A blue wooden chair is placed against a transparent Lucite podium in the centre of you me gallery. "That's just there for visitors," owner Bryce Kanbara laughs. Bryce's playful dismissal belies a thoughtful perspective about his approach to art. The gallery is an interactive, unintimidating space where all visitors are greeted and encouraged to spend time.
Opened in May 2003, the gallery's name was inspired by Bryce's father's family homestead, located on the Inland Sea in Japan. Bryce has made the homestead available for stays by Japanese Canadian artists since 1999 when he renovated the ancestral home. Staring across the water, a red and white sign for a department store called You Me Town beckoned him. "It's a quirky, sentimentalized example of how the Japanese borrow English words," Bryce explains on how the name was perfect for what he had in mind to do with his gallery.
The Hamilton native cultivated his self-designated "eclectic style" from his tenure as a founding member of Hamilton Artists Inc, and his curatorial work at the Burlington Art Centre, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Glenhyrst Art Gallery in Brantford and the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto. He also spent time as a Visual Arts Officer at the Ontario Arts Council. Inspired by the Masters, and focusing on contemporary to community art in mediums such as painting, sculpture and drawing, Bryce jokes that he is "an artist by choice."
"Whose parents want them to become an artist?" Bryce rhetorically asks, himself a recipient of Art History and English degrees from McMaster University.
