full interview with Alan Kollins & Marlaina Buch can be read here

As a recognized subculture, Heavy Metal is as resilient as any in today’s world of wiki-malleable social adaptation. “Bangers” or “Heshers” are still visibly recognizable from 100 feet away, just like they were in 1991. The tribal, ritualistic signifiers that fuse Metal fans so dearly to their core belief system repel many. However, as documented in 2006’s Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey (produced, written and directed by Victoria’s own Sam Dunn), this  lifestyle bears a wild allure to a few seeking a passion, honesty and intensity that most other musical genres cannot offer.

Opening on November 14th at Open Space, SKID is an art exhibition that hopes to celebrate and explore some of the humour, contradictions and fetishes that characterize and define Metal so clearly to those both inside and outside the walls of guttural vocals and blastbeats. Artists Jo-Anne Balcaen (Montreal), Marlaina Buch (Victoria) and David Poolman (Toronto) will all feature works that comment on a litany of Metal’s trademarks.


SKID’s metallic investigations come in varying forms. Balcaen’s Concert Posters focus on classic overstated captions (“OH MY GOD” or “PLEASE PLEASE”), highlighted in the aggressive masculine fonts that are celebrated by the graphic arts of Metal. One of Poolman’s works is a video installation that recalls Norwegian Black-Metaller Varg Vikernes’ infamous church burning spree of 1992. Through her paintings and drawings, Buch hones in on issues within Metal around religion, history, music, gender and personal narrative. Her images range from Marshall stacks in bondage to one of a determined guitarist who, through the iconic ritual of smashing his guitar in classic flamboyant fashion, wishes to kill a spider.

Sitting down for a beer with Buch, along with SKID curator and Open Space staff member Alan Kollins, she offers a classic saga of her own relationship with the devil’s music (it should be noted that after deliberating over what to eat for 15 minutes, Buch decided on a beer, noting that “it’ll do.” METAL!). “My ‘metal years’ were when I was a [teenager],” says Buch, “living in a suburban dustbowl in the middle of Alberta. It was highly conservative. I was going to Catholic school at the time. Being an angsty teen with hormones plus having an older brother who was heavily into metal was the gateway. Me and my best friend, we were two fourteen year old girls with glasses, ya know, ugly ducklings trying to figure it all out, and we got thrown into the metal scene where we were like ‘we don’t know what the hell is going on but we’re angry and this is awesome! Let’s bang our heads and go crazy!’ It was Slayer, Metallica, Morbid Angel, Napalm Death, Brutal Truth. Basically bands that articulated the brutality that you feel at that age.”

Buch presents an impassioned take of what makes Heavy Metal so appealing in an age of caustic perspectives and ceaseless snickering. “Irony needs to die! We need to move onto the age of heartfelt sincerity. Irony is so boring. It’s [become] a surface gleaning of a lot of things that are a lot more complex. A sense of apathy is deep seeded, so there’s this counter movement of people who wanna put their fists in the air and they wanna feel something. We’re in a confused time; artists, politics, music, everyone knows that they’re vaguely dissatisfied, but they don’t know how to [articulate it]. [Metal] is about that rage and that release, even if the words are unintelligible. It’s that bottom-heavy, smack-you-in-the-face sound that you connect with, that’s irrespective of gender.”

Branding, symbolism and commodification are some of the issues examined through SKID. For a genre that is so defiant of society’s regulatory efforts, Heavy Metal is inevitably bound to some of capitalism’s most effective systems. The branding, as Buch explains, “is an identification thing. On the inside, it’s an ideology that’s obvious; you don’t think about it or analyze it, it just comes with the territory. But from the outside, Metal is heavily commodified.” Kollins expands on how Balcaen probes this topic; “Jo-Anne takes the concept of a unified brand and she injects some humour into it because ultimately it does become fetishized, it becomes a commodity. She ends up walking a fine line between subculture identification and fetishization, the glorification of the brand.”

Another matter dissected is Metal’s paradoxical fascination with death in the face of such life affirming rituals such as attending concerts, growing hair and body beautification (tattoos and piercings). As Kollins points out, “[The death/life axis] is a paradox and irony that metal culture doesn’t want to own and it’s something we’re hoping to explore with this show.”

So is SKID about Heavy Metal or Art? Buch believes that the work of the artists is a residual of their interactions with the culture. “The art is a tracing of [Metal]. It’s the remnant of a thought process.” Kollins offers his take, “I think that the two can co-exist because conceptual art tries to investigate issue of the social, so anything, including metal, is fodder.”

Along with an artist talk on November 15th, Kollins is hoping that SKID can effectively venture down some of Metal’s less traveled avenues of introspection. “It’s tough with this scene that has traditionally not found humour within itself; it’s so earnest. So there is a fear that [true metal heads] may feel mocked by some of the art at the show. This may be a scene that’s not ready to have a look at itself in this manner. This show isn’t going to ‘save the metal scene’ or ‘save the world’ but it may dislodge some banger’s notion of what it means to be in the scene and how they represent themselves.”


SKID opens Friday Nov. 14 at 8pm and features an artist talk on Saturday Nov. 15 @ 2pm. It runs until Dec. 13.