bold and provocative mean to you?
Hmmm, I’m not sure–you mean like breathing air, being made of water? I think the side effects are boldness and provocation–and also in the eye of the object. I think the actual thing that’s happening is that I value enthusiasm, bold faith and honesty, at almost all times. It may feel like “I’m going to get you!” or make people feel like they are in the hot seat, but I’m not simply thrill-seeking, (well, not all the time) but because I have a very high standard

What’s next for you?
I’m very excited to be moving into muse work. I realized this year that my practice is rooted in helping artists, performers and athletes raise their vibration high enough that they can make good decisions, test ideas and communicate their mission clearly. It may “seem” like coaching, because that’s the closest definition we have in common vocabulary, but it’s not. It is a deep joining together to collaborate in service to the highest possible expression of the team or person asking to be mused. It’s wonderful and my total honor to be an live event emcee, on-camera interviewer and practical muse.

Be sure to check out Dyana’s website.

And here’s an event/project/party that inspires Dyana’s creativity:

50 for 50

Thank you Dyana for being born creative!

To hear about the next Woman of the Month, follow DollyFaye on Twitter!

Posted in Woman of the Month | No Responses »
Tags: creativity, Dyana Valentine, Inspiration, Woman of the Month