The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 29

i QUIET HEROES: We seldom remember their names; we never knew their faces. But LIGHT-I KEEPERS I WLM Agonizing I x' isolation, mind-numbing boredom and thankless hard work. That's how Donald Graham describes the fate of the average B.C. lighthouse keeper, who faced a life of almost unrelieved hardship. His book, Keepers of the Light, tells the story.

AMD ALL YOUR FAVORITES Books 12,13 Crossword 12 Names in the News 11 Records 2 TV listings Video 2 anonymous people who us the Hostess Twinkie, Richter scale and the ball pen all affected our lives some way. They now have something else in common: all died in 1985, without fanfare. ii jt SATURDAY JANUARY IQftR -H? Wr "Ms, lift i VP TOP ROCK: The Boss was No. 1, Vancouver's favorite hometown boy, Bryan Adams, rocked in at No. 2, and Tears for Fears, nabbed the No.

3 spot. We're talking about Vancouver's top 99 rock albums of 1985, as compiled by CFOX. All in all, it was a stellar year. And we give the complete list. EVE JOHNSON meets EVELYN ROTH, NYBODY who lives in a red and yellow kitchen with animal paw marks, in i grey paint, all the way up the walls and over the bright yellow fridge and stove, has got to be Evelyn Roth.

Mention her name and many people will instantly say: "crocheted videotape." Those who don't remember the 10-reel, 800-square foot videotape awning she crocheted for the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1973, may remember the videotape hats and miniskirts, or Roth's true stroke of genius, the crocheted videotape car cosy. And anyone who missed the artifacts the first time around could see the pictures in the Evelyn Roth Recycling Book, published by Talonbooks in 1976. A photograph of Roth "at Be In, 1966" in the VAG's Art and Artists catalogue shows a '60s-style celebrant in what looks to be a very strange hat. Twenty years later, Roth is still in Vancouver, still a deviser of and participant in celebrations and still an enthusiast for what she calls "costumery." Does that mean she's still adrift in the '60s? The woman who opens the door of the Kit-silano duplex is too blunt to drift anywhere. She is five-feet-two-inches tall, has chiselled features, eyes outlined in blue liner, a headband, strong hands and a massive silver ring by Kwakiutl carver Tony Hunt on the middle finger of her left hand.

"My hands are beat up. They aren't elegant hands so they can't have elegant rings," Roth says. Roth is part of an international network of performance and celebration artists. In 1985, she was invited to the Central Park summer solstice celebrations in New York. She lectured and did workshops at the University of Iowa in Des Moines and at Carleton, Calgary and Lethbridge Universities on her way home.

She was artist in residence for the B.C. pavilion at the 1974 Expo in Spokane. She designed the banners for Habitat Forum in Van- those gave the point in they much lives on. 3 RAMBO keeps fighting. 4 The Salmon Dance is performed by totem creatures drawn from Northwest Coast mythology to a soundtrack combining electronic music and natural sounds such as an eagle's cry.

"When people watch it, they see the glory of the salmon and nature," Roth says. "The human comes in with his garbage and upsets the living totem pole, and then there is an exchange between the animals and man and they are unified together in dance." For Roth, the values that her work upholds group participation and recycling aren't something she picked up in the '60s. They are values she had all along, values inculcated from the day of her birth in Mundare, in 1936. Roth's family was a mixture of Ukrainian and Polish; her maiden name is Yakubow. Her grandparents homes (K CPP 1 HEMINGWAY B.C.

artist extraordinaire couver in 1976. She was hired to set up a children's play area for the Brisbane Commonwealth Games in 1982 and organized street decorations for the Univer-siade Games in Edmonton in 1983. Her Salmon Dance, which uses as a prop a 50-foot inflatable nylon salmon, has been performed in Australia, Bali, Korea, Thailand, Fiji, Samoa, New Zealand and at the Edinburgh Festival. Meeting Place, her current project, brings together four cultures. In her words, it is: "Canadian Indian, then the far east, then Europe-technology, then Africa, emerging from and returning to an inflatable tunnel.

"This is going to provide my livelihood for the next 10 years," Roth says. "I know I can travel with it two or three months a year, anywhere I want in the world." She may not be a major participant at Expo, but Roth gets enough attention internationally to give her confidence in what she does. "My art is used," she says. "It works with Third-World countries; it works cross-culturally; it works with native people. It goes anywhere in the world because it's big, it's colorful, it involves dance, ritual, music, all of these things." I 4 ft 0 FOR the past 25 years Walter (Wally) Anderson has blown things up.

Now he spends his spare time making dynamite art literally. Anderson, 51, is a master blaster who has done excavation work in downtown Victoria as well as blasting for airstrips in the arctic, uranium mines in Saskatchewan, and bigger harbors in B.C. On the weekends, he drives from his house in Victoria's James Bay area to a hill outside Sooke where he can see for miles in all directions. There he makes sculptures out of pieces of copper or brass pipe, paintings, and jewelry. The sculptures, which he can now make in four basic shape, resemble metal flowers, jmr i f' 1 I ilflll pl Ml i ly hamit artwork driven by Klaus Roth, 23.

