The Indyish Core.

1. complexgeometries

Clayton Evans is a designer, pulling increasingly diverse and exciting collections together over the years I’ve known him, and an artist in the wider, more complex meaning of the term, pulling exciting networks of people and projects together as well, in dizzying combinations. When we first met, Clayton Evans was making electronic music, and staging joyful, performative happenings with museums in Calgary (if I remember correctly) and possibly also still winning swing dancing competitions. He was then, and is now, an exhilarating person to be around because he is simultaneously quiet, kind and peaceable; while busting under the surface with colourful dreams, multi-disciplinary technical aptitude, and a heroic creative energy. Over the past few years his adventures have ratcheted-up the intensity. He launched the first Consistent Variable Project in Montreal, drawing over 50 designers- 42 groups- into a month long experiment, which we’ve since turned into a design workbook for young people. He is constantly producing, and in between he travels to craft fairs with his wares, turning down some of the more chichi boutiques in town in order to continue to work in the ways that inspire him. This spring he coordinated and curated a Second Trial of the Consistent Variable Project, at the behest of Terminus1525, and together helped celebrate the launch of Worn Fashion Journal’s Issue 2 in style.

2. Pearls Before Swine

Himo Martin experiments with technological music, and farming, and he has a style that’s similar to Clayton’s, though he is perhaps even more shy and retiring. His business cards, for example, have no name or contact information on them, just an imprint of the logo and a single pearl dangling on a fine, blackened chain. He giggles mischievously when you talk about this, because it’s just one of countless small ways he tries to escape the things he hates about the fashion industry. His work is based on a foundation of crafty rebellion, working the system’s logic into tight and interesting circles by doing things like cherishing the imperfect pearl, the unlovable by-product of a “culturing” industry.

3. Damned Dollies

Dana De Kuyper is one of those Montreal art stars way more feted abroad then her pleasant, neighborhood girl-on-bike personality might suggest. Her Damned Dollies have appeared in Bust, Marmalade, British Vogue, Strut, Elle Quebec, yada yada lots of awesomeness. It turns out that we grew up within minutes of each other, and dated the same people within years of each other, and are generally as perversely over-connected to each other as any other primarily anglo Montrealers, and yet it took Clayton Evans coming from way out west for us to meet. Such is life. Dana, like Clayton, Himo and myself, is interested in all kinds of art directions, pushing the sweet and sexy and meticulously crafted anarchy of her Damned Dollies into musical experimentation and beyond.

4. KMC

KMC, I met in person only briefly at a designer sale on Viger, in Old Montreal, where she was selling the papier mache house she had made, as well as a painting, I believe. She is a musical performer and a fearless young artist person, and the niece of Himo Martin of Pearls before Swine who speaks proudly about her talents and energy to me every time we meet.

5. Neale

Neale is a dear fellow, who’s work I became interested in when I found out that the smiling face he’d drawn and silk screened onto t-shirts, posters, and bags, was the legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. At a New Years Eve party at his lovely girlfriend’s house- Raphaelle Aubin, currently a curatorial consultant- Neale brought a gift for her that I believe may have sealed the deal on their love, and on my giggling, head-shaking appreciation for his style: a CD with the song “The Final Countdown” burned onto it 14 times, which they played as we were gathering our coats to head out to the next stage of the evening. Elran and I, being the sneaky geeks we are, made out on the porch and then snuck off home to the echoing tunes of track number five. Neale has all kinds of tinkering love of technology, working with his brother to rewire the old Speak and Spells and trolling all the garage sales he can get to for the good quirky finds.

6. Re-Gen

Jen Gilpin is a beautiful designer, working carefully, bravely, lovingly on her ideas. When she lived in London and was very broke, she went around to the designer’s studios collecting off-cuts of fine fabric and made whole collections with these tricky bits and pieces. She’s motivated by the math in design, I think, and by the way she can see the potential for complex relationships in cloth, and make them real. It makes loads of conceptual sense to me that she works in close proximity to Clayton and his complexgeometries operation, Maryanne and her bright playful crafting, and that she shares her studio with Himo Martin and his delicate, waste-critical rebellion. The most remarkable of Jen Gilpin’s pieces, in my opinion, are all derived from the mathematical harmonies of the Fibonacci sequence, which have fascinated theorists of all kinds for a long time. The quotients of the Fibonacci sequence- the fractions it forms when folded in on itself- approach the Golden Mean, a number associated with natural order and the logic of the universe, which is a reassuring thing to have around you, swirling with your movements as you talk or gesture, brushing up against your skin.

7. Worn Journal

Serah-Marie McMahon is the driving force behind Worn Fashion Journal. She’s a fiber artist, author/editor, and a gifted photographer. She’s got a sharp eye, limited tolerance for fluffy nonsense, and a contagious excitement about history. Before settling down with her husband and two cats to become a university student, she was an agent for models, photographers and stylists with Giovanni Modeling Agency in Toronto, and now she’s on the run from some of the more irritating aspects of that industry, delving deeper into the worlds of artful attire missing from the modern, air brushed fashion rags. She’s also one of my oldest friends in the world and I cried at her wedding wearing vintage red, holding tulips of Anna Sui mauve.

8. Lickety-Split

Amber Goodwyn is the fierce and passionate mistress of this brave publication. She takes on the whole world of intense emotions that surface when people are confronted with sexuality, and so she has more courage then I. Involving something that self-identifies as porn is a tricky thing to do on an all ages site, but I have to stand by my sense that we sometimes make way too much of a big deal about sex, and that there might be less angst, anxiety and built up aggression around if we were better able to own and understand the things that give us release. Goodwyn’s work suggests that she is not simply out to scandalize and shock, instead she’s deeply invested in the politics of embracing who we are as sexual beings, and of getting outside the shame and fear that sometimes clamp down around our real hopes, desires, fantasies and dreams. Her smutty little zine includes pornography, but also writing on sex theory, performance art, found photography and more. She guest hosts radio shows about sex health and gender, and works with a great neighborhood non-profit organization called Head and Hands.

