Doug and Ken: Two Against the Beyond
Ken Steacy with Douglas Coupland Toronto, 2504 AD 2004
As everyone from professional trend forecasters to late-night cable psychics know, the future is an unknown (and valuable) quantity to most. But if the clues of the future can be found in close observation of the present, author and artist Douglas Coupland might be considered a better futurist than most; with his sharp eye and able wit, he has spent the better part of 20 years presciently putting words to new-but-lasting cultural phenomena like Generation X and Microserfs.
Now, a Victoria exhibition is showcasing a decade-long collaboration between Coupland and his friend Ken Steacy, an accomplished comic-book artist, that puts thousands of Coupland’s farsighted words into pictures.
These pictures—some of which depict a future Kitsilano under siege and a year 2504 Toronto dominated by a truncated, decayed CN Tower—can seem bleak. But it’s clear that the process was an enjoyable one for these two sci-fi-loving artists.
As Steacy, who has illustrated for iconic narratives including Astro Boy, Spider-Man, Harry Potter and Star Wars, among others, explains in his artist statement, the exhibit “is about the dynamic process we employ when working together. Doug conveys the subject in question, then together we assemble and work with both random abandon and Lego-like structure, using pencil, pen and ink, and pixels. Once completed, it’s invariably something that retains evidence of the initial idea, but is still parsecs from the point of departure.”
In the end, it’s these artists’ visions of the future, as well as their dynamism in the present, that makes “Doug and Ken: Collaborations 1997–2008” a show worth seeing. (3-3690 Shelbourne St, Victoria BC)
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Ken Steacy with Douglas Coupland Kitsilano 2000 |
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