Marlena Zuber – Illustrator

When Marlena was 7 years old, she found herself reading about dinosaurs at a friend’s house and  decided to pick up some crayons and draw them herself. “That was the moment I fell in love with drawing. I remember feeling still, peaceful, and free,” she says. “I never stopped drawing after that and at night I would dream I was exploring and wandering around in my colourful world of crayon drawings.” Marlena has created a career through her colourful worlds, both as an illustrator as well as with other projects such as map making, painting, social work, and music.

Upon realizing Marlena’s interest in art, her parents (neither of them artists) did everything they could to nurture her talents. From sending her to art camps and community centre classes in drawing and painting, to finding an art focused high school for her to attend, “they’ve encouraged me all my life to live my dream,” says Marlena. During her high school years, she worked at a children’s book and toy store and became inspired by the “beautiful and playful illustrations” on the store shelves. It was then that she decided to pursue illustration as a career by attending OCAD.

Early on she worked mostly as an illustrator doing a lot of editorial work. “Most of my clients were from New York or LA,” says Marlena. “Then came September 11th.” As the American economy collapsed, magazines took huge budget cuts. Some of the first things sacrificed were illustration and photography as magazines turned to stock, rather than original, visual content. “I don’t think it’s ever fully recovered,” says Marlena. “I’ve actually moved away from editorial work in the last few years with book projects and map making.”

Marlena got into map making when she was asked to draw a map of Kensington Market for Murmur – an audio story-telling project. The project was successful and other map work started coming her way. It turns out that in the satellite mapping age of today, hand drawn maps are in high demand. “I think people are drawn to maps for many different reasons,” she says. “Maps help us understand the larger world around us and our place in it. I think that this is a basic and common desire.”

Along with her work as an illustrator, Marlena works at the Creative Work Studio - “an art program for people struggling with long term mental illness and or addictions.” She is also in a band called Tomboyfriend and they’re working on releasing their first album this October. “An even bigger project for me will be starting a family,” says Marlena. “I’ve focused my energy so much on my career for what feels like most of my life, it’s time for me to focus on my personal life.”

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If you have any questions for Marlena please post them in the comments or you can email them to her directly. To see her work please visit her website at www.marlenazuber.com

Erik Rutherford – Creator of Ryeberg.com

Anyone with even the slightest experience online, knows the depths a comments thread can quickly sink to. On YouTube this is perhaps more prevalent than most places. “I’d often put up comments to debate with other users or I’d send videos to friends; there was so much to say and yet the exchange was generally pretty poor and disorderly,” says Erik Rutherford – the creator of Ryeberg.com. The website “publishes essays about YouTube videos (or videos from any other video-sharing site), curated by writers and artists.”

Erik grew up in Toronto and Victoria, going on to study literature at McGill and then Oxford. He lived in Paris for 8 years, where he worked as a freelance writer, a teacher, and also produced two radio shows; since  2005 he has been living in Toronto. The idea for Ryeberg came to him “one night at a dinner party with everyone hunched over a laptop watching a YouTube clip.”

Erik thought it would be great to “subject all this perishable, popular video stuff to some kind of useful critique”. As a result, “Ryeberg would designate video clips to take note of and then wrap them up in intelligent text, perhaps even become a pole of authority.” The authority lies in the hands of an ever expanding group of contributors on the site, aptly named curators. Sometimes curators are recommended, on occasion strangers submit great content, and Erik has a running list of people he admires and hopes “might be enticed to contribute.” Recently, Ryeberg has broken free of it’s digital self through a live event.

“Ryeberg needed to manifest itself in the world of flesh and blood, like any other agorae of the web,” says Erik. “I also sensed that curated videos could work in a live format, and this turned out to be true.” When videos clips are watched in a group, “we are naturally more attentive,” says Erik, “they are transformed by the presence of other people”.

At the moment Erik’s number one priority is growth. “The essays on Ryeberg deserve many more readers,” he says. So if you haven’t taken a look at Ryeberg yet check it out and let all your friends know. Also, another live event is in the works so if you want to be kept in the loop be sure to add yourself to their mailing list.

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If you have any questions for Erik you can leave them in the comments or email him directly. If you wish to make a submission to Ryeberg please send it to curator@ryeberg.com but first check out the guidelines.

