Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist, visual artist and designer. His first novel in 1991 was Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. He has published thirteen novels, a collection of short stories, seven nonfiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. Coupland’s novels and visual work synthesize high and low culture, web technology, religion, and changes in human existence caused by modern technologies.
Douglas Coupland’s Museum of the Rapture was a site-specific installation interrogating life and death and things in between. It was installed in the underground parking garage at Toronto City Hall as part of the Museum For The End Of The World at the 2012 Scotiabank Nuit Blanche.
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Henry Street Settlement’s Abrons Arts Center is proud to present DECENTER: An Exhibition on the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show, curated by Andrianna Campbell and Daniel S. Palmer. Opening February 17, 2013 and on view through April 7, the exhibition celebrates the legacy of the Cubist paintings and sculptures in the historic 1913 Armory Show by featuring a group of 27 emerging and internationally recognized contemporary artists, who explore the changes in perception precipitated by our digital age and who closely parallel the Cubist vernacular of fragmentation, nonlinearity, simultaneity, and decenteredness. The show exhibits a group of artworks in the gallery, and also features digital works displayed at
DECENTER:
An Exhibition on the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show
February 17- April 7, 2013
466 Grand Street, New York, NY
www.decenterarmory.com
The exhibition commences on the 100th anniversary of the Armory Show, Sunday, February 17, with a 1913 Armory Show Centennial Event, which will feature panel discussions about the 1913 exhibition, as well as the theme of perception and art in the digital age, followed by an opening reception. The Abrons Arts Center gallery, which was established in 1963 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Armory Show, is located at 466 Grand Street, New York, NY.
Artists: Cory Arcangel, Tony Cokes, Douglas Coupland, David Kennedy Cutler, N. Dash, Michael Delucia, Jessica Eaton, Franklin Evans, Amy Feldman, Andrea Geyer, David Gilbert, Ethan Greenbaum, Gregor Hildebrandt, Butt Johnson, John Houck, Barbara Kasten, Andrew Kuo, Liz Magic Laser, Douglas Melini, Ulrike Mohr, Brenna Murphy, John Newman, Gabriel Orozco, Rafaël Rozendaal, Seher Shah, Travess Smalley, Sara VanDerBeek
The collection takes its inspiration from the “writer’s nook” and consists of a desk, chair, lamp, bookshelves.
The desk I write on every day is an escritoire — which is a sightly old fashioned furniture category, but a good one.
Escritoires are elegant: with one flip of a lid I can conceal mountains of junk inside while everyone looking thinks I’m this really together stylish person.
My escritoire is Japanese lacquer colored. Ever time I see its lush, civilized richness, my brain releases a small hit of dopamine, which in turn, makes me want to write more. It’s a successful feedback loop.
When I open my escritoire’s lid, it’s as if I’m inside my own brain, and I like what I see. Everything inside it is mine –– and because it has a lid, I know that nobody has messed with my brain since the last time I was in there.
But mostly I like escritoires because they exist purely for writing and nothing else. Their very existence is about the civilized creation of words, whether by ink or by electrons.
The “Douglas Coupland for SwitzerCultCreative” collection is a reflection of everything I use daily. These are pieces that will unleash creativity, dopamine, high style and timelessness into their user’s world.
When I went to art school in Hokkaido, I had to study several Japanese art forms — ikebana, rock arranging, calligraphy and sumi-e painting. I think everybody should study these things. It makes you reframe the way you see the world. These seats are unexpectedly ergonomic and work whether you’re doing ink work, or blogging on a MacBook Pro.
Lacquer is a perfect color. A few years back I bought a small piano and it needed repainting so I gave the painter a lacquer-colored bento box cup and he gave me a weird look. But when it was done? Beautiful. This scary old piano became something of beauty that people talk about years later. The red lacquer color is very underutilized in the West. This escritoire has that same eternal magic, yet it’s been updated with delicate inwardly scalloped brass hardware is reminiscent of Mac laptops.
I collect tempera paint pucks from various cultures. Ever since kindergarten, every time I see paint pucks my universe becomes larger and is filled with more possibilities. The colored boxes inset into the white escritoire take my mind back to living in Japan and using sumi-e paint. I think I have an actual crush on this piece. It’s juicy.
Lacquer
Tatami
Temple Door
Maple
Chrysanthemum
Small glimpses can sometimes color the rest of our lives. The checker pattern and periwinkle color in the lamps come from a brief 1986 memory I have of a sliding door I saw in Kyoto’s Ryoan-ji Temple.
