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30 Oct 2023

Works From the Collection: Glenn Lewis and Kate Craig

  • Kate Craig

    Kate (Catherine) Shand Craig (Canadian, 1947-2002) was a multimedia artist whose work spanned costume, film, performance and photography. Craig experimented with role-play and costumes in performance and video. She adopted the camera as a mediating device to challenge the conventions of realist narratives around the female body and the natural landscape. After graduating from Dalhousie University in 1964, Craig met the artist Eric Metcalfe in 1967 while attending the University of Victoria. Together, they assumed the personas of Lady Brute and Dr. Brute and became involved in mail art networks, including Image Bank, International Image Exchange Directory and the first International Satellite Exchange Directory. In 1973, Craig co-founded the Western Front Society along with Martin Bartlett, Mo van Nostrand, Henry Greenhow, Glenn Lewis, Eric Metcalfe, Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov. While serving on the board of directors at the Western Front from 1973 to 1993, Craig curated the Artist-in-Residence Video Program, which provided local and international networks for artists. Her works have been presented nationally and internationally in exhibitions and can be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Museé d’Art Contemporain de Montréal and the National Gallery of Canada.

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  • Glenn Lewis

    Glenn Lewis (Canadian, b. 1935) is a contemporary conceptual artist based in Vancouver. Lewis became a central figure within Vancouver’s prolific avant-garde art scene of the late 1960s. Initially trained in ceramics, his practice expanded to include photography, sculpture, performance and video, and is often grounded in collaborative projects or approaches. Lewis’s work questions the dualities of the social and the natural, the conventional and the mythical, as well as the static and the transient. Over time he has become increasingly inspired by paradise myths, nature and topiary, which motivated his travels around the world photographing gardens. These interests intersect in his commitment to preserving rare and regional botany. Lewis received a degree from the Vancouver School of Art in 1958 (now Emily Carr University) and later a teaching degree from the University of British Columbia. He went on to study ceramics under artist and potter Bernard Leach at St. Ives in Cornwall, England from 1961 to 1963. Upon returning to Vancouver, Lewis became involved in numerous artists’ collectives and artist-run centres, including Intermedia (1970) and the New Era Social Club (1968). In 1973, he co-founded the Western Front Society with Martin Bartlett, Mo van Nostrand, Kate Craig, Henry Greenhow, Eric Metcalfe, Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov. As an educator, arts administrator and arts programmer, Lewis has curated numerous exhibitions and programs, including the Performance Art Program at the Western Front (1977-79), the Exhibition Program at the Western Front (1986-87) and the Western Front Historical Exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany (1983). Lewis has served on numerous boards and councils, including the Vancouver Art Gallery Board of Directors and the Western Front Board of Directors. His work has been exhibited extensively across Canada and abroad.

     

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By Michael Dang, Public Programs and Exhibitions Assistant, 2023

 

This rubber swim cap (1973) created by the artists Glenn Lewis and Kate Craig was a prop that was used in performances of Lewis’s New York Corres-sponge Dance School of Vancouver. Craig and Lewis were two of the founders of the artist-run centre Western Front, which was established the same year that this cap was made.1 In its early years, Western Front was a “laboratory” for collaborative and interdisciplinary artistic production that often blurred the spheres of what was considered art and life. Lewis, under the alias “Flakey Rrose Hips,” conceived of and often wore this swim cap, while Craig was responsible for its construction.2

I met with Lewis in his studio on 28 August 2023 to discuss his memories of the swim cap, where he was working on a new ceramic piece. Lewis remembers that Craig owned an industrial sewing machine that allowed her to construct these caps using the heavy-duty rubber of truck inner tubes. Lewis’s Corres-sponge Dance School was a play on Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School, a mail art network that many of the Western Front artists were members of.3 Meetings of the Corres-sponge Dance School would take place weekly in Vancouver, first at the Aquatic Centre and later at the Crystal Pool at Sunset Beach, and members would swim together wearing shark fin caps like this one. Lewis recalls that the meetings were informal, with participants creating variations on synchronized swimming routines (“we certainly weren’t professionals,” said Lewis, “we’d just swim around and we’d say, ok, let’s do this, let’s do the breast-stroke”), and more of an opportunity to get together, chat and relax.

Through these aquatic projects, “Flakey” gained notoriety as he was dubbed the “Esther Williams of Art” by Susan Subtle in the August 1974 issue of Esquire magazine, referring to the Hollywood film star and competitive swimmer.4 In addition to the Corres-sponge Dance School meetings, these caps were used in other works involving the Western Fronters including the February 1974 Decca Dance in Los Angeles, a mock awards gala that referenced Robert Filliou’s idea of Arts 1,000,011th Birthday.5 Decca Dance brought together members of the Eternal Network from around the world and “Flakey” served as an emcee for the ceremony.

Lewis recalls that the motif of the shark fin had its origins in the late 1960s with the early artist-run initiative Intermedia, “the original meeting place” of the artists who would later become associated with Western Front.6 Lewis believes that an abstract painting including shark-fins by one of his colleagues at Intermedia was the impetus for the recurring use of the shark-fin, as well as the motif’s visual affinity to Michael Morris’ “lightning bolts.” The name “Flakey Rrose Hips” also had similar origins in the Intermedia scene as Gary Lee-Nova had addressed a piece of correspondence to Lewis as “Flakey Pie Crust,” a reference to the latter artist’s interest in food performances, and to Marcel Duchamp’s alter-ego Rrose Selavy.