Robyn McCallum – Gallery Manager

Robyn McCallum graduated from Ryerson’s photography program several years ago and has been making great strides in the industry. At the moment she is the gallery manager at Bau-Xi Photo, co-curating the Canadian exhibition of the Flash Forward Festival, and will soon be the Chair of the SNAP! auction. Robyn discovered her interest in photography during high school in Ottawa. “They had amazing facilities and I was able to experiment with all different types of art making,” she says. “Photography was what really inspired me and so I stuck with it. “

During her final year at university, Robyn was hired as the development coordinator at the Ryerson Gallery. “I suspected I wanted to go down a more administrative road, but had never had any experience in the field so I wasn’t sure,” she says. Katy McCormick, a professor at Ryerson, let Robyn curate her first show at the gallery. “She really helped me through and showed me what had to be done and how to look at the exhibition itself as a single cohesive work of art,” says Robyn. This experience led to Robyn’s current role as the gallery manager at Bau-Xi Photo.

Interestingly, she acquired the position in a way that is unusual for the art industry but is well known to those in other fields – she saw an ad online and applied. “I have several responsibilities at the gallery,” she says, “everything from finding new artists to sweeping the floor.” On a day-to-day basis, a lot of her effort goes into dealing with clients, marketing, and getting press for the gallery. As if she wasn’t busy enough, Robyn’s latest projects – co-curating an exhibition for the Flash Forward Festival and taking over as Chair of the SNAP! auction have her working around the clock. “[I] try and do things that I’m excited about so I don’t mind coming home from the gallery and working on one of my other projects.”

As someone who has made a successful transition from school to work (somewhat uncommon for art students), Robyn says one of the best things she did was “stay engaged in the photography community.” Upon graduating you’re in the real world, “you should just embrace it and really put yourself out there,” she says.

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If you have any questions for Robyn please post them in the comments or you can email them to her directly. To see her own work please visit her website at www.robynmccallum.com.

Lucy Gong – Health Sciences Student

I met Lucy several years ago and have always been impressed by both her achievements and her humbleness. Though she might reply ‘not much,’ when asked what she’s been up to, that usually means she’s been doing something along the lines of building homes in New Orleans or sky diving by Lake Erie. Having recently graduated from McMaster University’s Health Sciences program, Lucy is taking a year off from school to see if she wants to continue on to medical school as she originally planned.

Lucy and her family moved to Canada when she was five – her father was pursuing a PhD in physics. “I think that being raised by Asian parents in a westernized society had a big impact on my life,” she says. Knowing the sacrifices her parents made to bring her here made her strive for excellence in school early on. “I decided at the age of 10 that I wanted to be a doctor.” After finishing high school she continued down this path, applying to Health Sciences, Life Sciences as well as other fields such as Business and Nutritional Sciences. She says, “ultimately, I chose Health Sciences for the unique program, for it’s style of teaching students that I thought would work for me and was unlike any other program I had come across.” Her other interests included community involvement and international travel, something she capitalized on while in university.

During her first year, a few fellow students wanted to organize a trip to New Orleans in order to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Lucy immediately became involved in the project, which resulted in them rebuilding homes in New Orleans. “Knowing that I was actively making a difference in someone’s life was very gratifying and rewarding,” she says. The following year Lucy organized a similar trip for other students.  Also during university, she volunteered at a local elementary school as a teacher’s assistant in a kindergarten class. Afterwards she once again took on an executive role and organized placements for other students. Now that she has finished her degree, Lucy is reevaluating her goals and options.

“I wanted some time to decide if Medicine was really best for me,” she says, “and ultimately decided time off would be the best route for me”. Her work in New Orleans has piqued her interest in public health and humanitarian organizations. “I think that work in these sectors can make a positive impact on a large scale,” she says. While she is enjoying her time off, she is also looking into jobs in humanitarian aid. “Ideally,” she says, “I would like to work first-hand in a community in need, perhaps at a grass-root level to gain some experience. I am excited to see where this will take me and I would love to do some international work.”

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If you have any questions for Lucy please post them in the comments or you can email them to her directly. You can also follow her on twitter.