With a few days before the Awesome Showcase, we headed down to the Vancouver is Awesome office to talk with Editor-in-Chief, Bob Kronbauer, and curator, Randy Laybourne, about their upcoming exhibition.   A 30+ collection of some of Vancouver’s most seasoned artists as well as up-and-comers will be participating in the show and hopefully gaining some recognition from our globe-wide visitors.  The show is coordinated to run the same duration as our 2010 Winter Olympic Games so be sure to make it out to Shine in the daytime from February 12th to the 28th to experience what our young art culture is offering.  Huge thanks to Bob and Randy for taking a bit of time from their hectic schedules to shed light on the show.  By the looks of things in the studio, it’s shaping up to be something special for such a dynamic time in our city.  Stay on the lookout for the latter half to a 2-part interview we’ve got cooking up with Bob involving news on his upcoming ventures which includes a couple sneaker deals with Emerica and Nike SB!  BTW Opening Party starts tomorrow at Shine 364 Water Street, go to rsvp@shinenightclub.com for guestlist invite.

http://www.vancouverisawesome.com

http://www.lookforwardtothepast.com

First off can you let us know what the Awesome Showcase is all about?

Randy: The awesome showcase is just bringing together local artists and kind of present them to all the visitors coming into the Winter Games or Olympics or whatever you’re allowed to call them.  Just take advantage of all these visitors and showcase some of the great artists and designers and photographers in Vancouver.

Is there a theme running through the exhibition or is it really just an “awesome” collection of artists and their pieces?

R: Kind of, it’s inspired by what Jeff Hamada’s doing with Booooooom kind of just putting the work into three categories, so we have photography, visual arts, and mixed media and just kind of splitting everyone a part.  Obviously, there’s some people where it’s hard to categorize their work and then some people have work in every single category.  It’s a variety of stuff and we’re going to present each category for a period of 5 to 6 days.  With the opening we’re going to show everything so it’ll be like boom with a crazy amount of stuff.

Was there a method to the mad amount of artists that you have contributing to the showcase?

R: Haha, ya.  The method is, if something gets stolen, it doesn’t really matter because we’re doing photographic prints.  I had all the artists submit digital images so that you know, nothing is real it’s only the images.  It’s the images that matter.

How did you go about curating this exhibition?

R: In conceptualizing this show it was a bit tricky.  It has to be taken down every night, since the night club is open.  So the work had to be easy to put up and able to take a little bit of wear and tear.  We didn’t want any artist’s work to get damaged so we came up with a standard format of 8 x 12 photographic prints.  It made it super easy to get the work (uploading and downloading files).

What was the process behind putting your own pieces together for the show?

R: I participated in each category; photography, visual art and mixed media, so I went through some current photos, drawings and digital images.  It’s not easy to pick so I just chose a couple favorites from the past year. With the photo “Looking Up”, as soon as I saw this photo it didn’t matter that it was my wife, it was just a great shot.

Shine doesn’t seem like the typical venue for an art show, was there something specific about why you chose it?

Bob: They actually came to us.  They’re a nightclub so they’re generally only open at night but they were granted a special liquor license to be open during the day throughout the Olympics.  They approached us about showcasing Vancouver artists’ work on the walls, to bring in something special.  If you go in the back of Shine it’ll be like a sports bar where you can go in and have a drink and watch the Games, we’ll be taking over the front part with the artwork.  Also we’ll have a soundtrack supplied by Vancouver musicians via CBC Radio 3, so there’s a double whammy of Vancouver artists that’ll hit you when you walk in the door.

What can people expect as the show goes on, will it be changing at all in those two weeks?

R: The show is going to change every day.  The images probably won’t be placed in the exact spot each day and about every 6 days a new category will appear. We are going to do Mix Media from the 12th to 16th, Photography from the 17th to 22nd and finally Visual Art from the 22nd to 28th.