9. G-Eunuch Digest

Miranda Campbell is the chief of this publication I believe, and her love Adam Waito, lead singer of Telefauna, is right up there with her, working the layout and interviews and performing with her in their madcap gender playful photo sessions. Miranda is a phD student, and a language teacher, and another dear and softly anarchic girl, giving little playful jabs at the portrayal of Men in popular culture, exploring, like Serah-Marie, the stewing currents of stories that have yet to be unpacked in her area of interest. Though the Digest is now quietly defunct, it’s first two issues can still be found here, and we’ll be drawing more Miranda and G-Eunuch content on line over time.

10. Telefauna

Adam Waito is the gentleman I know best from this outfit and we have recently karaoke’d together in Miranda’s livingroom. He’s got a good deep chuckle, and a drama teacher’s open mannerisms both of which get electrified into full effect during out his stage performances with Telefauna. The whole band is smart, and sly and deeply funky and nice and we’ve ended up cornered in hallways; or in performance halls with self organizing blimps; or on couches at vegan sushi parties talking excitedly about open source, privacy on the internet, processors and other hopelessly deliciously geeky things, so though they’re terribly cool and somewhat intimidating I continued to harass them til they were Indyish.

11. Shoot the Moon

Daniel Schachter is perhaps one of the guys who, recently, I’ve had the most productive back and forth with about music, songs, movies, grants, Indyish. He in an incredible song writer, pulling a world of startling and specific vocabulary and story into songs, and still makes them singable, sing-along-able, and sad sometimes, but deeply catchy. He writes tight little challenges for the tongue, and then throws his heart and vocal chords into the sound. He and Tara Martin and Nadia Bashalani and I did some schooling together, and they’ve known each other long and well, so on some tracks when the three of them sing you can hear a whole world of strong personalities riding and colliding. The band is changing now in some interesting ways, going off in some new formations and directions, and I think it’ll all be interesting and good good good. Elran is a particular fan of James Rosen’s, who plays bass and guitar- shoeless sometimes and in a bike shirt designed by Dayna Gedney- and who unleashes liquid, tricky, personable instrumentation.

12. Hastings and Main

Maryanne is funny, elegant and disarming, as are her clothes. It’s like she’s pulling everything off perfectly, sexily, professionally, and then suddenly you see a bit of the goof shining through in the ribbons or spray paint. I’ve been in her studio, talking with her about design and watching as she folds and pins with a quick wrist and a self-deprecating joke and a polite introduction to her intern. She is, like the rest of us, riding the highs and scary lows of this try-and-make-a-living-from-your- art thing, but she does it in a style that’s friendly, and straight forward like an old school friend, haptic and brightly coloured.

13. Sara Johnston

Sara Johnston is sunny and dry like white wine on your balcony in the summer. She’s been through a lot, played for hundreds of thousands of fans around the world, and spent long whiles knocked flat out on her back and in pain. Invariably I put her first solo album aside for a while, and then pull it out in response to some trigger- a memory, or a day that particularly suits it- and her first notes always surprise my breast plate with their pain, sweetness, clarity and resonance.

14. Kidnapper Films

Kidnapper Films are surprising as well, but the surprise has less to do with beauty and pain, and more to do with hilarity and inappropriateness. When we met in high school, they were already refining a group language and a humor that was disorienting, absurd, filmic, grotesque and deadpan. Over the years they drew on contemporary theory stuff about religion and gender to push their characters and situations further, and though they worked in live sketch comedy type situations, their insistence on being a film company is what keeps them open, I think, to a huge and diverse world of potential.

Darren Curtis of Kidnapper Films was the first and most crucial early support to Indyish. In conversations in and around Cinema du Parc when Indyish was just beginning to take shape as an idea and website, Darren was generally friendly, supportive, and excited about the potential websites might have to help organize aspects of an artist’s business and lay things clearly out. He was working as an independent photographer, and had a website idea of his own that was pretty clear and well-developed, which was exciting for us because El was really starting to get good at the database programming and we wanted to make more sites to fill out our portfolio. So we made a trade- he took and processed all kinds of photographs for Indyish, and we made him Actaeonphoto.com. We’re both happy with the trade, I’d say, and the best thing we got out of it was a basis of good follow through and mutual support to this whole Indyish enterprise.

15. R+R ( Robyn Fadden )

Robyn Fadden had poems, sheafs of them, that she’d been whittling and polishing for a long time, and she shared them with me when I asked her about them via email, and then I shared some back, and though both of us had probably been equally shy about this type of thing for years, for some reason at the point, though both madly busy with school and work and (on my side) websites, we were ready to speak seriously about this poetry thing. I wanted to make a Lulu book, to go through the process and see what happened before continuing to recommend it blithely everywhere I went. And I was nagged by these poems I’d written over the years. The thing was, as Robyn said, we were both ready to let these ones go. As though putting them out there in book form would clear space in our heads for next things. She embraced the Lulu idea with the delight and fervor you might expect from a blogger, writer, hippy child, media scholar, indie art lover, musician person; and she agreed that we should see if we could make a book happen in time for a launch. She wholly took this project on, as I was getting all the item’s Darren had photographed online, and our lovely little book was available on Lulu in time for our very first stage launch, the Indyish @ Home. Following the relative success of this venture we ruminated for a while on how to give our expansive publishing dreams some shape and then decided on OJ Press.