Sandra Storey’s exhibition All in the Dance runs through Nov. 29 in the Yukon Artists @ Work Gallery
Sandra Storey’s newest art exhibit started with a box of old Tinkertoys, the vintage children’s wooden building toys. Storey had been tinkering with the toys, fashioning some art pieces out of them, when she noticed an opening in the Yukon Artists @ Work (YAAW) Gallery space, and she gave herself the challenge of getting her Tinkertoys-based project together in time to fill the slot. She set out to make pieces fashioned after an old playground behind her house.
“I bought a vintage set quite a long time ago at the Kids Market in Vancouver, and I just pulled it out and was just putting stuff together,” Storey says. “I got the idea of recreating the old playground behind my house on Tatchun Road.”
Storey says the playground she grew up with had equipment that would now be banned for safety purposes, but that never stopped her from using it to its full potential.
“We just had a ball playing there,” she remembers. “This kind of turned into a little bit of a protest about the insanity of what’s going on in the world and this feeling of real helplessness, and getting up every morning and finding it’s gotten worse and not better.”
Making her pieces helped Storey reconnect with a carefree time in her life, far from the worries of adulthood in the modern world.
“As an artist, or as anybody, you want to say something, do something, stand up and protest,” she says. “This is the way that I do that.”
Storey’s driving theme was the idea of abandoned play. She remembers the joy of flying a kite and watching it get up in the air, and swinging on a swingset so high that the chains went slack and then jumping off in mid-swing. The best of all though, she says, was the merry-go-round, which she and her childhood cohort referred to as the “Wheel of Death.”
“We would get the biggest guys in the community to get on and push it so that it was going as fast as it could possibly go,” she says. “You literally had to hold onto the bars or the centrifugal force would fly you off of the Wheel of Death. Back then, the playgrounds were all gravel or sand and they didn’t have any matting or anything on them.”
With all these memories coming back to Storey, her ideas began to flow and soon enough she’d made swingsets, teeter-totters and more out of a mix of Tinkertoys and other artistic materials.
“Within some of the titles are some of my little protests,” Storey explains, noting the teeter-totters are titled “The Perception of Balance” and “The Balance of Power.” She says, “If you look at them, the physics is all wrong. There’s one where the two teeter-totter guys are so big that they’ve broken the teeter-totter and they’re sitting on the ground laughing.”
By making these pieces, Storey was taking a stance to find joy in hard times, and encouraging others to try and do the same.
“It really was as simple as that,” she says. “As anyone who has a practice knows, one piece leads to another and it just gets more and more fun, really, if you’re not strapped for time. That’s basically the story of the show.”
Storey was born in Whitehorse, the youngest of six children. As a child, she had severe asthma and spent lots of time in an oxygen tent, which is a small bubble for a four-year-old.
“I don’t say I grew up there, because I had lots of healthy times with a lot of camping and stuff like that, but when I was in hospital, my dad would give me drawing pads and pencil crayons and modelling clay,” she says. “I started doing little sculptures just to create my own world where I was.”
Storey’s interest in the arts stuck with her, especially when she got to high school and had acclaimed late-Yukon artist Ted Harrison as a teacher, just before his retirement. She went to Emily Carr University, which was a college at the time, to get her degree in fine arts, and spent many of the following years travelling the world before returning to the Yukon. During her travels, her art took a spot on the back burner, though she did run a gallery and teach art in New Zealand.
Storey moved back to Canada in 2006, originally to take care of her parents who have since passed. She now spends her days running her artistic practice out in Tagish. “We heat with wood and we haul our own water, and I spend four to six hours a day in the studio, most days,” she says.
Storey’s exhibit, titled All in the Dance, opened Nov. 7 at the Yukon Artists @ Work Gallery, in Whitehorse, and runs until Nov. 29. Working under a deadline was a new challenge for Storey, who typically spends however much time she likes on her pieces before seeing which ones can go together as a collection, but the creation of these pieces was also different than her previous work.
“I knew I wanted to work with the Tinkertoys, and that was really experimental because I’m usually just working with clay, or sometimes clay and wire,” she says. “I had to make the structures first or I couldn’t make the animals fit on them.”
Storey was thrilled with the opening of her exhibit, saying the comments she got from viewers made her feel awesome. Over half the collection sold on its opening day.
“It’s always uplifting when you do something and you take the risk of putting it out there,” she says. “The day of the opening can be like having a birthday party and thinking nobody is going to come, but then they all come and bring presents.”
Visit yaaw.com to learn more about Yukon Artists @ Work and All in the Dance. You can also visit whatsupyukon.com to see more pictures of Sandra Storey’s exhibit.
