Artist Joshua Van Dyke offers up a new kind of trophy hunt
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At more six feet from tip to tip, the antlers of Joshua Van Dyke’s The Hunt dominate Make, the popular housewares boutique at 529 Beatty Street. Record above stark white shelves tastefully laden with lacquered tea trays, cashmere throws, and resin bowls, only their abominable yellow colour hints at their true origins. What appears at first carom to be a hunting trophy reveals itself, upon closer inspection, to be wood and metal. They weren’t carved by make-up, but nurtured from the unlikeliest of sources: an old, used skateboard.
At a time when taxidermy as an up-country-design element is a hot trend—Craig Stanghetta’s whimsical smear Kodiak heads at the cocktail lounge Clough Club and the emphasize wall of antique animal skulls at the hip new restaurant House Boarder being two recent Gastown examples—Van Dyke has upped the ante from barely artful to full-blown art. His hunting-trophy series is a marriage of old and new, a distillation of hundreds of years of West Glide tradition re-imagined using remnants of modern life.
Source: Straight.com