Interview: Blanketing the City Designer Gabriel Hall
Blanketing the City (2018-2021) is a public art mural series and Reconciliation process designed by acclaimed xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Weaver and Graphic Designer, Debra Sparrow in collaboration with Vancouver Mural Festival. The series boldly affirms the resurgence and importance of Coast Salish weaving on these lands, and directly combats the ongoing systemic suppression of Indigenous visual culture.
Gabriel Hall has been working with Debra Sparrow on Blanketing the City since it first started in 2018. Since then it has resulted in three major mural projects with the fourth currently underway at Cathedral Square. We touched base with him in a phone interview.
VMF: You've been working with Debra on Blanketing the City since it all started in 2018. What is your role in the project?
GH: “My role in the project is effectively to facilitate Debra's vision and to help her translate what her creative emphasis is [and put it] into the world of murals and static art. [I work] with her to develop and create processing to get her art into whatever format we’re trying to achieve…sometimes we’ll work from sketches of hers, sometimes we’ll work directly from weavings she’s done, sometimes it’s a combination of both. She’ll come up with concepts for the art, I will work with her on fine tuning and getting all of that flattened out into render art, and then often creating pretty detailed renders on how it will look in real life. So, I'll go and photograph the site, I'll take the art and apply it in photoshop so that it looks realistic, and from there we’ll usually go over several rounds of revisions and fine tune how it all looks, and then go and pull all the different colours we’re going to need, work with production artists to get them the colour swatches that they need, the measured diagrams of how it’s all going to be painted out, that kind of stuff.”
“I am an entirely different person than I was before I started the [Blanketing The City] project. ”
What is it like working with Debra?
GH: “I love working with Deb! It was intimidating at first. All of the things that make her intimidating are also the things that make her fantastic to work with. She is a very confident artist and she knows what she wants to do and she’s not afraid to talk about it. She’s really patient, she’s really good at staying with things and making sure they’re perfect as opposed to just kind of letting things go.”
VMF: What are some of the things you’ve learned from working together?
GH: “Oh wow, yeah, a ton [of things]. Specifically about her, but also about Musqueam culture and art that I didn’t know ahead of time. I’ve done a lot of my own research to the best that I could… but having the chance to work and converse candidly and intimately with Deb for years now has completely changed my perspective of our relationship to the local Nations, the colonizers, and what the trajectory of all of our cultures moving together could or should look like.
I am an entirely different person than I was before I started the [Blanketing The City] project. Deb has really challenged me on a lot of things that I didn’t even realize I believed, like, they were just so fundamental that I didn’t realize they were conscious choices about how I thought and felt. So, it's been really good because it's given me the chance to fundamentally go into my core and do an inventory and challenge perceptions that I had.”
VMF: Any specific memorable moments from working on Blanketing the City?
GH: “For me to be sitting with these three incredibly powerful, First Nations matriarchs and knowledge keepers who are working so hard to maintain and resurrect their culture after everything that’s happened here, is just such an honour. I feel so honoured to have something this important pass through my hands on its way to becoming reality. Working with and standing on the same ground as these three representatives from these Nations to help bring their vision out and really important piece come to life… I think for me that’s a major highlight of this whole thing.”
Note: this interview was transcribed from a recorded conversation with Gabriel and edited for clarity and brevity.
