Vancouver artist Hal Riso prizes paradox.
His best-known works, immaculate assemblies of coils, curves, and rod-like forms, hover in Zen-like composure, yet that balance remains unstable. Blink, and another presence pushes through: motile, unsettling, erotically charged. The artist calls this body of work I 🖤 You t.u.n.s and takes pleasure in asking viewers what the initials might mean (although he never tips his own hand). Enigma and innuendo are his constant watchwords.
In Mental Metros (featured in this year’s Eastside Culture Crawl, Nov. 20 to 23), Riso invites us to reflect on the industrial designs of Massimo Vignelli, the Italian American architect who reshaped the way the world envisioned complex transportation systems. Riso creates map-like schematics of rumbling, jolting, subterranean states of mind: an imaginary subway with station names such as Loathers Lane, Scheme Street, Notion, and Avoidance. However lustrous and perfected the surfaces may be, the intestinal looping reminds us that something dark and fetid might be lurking just beneath.
Riso grew up the adored youngest child in a hard-working, artistically inclined Cariboo family. His father, who spent many years in hard-rock mining, was also a silkscreen artist and graphic designer in his youth. His brother and sister, fourteen and sixteen years older, encouraged him to explore his creative impulses, and he began drawing as soon as he could hold a pencil. Music held equal power over him, particularly percussion. He threw himself into it the year he turned ten, after his brother gave him a grown-up drum set for Christmas.
By day, Riso is a Vancouver-based video editor and multimedia designer who specializes in motion graphics and 3-D animation. Not yet thirty, he has contributed to a wide range of documentaries, commercials, and music videos. Every project is different. More recently, he has been active on the leading edge of 3-D data visualization and LIDAR photogrammetry, completing multiple projects that analyze and visually depict large geographical areas.
Written by Michael S, former newspaper editor
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Which hood are you in?
I live in Railtown on the edge of the trainyard, overlooking the Port of Vancouver’s loading docks.
What do you do?
I work full-time as a freelance video editor and multimedia designer.
What are you currently working on?
Currently, I’m assembling a collage of 100 pictures of the Downtown Eastside, and I am in the planning stages of my next Mental Metro map; this one focusing on depression. I’m also well underway on my next big music project, an audio adventure akin to Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, interspersed with original music and voice actors.
Where can we find your work?
I’m always engaging with other artists and posting snippets of current works in progress on Instagram or on my website. You can also find my work in the upcoming Culture Crawl (November 20-23, Thurs/Fri from 5-10 p.m. and Sat./Sun. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.), where I’ll open my studio space to the public. My latest piece, Passion, Reason, Idiocy, will be on display at the Pendulum gallery from November 6-28.
