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The Social Yoga has married Ted Talks with your neighbourhood yoga class to produce The Storytelling Series — an evening of stretching, strengthening, and socializing followed by an opportunity to hear from experts in Relationships, Money/ Finance, Adversity, & Creativity. Check out thesocialyoga.com/shop/the-storytelling-series for more info (Advance registration required. Sorry, no drop-ins).

Hot Art Wet City gallery presents the second annual Hot Talks in partnership with the Eastside Culture Crawl and curated by Rachael Ashe. Join us for an evening of intimate and entertaining talks by artists, designers, and craftspeople. The eight speakers represent a small cross-section of the wide variety of artists participating in the 2015 Culture Crawl. Each speaker will present their work, a peek into their studio, and share their process in a short “Show & Tell” style talk. Artists: Ben Z Cooper, Jacqueline Robins, Renée MacDonald, M.A.Tateishi, Ross den Otter, Simone Richmond, Toby Barratt / Propellor Design, & Christina Norberg.

Radius Clause
 
Boyfriend attempts to measure the spaces between reality and it’s depictions. She’ll trace the radial line which spans the circular feedback loop of media consumption and individual action, looking at how depictions of love & sexuality are perpetuated and justified by mainstream messaging. More specifically, Boyfriend will discuss the motivations, inspirations and references behind her Love Your Boyfriend EP and the tools she used to communicate those ideas.

Rap Game Bette Midler. English Major Rap. Rap Cabaret. Boyfriend has garnered a collection of buzzy descriptors that attempt to summarize her particular brand of performance. But perhaps, like the Grand Canyon, Boyfriend is best witnessed in the flesh. Catch her at Pemberton Music Festival from July 16–19, 2015.

HOT TALKS: Eastside Culture Crawl
November 13, 2014
 
We partnered with the Eastside Culture Crawl for a special edition of Hot Talks. An evening of short talks by artists participating in the 2014 Culture Crawl including: Jon Shaw, Holly Cruise, Claire Madill/heyday design, Patsy Kay Kolesar, Reilly Lievers, David Robinson, and Robin Ripley. “Show & Tell” style talk followed by Q&A (To see the Q&A, watch the video on Youtube).

The Eastside Culture Crawl is an annual 4-day visual arts festival in November that involves artists on Vancouver’s Eastside opening their studio to the public. The event is focused on the area bounded by Main St., 1st Ave., Victoria Drive, and the Waterfront and involves painters, jewelers, sculptors, furniture makers, weavers, potters, printmakers, photographers, glassblowers; from emerging artists to those internationally established. Check it out November 20-23, 2014.

Hot Talks: Tod Seelie
July 22, 2014
 
Tod Seelie loves New York, but not the version depicted in postcards. His city is an underground haven for people at society’s edges, people who come alive at night, who make music and art and noise and mess; punk bands and bike parades, abandoned spaces and skeezy clubs, junk-filled lots and sketchy streets, his book Bright Nights is a startlingly beautiful collection of images capturing a gritty culture that belies the city’s glamorous persona. Interspersed throughout the book are texts from Seelie’s friends and fellow artists, along with an introduction by Jeff Stark, editor of the iconic alternative events e-mail list Nonsense NYC. At this Hot Talk, you’ll see photos from his book, hear the stories that went in to the creation and what was going on behind the scenes, and a bit about Tod’s process.

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Tod Seelie has photographed in over 25 countries on five different continents. Originally from Cleveland, he relocated to Brooklyn in 1997. Tod was a founding member of The Miss Rockaway Armada, and continued on to travel by raft with both manifestations of the Swimming Cities. His work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Stern Magazine, TIME Magazine, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, Spin, Juxtapoz, Thrasher, Vice, Der Speigel and ARTnews among others. His images also appear in the feature films Perfect Sense (2011) and Empire Me (2011). Tod has exhibited work in solo and group shows around the world and at Mass MoCA and the Philadelphia Art Alliance. His work has also appeared in photography and art books, such as The Vice Photo Book, Hijacked, Swoon, Street World and Backyard Shakedown. In 2013 Tod published his first book of photography, BRIGHT NIGHTS: Photographs of Another New York, with Prestel Publishing. The book chronicles 15 years of living and shooting in NYC, with 10 essays by fellow collaborators and cultural observers.

LEGO as a muse? Seriously? How could a designer, or any creative professional, possibly find inspiration from a simple plastic toy brick? Creative Blocks & Coloured Bricks will feature a blatant disregard to traditional creative process tactics and focus on playful techniques for smoothing out the speed bumps of creative blocks. We all love the thrill we feel when an idea forms, a project takes shape, the imagination surges, and a client smiles. I look forward to sharing how one particular playful process not only brought back the fun of creativity, but also serendipitously re-awakened essential design principles and practices. Work should be fun. Let’s play.

