Randy Pandora

Pandora's work is beautiful. In fact I've put my money where my mouth is and purcahsed a couple pieces. He is a fascinating individual, and the Vancouver Sun interview below is worth a read.

MAKING ART FROM TRASH...REALLY
Randy Pandora has spent most of his life falling between the cracks. He was a teenage runaway, lived on the street for years, and admits to an on-and-off drug problem -- more on than off.

He's also been a longtime binner, sifting through people's garbage for bottles and cans to cash in. But he finds something else in the things people throw away -- the material for his art.

Pandora makes sculptures from almost anything: bicycle seats, a smoker's pipe, a faucet, a garlic press, an antique funnel from a gas can. In his hands, salad forks become noses, a shoe becomes a head, and a thumb from a boxing glove becomes a tongue.

It's not the kind of stuff you see at the big commercial galleries. But it fits right in at the Interurban Gallery at Carrall and Hastings in the Downtown Eastside, where Pandora's first solo show opened this week.

It's the highest public profile in decades for Pandora, who was a leading light in Vancouver's underground music scene, circa 1978-79. Back then he was the tall, whippet-thin singer in the Generators, an art-punk outfit infamous for its riotous live shows and songs like I Wanna Be A Girl.

"When we were good we were better than the New York Dolls," he states, "and when we were bad, we were just as bad as the New York Dolls. But we were definitely fun."

Unfortunately, the Generators broke up before they made any records. Then Pandora suffered a terrible beating which left him permanently injured.

"I had a head injury, a really major head injury, that still affects me to this day," says Pandora, who turns 51 on April 1.

"Somebody called me faggot and put my head in a corner and stomped on it with steel-toed boots. Caved in the whole left side of my head: six months in the hospital, three surgeries, huge memory loss.

"I'm pretty smart for a brain-damaged person, but my ability to memorize isn't the same, [and] my personality changed."

Since then, he's been on and off the street, although currently he has a place to live.

"I call it the fat man's coffin," he says. "I live in a seven-by-10 windowless room that I pay $350 a month for."

He has quite a story, Randy Pandora. He was born in Toronto, where his father J.J. Conroy was a bouncer and professional wrestler who went by a variety of names: Killer Kane Conroy, the Masked Marvel, the Assassin and the Psychedelic Killer.

Naturally, dad was a villain, or in Randy's words, "a beast." Dad also had a role as a villain in the Bob and Doug McKenzie movie Strange Brew: "He was the big fat ugly guy in the jail that scared the hell out of them."

But Randy Charles Conroy Hunter McArthur didn't spend much time with his father, who he claims sired 22 children by a variety of women. His mother was declared "unfit" to raise her children, so young Randy was put up for adoption. He ran away at 11, and ran away permanently at 14.

He moved to Montreal, where he landed a gig as a David Bowie impersonator in a drag show from 1972-74. "Two, three thousand people a week would see the show."

Somewhere along the line, Randy McArthur became Randy Pandora.

"Some drunken Russian sailors said my makeup reminded them of a panda bear," he recounts. "They went 'Randy Panda', and I said Pandora is much better."

He kept the moniker when he moved to Vancouver in 1976.

"I was reunited with my biological family; my mother had come out here to get away from my father," he says. "Harry Rankin did their divorce, actually."

In Vancouver he started attending the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr).

"I had been going there for about two years when they hauled me into the office and said 'Randy, has it ever occurred to you to register?' I said 'What do you mean, register?' 'Well, actually sign up. Enrol.' I said 'Why?' They said 'Well, you'd get marks in art.' Then they mentioned grant money, so I finally registered."

The first Talking Heads album had come out, and art students everywhere were inspired to start punk/new wave bands. Hence the Generators, which included the great Gary Middleclass (whose real name was Gary Bourgeois) on guitar.

After the Generators broke up, for a short time Pandora had a band called Exxotone. But then he more or less vanished from the local music and art scene, although there was the odd Randy Pandora sighting over the years.

His current comeback of sorts is due to the efforts of artist Carel Moiseiwitsch (who insisted he do a show) and John Lawrence of DoDa Antiques (who sells Pandora's work).

"I think Randy is incredibly resourceful, and very witty, and very inventive," says Moiseiwitsch.

"He's got absolutely no money, but he makes all this amazing stuff. All the rest of us [artists] have to have studios and God knows what, and this guy just makes it out of nothing. He's like a conjurer, he just brings the stuff up."

Lawrence feels the same way.

"I think he's a real product of his environment, which is very street-oriented. I like the idea of putting it all up and seeing it in a show where people can respond to it as a group, because there's a very wide variety of reaction to it, both on his part and on the part of the people who see it. He has said to me that sometimes he is frightened by his own work."

Indeed. His paintings -- which tend to be self-portraits -- can be quite sad.

"This is the sad clown with the vacant eyes," says Pandora, pointing to one of his favourite works.

"I think it [relates to my] head injury -- there's no top of the head. The eyes are vacant, there's a sadness. I suffer from bi-polar hyper-manic depression, it sometimes can be quite debilitating."

But in the main, Pandora's pieces are quite fun, playful and imaginative. He works wonders with bicycle seats, transforming them into amazing masks.

"It's a ripoff from Picasso," laughs Pandora.

"He's got the famous bicycle seat with the handle bars, like the bull's head. Bad artists copy, good artists steal."