David Pirrie

When I tell David Pirrie his work reminds me a little of M.C. Escher, he seems surprised. “Escher!?” he exclaims “All I remember of his work is endless stairs.”

That’s fair. And to be honest, while there is something vaguely Escher-esque about Pirrie’s work, I was mostly talking out of my ass. The two artists have little in common.

Pirrie, a BC based visual artist, is currently working on and showing a project titled Risk Analysis. He describes it to me as being about “technology and the arc of human vulnerability; about how we assess risk both metaphorically and in our day to day undertakings.” He also says “Through strict composition and repetition, I am trying to formulate an idea of a conceptual moment in time, a static reminder of our own vulnerability.” That’s artist talk. Basically, it’s pictures of cars. Cars that are alternately smashed up and wrapped around trees.

Before you write him off as a pompous, academic spewer, keep in mind that I often tease artists about their verbose and oh-so-serious statements, and many don’t take it well, but Pirrie doesn’t seem to mind. He himself uses the phrase “intellectual wanking.” On one hand, he says he regularly struggles with the challenge of describing his own work and isn’t a fan of the sort of jargon-filled academic language you so often hear in the artistic community. On the other, he says, “art can and should be sometimes difficult… I don’t have a lot of time for people who are too lazy to really try and understand ideas.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said that thing about it being about smashed up cars.

Regardless, he’s not keen on intellectual wanking, which he blames on French post-conceptualists. Pirrie says, “Sometimes there is no other way to write or think about art.” Particularly since, he says, an artist is a “cultural commodity”. In other words, if an artist or a gallery is going to make a go of it, stuff has got to sell. And, let’s face it, if you’re buying art you’re also buying the idea of yourself as a person who collects art. That doesn’t always come cheap, so emphasizing seriousness can be important.

Pirrie is not one of those artists who seems to be suffering. He is well-known, which you’d think would be a bit of a relief, but he is surprisingly blasé about his own success. In fact, talking to him you’d think becoming an artist wasn’t such a big risk. “I can’t think of a better time to be an artist,” he says, because making a living is actually an attainable goal.

“Today’s contemporary art scene is like nothing ever seen before,” he explains. “Every city now in the western world has to have a major contemporary art institution. Curators must be found, and artists must be found to fill them up. Collectors are snapping up works by artists in their 30s for hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes even millions … This is what I mean as cultural commodity and what is at stake, and why the language of art is becoming so specialized.”

Speaking of specialized language, in our conversations about his work, Pirrie also says he’s interested in “using imagery that floats a tenuous divide between attraction and repulsion. Mortality, illness, geological breakdown, car crashes, all these ideas are in my head as objects of study.” It might sound novel, but in many ways, this isn’t an original idea. A lot of contemporary artists are currently working with the concept of beautifying the terrible. However, Pirrie’s art still feels original and you’re not likely to have seen anything quite like it before.

Born in Montreal, but raised in North Vancouver, Pirrie spent his university years back in Quebec, and had short stints in Paris and Toronto before settling back on the West Coast where he says he’s happy. “Vancouver is very much my city,” he explains. “It’s a quality of life thing … I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

Regardless of where you live, you can get a taste of his art through the Douglas Udell Gallery that displays and sells his work in Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary; on his personal website and at Dadabase in Vancouver, where his t-shirts are distributed. He has also shown work in Toronto, Seattle, and Turin, Italy, among other places.

-Jen Selk
Jen Selk’s Website