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Johnathon Vaughn Strebly has decades of experience and involvement in the creative industries, generating positive results for the people and organizations he works with. Committed to encouraging growth as well as change in the creative and applied arts, Johnathon is a past president of CAPIC Vancouver and currently sits as President of the vibrant GDCBC Executive. He is a founding committee member for Creative Mornings Vancouver and a contributor to local design institutions. Johnathon was the Program Coordinator for three design programs at Langara College, where he directly influenced the growth of young designers by teaching them the tried and true principles of design while balancing the difficult challenges of today’s design environment. Due to a lifelong obsession for fine food and drink, Johnathon is the co-creator of Gourmet vs Gourmand, a video based celebration of food culture. Johnathon is an old school punk rocker turned design professional. The mohawk may be gone but he still stands by its ethos: Create change from the inside.

Hot Talks: Corwin Hiebert
July 30, 2013
 
BE CREATIVE + GET PAID: Making a Living as a Creative Freelancer
 
Building a successful freelance business is not about you and your creative needs but rather the needs and wants of those you’re looking to extract money from (aka clients and customers). So how do you get started? How do you grow your business in such a way that you can be happy, productive, and earn a good living along the way? Good business decisions are what separate the martyrs from the entrepreneurs. This presentation will focus on providing tangible action steps, management, marketing ideas, and principles that can make independent creative work less stressful and more financially rewarding. How much should you charge for your work? Who is your target market? How can you make people curious in your work? How can you generate real demand over the long haul? These are some the questions that will be answered through examples, rants, nerdy digressions, and real-world advice by a business manager who gets it.

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Corwin Hiebert is a management and marketing consultant to creative entrepreneurs (such as world-renowned photographer and best-selling author David duChemin). He is the author of Living the Dream: Putting Your Creativity to Work [and Getting Paid] published by Peachpit Press (2013); he also has eBook titles on Craft and Vision and Flatbooks. Corwin’s company is Taendem Agency and he is a Business Development instructor at Vancouver Media Arts Institute (VanArts). He doesn’t blog, he delivers.

Hot Talks: Bruce Alcock
June 25, 2013
 
Your Self Out There:
Walking the spectrum from bullshit to truth in the creative life
 
From waiting tables to making art to advertising Coca-cola, Bruce Alcock looks over the last 25 years to examine who he is when he’s at home, or at a meeting table, or managing staff, or standing up and talking to a group of people in a gallery. Is client interaction performance, or are you simply who you are? In this age of digital self-representation, does your private identity change to sync with your public identity? The Onion’s headline “I am a Brand, Pathetic Man Says” points to empty self-representation, but any time you put yourself out there, you’re creating a persona that reflects your assumptions about the people you’re talking to, or working for, or just passing time with. From small talk (excruciating) to work talk (boring?) to letting out your inner beast, or weenie, or feather boa, what’s real and what’s not, what works, and what can you live with?

Bruce also posted the transcript to his talk here >

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As Creative Director of Global Mechanic, Bruce Alcock supervises all commercials and TV series made by the studio, including shows for PBS and the Cartoon Network. He has made over 500 TV commercials and award winning campaigns for clients like Coca-Cola, Bank of America, Molson, Kraft, Chrysler, Bell, and Proctor & Gamble. Bruce’s short films have competed at Sundance, TIFF and other festivals worldwide. He is currently in co-production with the NFB on a stereoscopic drawing short with writer Ed Riche, and exploring new mediums in 3D Projection Mapping for large commercial clients.

Sometimes It Ain’t Pretty:
How the Painful Parts of Creativity Can Be Our Strongest Assets

No amount of you-can-do-it cheerleading can prepare us for the inevitable pitfalls inherent to creative exploration. We’re going to struggle, we’re going to stumble, we’re going to fall flat on our face. The thing is, everyone does. So rather than avoiding failure at all costs, I say we allow – or even force – ourselves to dig deep into it for a while. From an intimate understanding of our relationship with failure we can become stronger, more flexible, less afraid, and more adventurous.

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Kim Werker leads a project called Mighty Ugly, helping people of all sorts work through their discomfort so they can have more fun making stuff and generally being creative. Her book on the subject is due out in the spring of 2014. She works as a writer and editor from her Vancouver home, which is also home to a two-year-old, a mutt, and a post-doctoral researcher.