COMING UP

From ART Matters October 2016 issue

Studio Civilization plans to get DownEAST Homes "Oncolor"

I recently sat down with artist Jocelyne Soubliere of the always creative Studio Civilization which does commercial and residential painting of pretty much any kind you can imagine. She says there won't be any institutional colors for a new affordable housing project in Calgary's East Village. She jokes that she has been given the task of making living spaces living spaces at DownEAST Homes which is scheduled to be completed in early 2018. Says Soubliere, 'Color is a reflection of light and light is everything in design. It doesn't cost more to paint a wall red rather than green, or green rather than red. There's no reason why affordable housing projects always have to look like affordable housing projects' That caught the City of Calgary's attention.

She posits, 'Budgets have obvious ramifications on the design and construction of buildings, but have very little, if anything, to do with aesthetic choices like color and how it's applied,' and further, 'The way we see a color is powerfully affected by the color we choose to put it beside, or the texture of the object on which we put it, or how much light is or isn't present, as well as countless other factors and combinations thereof. These are all examples of ways we can use color that have no relation to budget; of ways we can positively impact people's everyday lives. Sometimes, the answers are already in the box.'

'Color is so much a part of our daily lives that we take it for granted and don't realize how meaningfully it effects us,' she says, 'We even use everyday visual expressions like paint the town red and colorful personality to help communicate verbal messages.'

It seems like the way to solve housing problems has always been to throw as much money at them as we could afford and hope for the best. I think Soubliere has come up with a brilliant example of how we can solve some old problems and move some old boundaries without breaking the bank.

I'll give her the last word: 'Describing something as off-color is synonymous with saying that it's wrong.'