Been a quiet holiday season at MOV (and quiet on the blog front! It’s been awhile!). Consider it the calm before the storm. In just under two weeks we’ll open Art of Craft, an exhibit that comes to us via the Cultural Olympiad. The exhibit is a national survey of Canadian craft with a section devoted to works from B.C. and the Yukon, and another section featuring 47 objects from Korea. (More posts on Art of Craft to come. Meantime, buy your tickets to the opening party on January 13 here.) A second exhibit from the Cultural Olympiad opens on February 4 and features the incredible immersive work Tracing Night by Toronto artist Ed Pien. Details here (and, again, more to follow in upcoming posts). In addition, we’ve extended the run of Working Wood, our look at the work of five Vancouver woodworkers, to February 7. Ravishing Beasts continues to the end of February. It’s a packed house.

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This is the fifth (and final) installment in our series on the Vancouver woodworkers featured in our current MOV Studio Exhibit, Working Wood, on view now until January 3, 2010. The last word goes to Ben Burnett of Zillion Design.

What inspired the Pivot Table?
My background is as a sculptor, and my sculptures are always interactive. My progression into furniture design was fostered by a fascination with interaction, and the fact that a piece of furniture can be the ultimate sculptural expression. A piece of furniture can remain fresh if you’re able to interact with it. In the way that you’d rearrange the furniture in the room to keep the room fresh, you can rearrange this piece.

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This is the fourth installment in our series on the Vancouver woodworkers featured in our current MOV Studio Exhibit, Working Wood, on view now until January 3, 2010. Here, three questions for Christian Woo.

What inspired Low Bench?
The piece has roots in early-modern furniture, which was being designed mid-century. Emphasis was placed on form,
 function, and simplicity. The intrinsic values in the wood are
displayed and not overpowered by design.

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This is the third installment in our series on the Vancouver
woodworkers featured in our current MOV Studio Exhibit, Working Wood, on view now until January 3, 2010. Now up: Derek Morton of Park Studio.

What inspired your coffee table?
The shape came from an airport hangar in Dallas, actually. I really like to try to keep the form simple so the material can speak for itself. I very rarely use lacquer, just all-natural materials and oils, and if I want something white, I use something in that colour. This table was designed in 2006 for my first Culture Crawl. It’s low-profile, with storage—a necessity for any good coffee table—and it’s a modular design so it can come with wheels, and customizable drawers. It can also be used as an entertainment unit.

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Part two of a series of interviews with the woodworkers featured in Working Wood, an MOV Studio exhibit on view thru January 3, 2010. Here, Kurt Dexel discusses 10 years of building furniture by hand.

What inspired your angled console table and cork stool? (Pictured left.)
It’s part of a collection of furniture I’ve done in the same style. Each piece has a mid-century-modern style, mixed with a minimalist approach.

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Part one of a series of interviews with the woodworkers featured in Working Wood, an MOV Studio exhibit on view thru January 3, 2010. Here, Enrico Konig shares his insights on working in Vancouver and what inspired Hall Table (pictured left).

How does Vancouver influence your work?
People always talk about being influenced by landscapes. I’m not. I’m influenced just by being in an environment where people are making a lot of things. It’s important to be part of a larger community. People like Peter Pierobon and Arnt Arntzen have been a huge source of inspiration.

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When we turned our frumpy orientation gallery into the MOV Studio this past June (backstory and images here), we envisioned a place where we could host a new slate of public programs and small, topical exhibits with an emphasis on design and local ideas. The first MOV Studio exhibit was a showing of Ian Wallace photographs capturing Vancouver pre-Expo ‘86. The second was Contexture’s Home Phone, an inventive nine-square-foot shelter created from a decommissioned telephone booth.

The third is Working Wood. Launched Thursday night, the exhibit showcases five pieces of wood furniture from five emerging Vancouver woodworkers. (Is “emerging” the right word there? Like other Vancouver artists, be they photo-conceptualists, painters, or ceramicists, these woodworkers are probably better known outside the city limits than they are within. Why is that? Does the city take a conservative approach to new work? Or does our creative class focus on promoting themselves to bigger, more lucrative markets back east and south of the border? The subject for another post, perhaps.)

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