Eastside Culture Crawl—Day 2

Strathcona
Saturday November 19

Day two and it's time to get serious about hitting the studios. Since it's my first crawl I wandered through the heart of the Strathcona area where many of the artists work and live.

Elemental Designs
717 Hawks Ave
Sculptor Sandra Bilawich works in stone and metal. There's a backwards cuckoo clock with a mirror image face that runs counterclockwise. Her trumpet candle holder is made from bits of recycled metal. Old saxophones don't die, they get recycled into a cool water fountain by Bilawich. I liked her pieces, and they are quite reasonably priced.

Arnt Arntzen
800 Keefer St
Arntzen works mostly in metal and builds furniture. His signature cigar shaped rocketship sidetable is a retro-futuristic bit of whimsey. The metal fish would make an interesting conversation starter at your next cocktail party next to the sushi tray. His beautiful reclaimed wood and metal desk is priced at a cool $5800. Outside the building is what appears to be a high voltage insulator from an electrical transmission tower which looks like some alien phallic sculpture.

Scott Plumbe Studios
737 Keefer St
Scott Plumbe seems to be slightly obsessed with Tibet and Buddhism. These are the subjects of his paintings which really embody the spirit of the people and the religious symbols in a photo-realistic way.

Big Green House
450 Heatley St
Artist Ruth Scheuing provides a computer geek's delight in the Big Green House. Her GPS tracks of her trips around the Lower Mainland are an unexpected study on the aesthetics of geography and paths. Her tapestries of Ada Lovelace are a wonderful homage to the world's first computer programmer.

Alley Gallery
715 E Pender St
Probably the most far out artwork of the crawl emerges from the twisted mind of Mad Dog. Playing with dolls takes on an entirely different meaning with his child's dolls dressed in BDSM outfits and fitted with angel wings. Various mounted doll heads in leather fetish hoods and masks are a fetishist headhunter's delight. Alternately creepy, and hilarious in equal measure.