Back in Edmonton now, doing some post-performance and post-Thanksgiving work: the “get yer ducks in a row” for the next work to be done.
Much to be thankful for, as always – being able to make work with talented collaborators, the opportunity to share ideas and approaches here and in person, the tremendous support I receive from my family and friends (without whom none of this would be possible).
So – a brief moment to take stock, and to share a link to the video of the performance shot for Livestream on October 5th.
Click on the IMAGE BELOW to go to the UBC School of Music’s video:
As summer slips into Autumn, I am reminded that beauty lies in the moment, and in those details that provoke a little wonder. My thanks to eMorphes for the shot of colour on a grey Monday.
The process of installing (and then striking) and exhibition always feels a little bit like alchemy to me.
It’s the presentation of a series of things transformed: from the raw materials, to the work, to the exhibition itself … and then it all disappears again. Of course it’s not that at all in practical terms.
It’s the work of being an artist, in all the different shapes that takes.
Still, it’s an interesting process to be completely inside, from start to finish …
From This:
To This:
To This:
And Finally:
And soon, all those boxes will be on their way across the country … and I have no idea where they will wind up after that!
Left speechless and heartsick by world events. Exhausted by hate, lies, and willful ignorance which seems de rigueur.
I need to write about these things – speak what I need to speak – but thus far, I find myself stumbling over words, at odds with logic and sentences and written or verbal expression. Words do, indeed, fail.
So, it is to images I turn, and in that way of things that brings one what is needed in the moment, I came across the gloriously violent images of Luke Shadbolt, reblogged from eMORPHES here.
My thanks to Luke Shadbolt and eMORPHES for the painful beauty that says so much in the closing days of a difficult year.
Like many people, this past weekend I found myself more acutely aware of the many sorts of bounty that surround me, the many things for which abiding gratitude is necessary.
I spent a ‘working weekend’ surrounded by great company and sparsely beautiful countryside … and did a serious recharge in the process. (the amazing food shared by everyone out there this past weekend contributed to health, contentment, and gratefulness, to be sure)
I was sad to be away from home for Thanksgiving, but was very grateful for a final opportunity to work on my more local site-specific projects one last time before winter sets in, in earnest.
I had three goals in mind for my time out at ‘The Farm’: to take stock of what the last year has brought me & where things are going creatively, get on the far side of a nasty cold that threatened to eat my sinuses and brain, and at least get close to finishing a new sculptural work – Dervish Reach – I had started on site last month (more on that work soon) … .
As it turns out, I got an added bonus: I was finally able to see Make:Believe in snow! (A bit early for my liking, but at least the weather wasn’t very cold, and it was rather lovely)
Make:Believe has always had a stillness about it – walking through the work, one becomes conscious of the way any activity in the surrounding landscape seems to fall away. I had wanted it to be a place that invited visitors of all species to pause – rest, play, wander – as they chose. As the work has grown over the years, this stillness has become more and more established, but the snow seemed to set it apart entirely.
I became deeply aware of this work as a space for quiet to be held and nurtured – a living reminder of how necessary it is to stop and be still now and again in order to appreciate more fully the gifts this life offers.
I attended a terrific panel discussion yesterday called “Draw More Income” as part of the AGM programming for Visual Arts Alberta – CARFAC. We had a great range of speakers: Derek Besant, Lee Deranger, Brittney Tough, and Kari Woo. Each of them addressed the practicalities of how they made a ‘go of it’ as artists, and what obstacles and setbacks they faced.
A common thread in the discussion was lack of confidence and fear – these being negative mindsets that held them and other artists back from achieving the success they wanted in their careers. So it seemed incredibly fitting that I should find this in my inbox this morning:
To survive in this high-pressured, crazy world, most of us have to become highly adept at self-criticism. We learn how to tell ourselves off for our failures, and for not working hard or smart enough. But so good are we at this that we’re sometimes in danger of falling prey to an excessive version of self-criticism … we need to carve out time for an emotional state of which many of us are profoundly suspicious: self-compassion. We’re suspicious because this sounds horribly close to self-pity. But because depression and self-hatred are serious enemies of a good life, we need to appreciate the role of self-care in a good, ambitious, and fruitful life.
It seems ridiculously obvious, but I do wonder how many of us in creative fields fall prey to exactly this type of thinking, and just how much it holds us back from all kinds of things.