Lewis’s playful and subversive sense of humour with its satirical edge persists in his work today as it did in the 1970s with the Corres-sponge Dance School. While we were in his studio, Lewis explained that the new ceramic piece he was working on was a parody of the opulent Meissen-style porcelain that was popular in eighteenth century Europe, this one with detailed ornamentation of vines and ivy leaves as well as a depiction of Narcissus wearing a pair of contemporary headphones. The shark-fin bathing cap, part of the immense Morris/Trasov Archive in the Belkin’s collection, will be on display as part of the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines that opens on 17 November 2023.

Works from the Collection considers works in the Belkin’s permanent collection in conversation with ongoing exhibitions, programs and the world around us. This entry is part of a series by Michael Dang, Public Programs and Exhibitions Assistant and candidate in the Critical and Curatorial Studies Program at UBC, that digs into the Belkin’s Archive collection. Dang has been researching works in the Archive in preparation for his upcoming practicum exhibition opening in 2024.  To see more of the Belkin’s archival collection, visit belkin.ubc.ca/collection.

Image (above): kate craig and glenn lewis, shark fin swim cap (detail), 1973. Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Morris/Trasov Archive (M/T 156).  Photo: Rachel Topham Photography.

 

  • Kate Craig

    Kate (Catherine) Shand Craig (Canadian, 1947-2002) was a multimedia artist whose work spanned costume, film, performance and photography. Craig experimented with role-play and costumes in performance and video. She adopted the camera as a mediating device to challenge the conventions of realist narratives around the female body and the natural landscape. After graduating from Dalhousie University in 1964, Craig met the artist Eric Metcalfe in 1967 while attending the University of Victoria. Together, they assumed the personas of Lady Brute and Dr. Brute and became involved in mail art networks, including Image Bank, International Image Exchange Directory and the first International Satellite Exchange Directory. In 1973, Craig co-founded the Western Front Society along with Martin Bartlett, Mo van Nostrand, Henry Greenhow, Glenn Lewis, Eric Metcalfe, Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov. While serving on the board of directors at the Western Front from 1973 to 1993, Craig curated the Artist-in-Residence Video Program, which provided local and international networks for artists. Her works have been presented nationally and internationally in exhibitions and can be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Museé d’Art Contemporain de Montréal and the National Gallery of Canada.

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  • Glenn Lewis

    Glenn Lewis (Canadian, b. 1935) is a contemporary conceptual artist based in Vancouver. Lewis became a central figure within Vancouver’s prolific avant-garde art scene of the late 1960s. Initially trained in ceramics, his practice expanded to include photography, sculpture, performance and video, and is often grounded in collaborative projects or approaches. Lewis’s work questions the dualities of the social and the natural, the conventional and the mythical, as well as the static and the transient. Over time he has become increasingly inspired by paradise myths, nature and topiary, which motivated his travels around the world photographing gardens. These interests intersect in his commitment to preserving rare and regional botany. Lewis received a degree from the Vancouver School of Art in 1958 (now Emily Carr University) and later a teaching degree from the University of British Columbia. He went on to study ceramics under artist and potter Bernard Leach at St. Ives in Cornwall, England from 1961 to 1963. Upon returning to Vancouver, Lewis became involved in numerous artists’ collectives and artist-run centres, including Intermedia (1970) and the New Era Social Club (1968). In 1973, he co-founded the Western Front Society with Martin Bartlett, Mo van Nostrand, Kate Craig, Henry Greenhow, Eric Metcalfe, Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov. As an educator, arts administrator and arts programmer, Lewis has curated numerous exhibitions and programs, including the Performance Art Program at the Western Front (1977-79), the Exhibition Program at the Western Front (1986-87) and the Western Front Historical Exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany (1983). Lewis has served on numerous boards and councils, including the Vancouver Art Gallery Board of Directors and the Western Front Board of Directors. His work has been exhibited extensively across Canada and abroad.

     

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End Notes

  1. For more information about mail art, Western Front and Vancouver’s art scene in the 1970s, see Kate Craig: Skin (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1998); Vancouver: Art and Artists 1931-1983 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1983); Scott Watson, ed., Image Bank (Vancouver and Berlin: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery; Berlin: KW Institute For Contemporary Art, 2019) and Keith Wallace, ed., Whispered Art History: Twenty Years at the Western Front (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993).

  2. A predominant strategy among correspondence artists was the creation of personas, aliases and alter-egos, such as Lewis’s “Flakey” and Craig’s contemporaneous “Lady Brute,” as ways of investigating and interrogating hegemonic notions of identity and “the link between culture, its fascination with images and the way the self is produced.” Lewis sees his alias much differently than Craig’s, however, as he remembers there being no such distinct “Flakey” persona from himself but rather thought of it as an amusing name to take up. See also Susan Subtle, “Their Arts Belong To Dada,” Esquire, August 1974, 53 and Watson, “In The Image Bank,” Image Bank, 20.

  3. The name was also an allusion to the French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, who stated in his 1973 “Whispered Art History” that art was invented “1,000,000 years ago” by a man who dropped a dry-sponge into water. See Bruce Canyon, “Kate Craig: But Is It Art?,” in Kate Craig: Skin, 52.

  4. Glenn Lewis, “Personal Perspectives,” in Vancouver: Art and Artists 1931-1983, 262 and Subtle, “Their Arts Belong To Dada,” 53.

  5. For more information about Decca Dance, see Scott Watson, “In The Image Bank,” 20.

  6. Lewis was amused when I mentioned to him during our interview that the Corres-sponge Dance School’s shark-fin motif pre-dated Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jaws (1975) by about two years.