If you’ve walked by the Wilson Arts Plaza at Emily Carr in the last couple of months, chances are you’ve noticed the giant screen projecting a video of an animated landscape evolving throughout the course of a day: a smiling sun gradually giving way to a shifty-eyed moon, followed by three people having a discussion over a campfire in an unfamiliar language. There are no subtitles to satisfy your curiosity as to what is being said. Instead, Cole Pauls (BFA 2015), the artist behind the animation, entitled K’ānäthät​ (Thinking), is inviting the audience to be an active participant rather than a passive spectator. “I want you to project your own thoughts into maybe what they’re talking about and what they’re discussing throughout the middle of the night into the morning,” he says.

Premiering last October, K’ānäthät (Thinking) is a project Cole was commissioned to create by the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program for Emily Carr University of Art + Design’s urban screen. Since its inception, the outdoor screen, which is an initiative in conjunction with the Libby Leshgold Gallery at ECU, has shown the works of Barry Doupé, Dana Claxton, and Marina Roy, making Cole the latest in an illustrious line of notable artists to have been commissioned by the city.

After previously collaborating with the city on the artwork for a handful of utility boxes around Vancouver, Cole’s creation of K’ānäthät​ (Thinking) is a natural and inevitable progression. “I guess I developed a relationship with them [so] that they thought of me when they were inviting people to submit to this project because I believe that there were only five or six of us that were invited to pitch,” he says, adding, “And I just luckily was chosen.”

It’s a modest statement coming from the award-winning Tahltan comic artist, illustrator, and printmaker who was the recipient of ​Broken Pencil​ magazine’s Best Comic and Best Zine of the Year Award for his language revival comic ​Dakwäkãda Warriors II​ in 2017, and has been profiled by the CBC for the same work.

Like Dakwäkãda Warriors, K’ānäthät (Thinking)​ incorporates the ancestral language of Southern Tutchone, which is a language that Cole spent years learning while growing up in Haines Junction, Yukon. The project feels deeply personal in terms of highlighting a part of Cole’s cultural heritage, but also allowing the audience insight into his workflow as an artist.

“I do most of my process and creation during the night and I find myself most productive and focused during that time,” he says. “There's a calmness when it comes to night. I feel like everything is either avoided or accomplished throughout the day, and there's nothing left for me to do at night, but sit down and work. It’s my happy place I suppose. So [K’ānäthät] is kind of like a version of that, but through a landscape lens.”

K’ānäthät​ (Thinking) can be viewed as an extension of Dakwäkãda Warriors just based on the colour palette and style alone, Cole says. But regardless of what he has created, Cole argues that there’s a uniformity to his overall body of work that is anchored by his own characters, ideas and personal vision. “A lot of the projects I make, I have translators and they’re my sole collaborators, but for the most part it's just me doing myself and making stories that I want to read and write about,” he says, adding that in that context K’ānäthät​ (Thinking) “fits perfectly in place.”

Although known for his comics, zines, illustrations and printwork, K’ānäthät​ (Thinking) isn’t the first time that Cole has delved into animation, having done a short called “Wizard Light” back in his first year of art school, which made it into Dawson City International Film Festival. But the process of working with the medium again after almost a decade was very different, says Cole.

“[Wizard Light] was a traditional hand-drawn animation where I drew every panel, and painted them too, all individually, and then I scanned it all and made it into an animation,” he explains. “It took some growing [with K’ānäthät​] because I had to re-learn a bunch of things. So I learned how to animate on Photoshop versus drawing everything traditionally, like with Lightbox and stuff.” All the backgrounds, characters, and form lines were drawn traditionally, while the zipatone in red, and all the animation movements were done digitally.

Cole is currently working on a collection of his Pizza Punks comics with Conundrum Press, a comic that he started back when he was a student at Emily Carr. Having worked on Pizza Punks on and off for almost a decade, its longevity within the course of Cole’s career has allowed him to physically see the evolution of himself as an artist. “My style has become a bit more detailed and I've learned a method and a process to make my comic,” he says, adding, “Yeah, it's kind of crazy to look at. This is why I'm making the bonus issue for the collection so I can be like, “Well a year from now I'll be happy with the last couple of pages and maybe cringe at the first couple of ones, but you know that's what happened when you grow as an artist.”

When asked if he had any further insights on being an artist, Cole espouses the importance of maintaining a connection with your peers. “Look around you, and just hold tight to the classmates you make because the people you have in your class can become lifelong friendships and collaborations, people that can really help you out and you may not consider it now,” he says. “What I gained from Emily Carr was a group of misfits that I can all consider my close or lifelong friends now. I collaborate with them, I talk to them, I bitch to them and I love them! I feel like the most I got out of Emily Carr was the people I met there and the connections I made, so hold onto them.”

You can catch K’ānäthät (Thinking) on the urban screen at Emily Carr, located on the north-east wall of the Wilson Arts Plaza, now until February 28.