My first full day in Nova Scotia – overnighted at the airport hotel, and will be heading to Day 1 of my residency at Main & Station in Parrsboro shortly!
Excited to get there, get settled, and get to work … .
Planning and researching, in order to make work that bridges disciplines and methods of articulating ideas: through sound, in sculpture, talking with and about scientific explorations, drawing as a meditation and as a performance … and all of this engaged to one degree or another with the public realm.
Both in and of the community. Rooted in landscape as place and as source of natural phenomena.
All kinds of conversations here, but they are at base conversationsbetween things and people.
And coincidentally, what should come to my inbox, but an article about Christo’s piers, and all the complicated things about this kind of work.
I was particularly struck by Hoy’s observations on the idealism of the work – particularly as it pertains to the recent Brexit, mobility, and migration (bodies in space) – and how this idealism comes up against the reality of work in public space, and that asks for public engagement directly.
(as a sidenote: I also find it interesting that Hoy mentions her Canadian roots, and the relative isolation of our huge country in relation to borders, boundaries, and movement … more food for thought here … does this explain my fascination with edges/boundaries, and with breaking them down or exposing them? is that a “terribly Canadian” thing I do?).
Hoy notes:
I doubt Brexit was on the minds of any of the thousands of people experiencing Christo’s magnanimous installation that Thursday. We were all too busy frolicking across the water, marveling at the scenery, and snapping selfies. And I’m sure any such symbolism was the furthest thing from the artist’s intentions—he and his late wife Jeanne-Claude first hatched the idea for the piers in the 1970s. “All the artwork Jeanne-Claude and I do is work of joy and beauty. They don’t serve anything except to be a work of art,” he said in an interview with Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in April.
and that
By a coincidence of timing, Christo’s Floating Piers became a symbol of how art can (quite literally) bring people together, but also how these connections are fraught. Soon, the piers will disappear and life on Lake Iseo will go back to normal. The EU will go back to normal, too, though we already know it won’t quite be the same.
At the risk of stating the obvious: context, scale, location … and fame … are markers that thoroughly differentiate my plans from this work entirely!
That being said: what has struck a chord for me is Hoy’s insights about both the impulse behind the work, and the potential for its lasting impact. I make work to speak about things in ways that (for me) defy the use of words exclusively; there are ideas I try to embody in the act of making and in the presentation of finished work that I hope people respond to viscerally.
A building, and a tearing down, simultaneously. Not without complications. A process that changes everyone involved and (hopefully) allows us all to see and experience things in the world – and ourselves – a little differently.
Idealistic, yes. Unabashedly so – there’s more than enough in this world, including Brexit, to make us jaded and cynical.
I have been thinking about a series of related concepts/ideas in the last little while … having the luxury of a little time to allow things to percolate through my brain, see where they take me. The swirl of idea(l)s has caught me up in the last 48 hours, and has insinuated itself in the nooks and crannies of the concepts I am beginning toward with for a new project …
I will perhaps post updates here as my thinking evolves and revolves …
Bodies in space.
from Maria Takeuchi, on Vimeo: https://player.vimeo.com/video/121436114
The way a single movement occurs in time, changes space, changes everything forever.
The fine line and inextricable link between order an chaos.
What can be built can collapse at any time.
2016 AICP Sponsor Reel – Dir Cut, from Method Studios on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/169599296
The Lorenz Attractor.
The difference between being active and reactive, in all things.
… that I came across today. A quote, actually, from Martin Creed, that sums up some of the ideas that have been rolling around in my head for a while now.
On a more literal level, working some of this out through the creation of the original Boundary|Time|Surface installation in 2014, and in other ways in the work that arose from it and that is now on exhibition in Newfoundland.
At any rate, Creed said:
“I started thinking about the difficulty of drawing lines on a map, making country borders, which is exactly the same as drawing on a piece of paper. Any definite border is against nature and against life.”
Things bleed into one another; that is the reality of it all. Eventually, all the myriad ways of dividing up the world (and ourselves) break down and erode. The edges get fuzzy, or float away.
These compartments we build are convenient, but they are illusions.
View from cliff topView facing the cliff at Green Point
Thanks Martin, I needed that today.
{SOURCE: “Martin Creed on Why Art Can’t Ignore the World around It” by Philomela Epps, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-martin-creed-on-why-art-can-t-ignore-the-world-around-it}
