HOT ART: An interview with curator Pennylane Shen

CURATOR: Pennylane Shen 
MUSIC: “Persistance” by Natalie Vermeer
INTERVIEW: Hilary Henegar 
VIDEO & EDIT: Chris Bentzen

Produced for Hot Art Wet City. Brought to you by Hot One Inch Action. 

“I like talking about art more than I like art itself,” says Pennylane Shen, a Vancouver curator and art consultant who has worked with some of the city’s brightest up and coming stars to help them hone what it is they do best.

Our conversation took place in her apartment on West Fourth, amid old fashioned typewriters and walls of interesting, often animal-themed art.

I directed my questions knowing most of the HOT ART Wet City audience are artists and would likely be interested to hear her advice for finding their voice and creating financially viable work. She’s matter of fact about the realities of the art world and realistic about the local market, which lacks a critical mass of collectors, which means if an artist wants to sell, they have to cater to what buyers here want. Often that means “abstract landscapes,” she says. 

While she works with artist as a consultant to push their work to the next level, her real passion is in facilitating conversation, particularly around the politics of representation, gender and identity in popular culture, film and fine art.

One way she explores this is through her work with the all-male figurative art collective Phantoms of the Front Yard; together they showcase the work of prominent Vancouver artists and hold monthly lectures on art and criticism, bringing in experts and encouraging potluck contributions.

She and I both went to NYU, though in different departments and at different times, but having that in common gave us a sort of shared language for talking about Vancouver in comparison to the outside world. I’m really looking forward to bumping into Pennylane again - hopefully this Saturday at the CARDED! show at Gallery Gachet.