Twenty-three years later I was reading a magazine and they showed the living room of actor Gary Cooper –– he had a really good sense of architectural style. I saw that he’d used the same color and motif on his living room’s main wall, and my brains almost dribbled out of my ears. I ripped out the page and then promptly lost it. I just went on Google and found out that Larry Gagosian bought it for 15.5 million dollars. Lucky guy.
The shades of these lamps are simple wire frames with translucent shoji-type material. The beige smaller lamp seemed like a nice accompaniment piece. Small lamps like this are friendly presences in any room.
Most people don’t know it, but books basically ony come in three sizes: paperback, hardcover and oversize. I have thousands of books and only a few books break this rule.
I made these shelves for myself in these three sizes, but I noticed that whenever people come to the house they pretty much always ask me where I bought them. They’re simple, smart, strong, and can be arranged in any number of configurations like Legos. They also have caps and kicks available should you want to change proportions.
I call them the Osaka shelves because when I was looking at earthquake photos from the 1995 Osaka quake, a wall came off an office bulding and I saw shelves very much like these ones inside.
The mechanical hardware on the shelves is dead simple: two dowels on the doors that fit within two grooves in the box. The covers smoothly open up, out and in, and a magnet keeps it flat in the closed position. I really think everybody who likes books should have a set of these. They’re terrific.
This is a Vancouver firm that works globally, exporting highest quality specialty furniture. All of it is made locally acording to sustainable ideals, and it embodies the best of what I think manufacturing will need to succeed in the coming decades.
Global Art Forum_7, the leading platform for cultural discussion and debate, explores Definitionism in 2013. Featuring commissioned projects and research, as well as six days of live talks, the Forum brings together a diverse lineup of artists, musicians, curators, strategists, writers and thinkers. It begins at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (March 17–18, 2013) and continues at Art Dubai, Madinat Jumeirah (March 20–23).
Global Art Forum 2013:
IT MEANS THIS
March 17–18
Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art
Doha
March 20–23
Art Dubai, Madinat Jumeirah
Dubai
www.artdubai.ae/global-art-forum
Speakers returning from previous years include writer and artist Douglas Coupland; curator Lara Khaldi (Director, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Ramallah); geostrategist and Director of Hybrid Reality Institute Parag Khanna; Turi Munthe, founder of ‘citizen journalist’ newswire Demotix; Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, London, Hans Ulrich Obrist; art patron and commentator Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi; and the Beirut-based critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie.
The Global Art Forum_7 features a range of commissions, including a series of “advert breaks” by upcoming artists Lantian Xie and Abdullah Al Mutairi, and two publications—Biography (contributors; Victoria Camblin, Douglas Coupland, Suna Kafadar, James Westcott, Charly Wilder) and Drone Fiction (contributors; Rayya Badran, Josh Begley, Hu Fang, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Tod Wodicka).
“We Were There… It’s the name of an impressive new monument in LeBreton Flats designed to keep alive the memory of Canadian firefighters killed in the line of duty or from work-related illnesses.
But it’s also a statement of bearing witness, which hundreds of people did Sunday morning as years of hard work by the Canadian Fallen Firefighters Foundation was unveiled under a bright September sky.”
Read more
www.ottawacitizen.com
See more images from the 2012 ceremony
www.pbase.com/wakenphotography
The Robert McLaughlin Gallery approached Coupland in the spring of 2010 with the idea of comissioning a major outdoor sculpture. His personal relationship with Arthur Erickson, the architect of the 1987 gallery expansion, and his ongoing interest in mid-century modernism, made the proposal particularily appealing to Coupland.
The approximately 27′ x 11′ relief sculpture entitled Group Portrait 1957 was permanently installed on the north/west facade of the RMG in September 2011.
Read more about the sculpture here.
Electric Ikebana is an audio-visual collaboration by writer/artist Douglas Coupland and musician Paul Humphreys from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark with the Global telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent.
The concept was to compose a musical track that interacts with telecommunications data of internet traffic and online activity, expressed in a visual manifestation.
Raw numerical data is visually translated into particles and their shape, colour, and quantity are determined by internet traffic volume and type.
It‘s the audio that initiates the coming together of the particles as they’re being driven by the music to build a digital form.
Each viewing is unique. This is due to the experience pulling in user‘s location and time of day while they control the point-of-view, fluidly moving around the environment.
The result is a creation that gives a voice and form to the online network, inspiring new possibilities of digital expression and electronic imaginings.