"He was educated, he was from Europe, he was writing. He was the TV star, the Mr. Magic who came into my life," she says. They ran away to Edmonton in 1953. He taught ballroom dancing at Arthur Murray; she worked in a bookmobile and took every evening dance class she could.

In 1961, Klaus enrolled at UBC and Evelyn came to work in the university library. Seven years later, Roth was still "doing my art as this thing on the side I could do if it didn't interfere with my work and my housework." Her marriage was over, but she didn't know how to leave. The prairie accent is still in her voice when she says: "It was a big threshold." Then, in 1968, she attended a three-week workshop for dancers and architects in California run by dancer Ann Halprin and her celebrated landscape-architect husband Larry. The 32 participants talked about their feelings, used driftwood to make structures on the beach, and choreographed dances to go with the structures. "The Halprin workshop got me out of the pit I had gotten into," Roth says.

"It probably completed a phase in my life that would have taken 10 years of normal living. When I came back, I just could not fit into that regi mented, patterned life. So Roth left her husband and set up housekeeping with architect and then professor in the UBC school of architecture, Donald Gutstien. She entered the most high-profile period of her life, when the spotlight beam of public attention focused on the crocheted videotape canopy over the entrance to the VAG's Pacific Vibrations show and the zany woman wearing the crocheted videotape minidress. Sometime in the late 1970s, the spotlight moved on.

Roth continued to do what she has done all along: dress up herself and her surroundings in bright colors. Her clothes and jewelry alone make her, as Museum of Anthropology director Michael Ames says, "a walking multicultural exhibition." Like her jewelry, most of the artifacts in her house are tribal, made either by Roth or her Northwest Coast friends. Unlike artists who have found inspiration in "primitive" art, Roth tries to translate the content, or as she says, "to translate in essence what their culture is about." Ames says: "I don't know of anyone else integrating symbols in a way that is not patronizing to the cultures involved. She relates on an equal basis to artists of different cultures." After her daily 6 a.m. run and stretch on Kits Beach, Roth comes home to the carpeted nook by the south-facing windows of her house to read the paper, listen to the radio and write her inspirations for the day in a diary.

She fills a large sketchbook every three months witn photographs, teaded, and their children stayed and farmed in the area. When Roth was a child there were sleigh rides to big family Christmas parties, and, in the fall, turkey plucking bees to stuff new feather comforters. Roth's mother sewed and painted. "I got the idea of recycling from her," Roth says. "Everything was used and re-used, cut down and made into something else." When Evelyn was nine, her mother died in childbirth.

By the time Roth was 17, life on the farm had palled. Her father had remarried, and Roth was in the middle of teenaged rebellion: "I wanted to be a movie star. I wanted to be Barbara Ann Scott. I was dying and daydreaming to get out, starving for some cultural things." Rescue came in the shape of a red MGA, paint radiating out from the center of the explosion. All of the paintings have a fine network of holes where particles of the blasting cap have gone through the paper.

"Some artists you can tell by their brushstrokes," Anderson says. "The mark of my work is these holes." Anderson spend his childhood in an Ontario orphanage after his family broke apart during the 1930s depression. At 18, he got a job in an open pit uranium mine in Saskatchewan, and began to learn blasting. After working on Arctic airstrips, he learned underwater blasting in Vancouver in 1965, moved to Victoria on a job and has stayed ever since. "I'm known as a good explosives man, which is why I can wear my hair long," he says.

As a professional blaster, he also has the government license that allows him to buy dynamite. Apart from his work with dynamite, Anderson makes jewelry for crafts fairs: spoon rings, bent-fork bracelets and pendants made from quarters cut so that onlythe caribou remains. He hasn't decided what to do with his dynamite new products, but he knows he wants more public exposure, a display in a gallery or' shop where "people could see it if they wanted to. "I want to show that dynamite can be used with precision and control to make beautiful things." EVE JOHNSON 12- I with their edges torn and curled back like petals. The paintings are explosive blots of pigment on variously colored papers.

And the jewelry, made by packing dynamite down the inside of a narrow gold pipe, is the shape of a tiny pumpkin, its sides exploded into six gold strips. If he's going to make a pipe sculpture, Anderson first erects a fishnet tent over the dynamite-filled pipe. Then he goes behind a tree and lets off a warning charge to alert any hunters in the area to his presence. If he doesn't hear a shot in reply, he blasts. When the dynamite explodes, the length of pipe splits in two.

The bottom half burrows toward China, and the top half spirals upward like a well-thrown football. Sometimes the fishnet holds the pipe. In most cases, the pipe, slowed down but still moving, heads off through the trees, leaving a trail of broken branches in its wake. "Basically it's a grenade," Anderson says. "They fly away like a rocket so you have to go rummaging around in the salal to find them.

There's some I've been looking for for two years." To make paintings, Anderson sets up an easel, suspends the dynamite, covered with paint, over the paper, and detonates it. He's still experimenting with paint application. The best results so far have been obtained by wrapping the paint-covered dynamite in silk doilies specially crocheted by Anderson's widowed stepmother, who lives in Manitoba. The paintings, no matter what their color, are all roughly similar: streaks and spatters of WALLY ANDERSON: master blaster making a big noise in the art i Continued page C5.