… until YORK closes at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art.
It’s amazing how fast the weeks have flown by – it certainly doesn’t feel like a month since we were installing the work at the gallery!
So – if you’re in Kelowna in the coming week, drop in and see YORK, and say hello to Lorna and Ketrena, and all the lovely people who are a part of the Alternator community!
The exhibition closes on April 23.
He makes it look easy. Oh, it’s not.
I am smitten with the meditative and performative quality of this type of work. When I make work like this – site based, body based, working with natural materials – I feel most at home in my skin.
As an artist especially.
Thanks for the reminder, Adrian Gray.
I’ve been doing some travelling recently, in and out of other parts of the country – and in and out of winter (and spring) along with the shift in landscape and time zones.
But wherever I’ve gone, there’s been ice, in all it’s beautiful, slippery, dangerous glory. Slick sidewalks, crusted roads, feather-frosted puddles and windows, shards and chunks in bodies of water. Yes, there’s water moving, to be sure, but its colour alone speaks volumes about how close in temperature it is to the ice floating in it, surrounding it, still covering most of it as it rushes underneath.
All this frozen stuff has made me want to retreat – to hibernate (again) – keep under the covers, wait for the sun to (finally) warm things into liquid, into spring, into green and growing. But I’ve also been drawn to it. To what it leaves unsaid, to its potential.
Under that veneer, it’s so very alive.
Of course I know that rationally – but it’s easy to forget this time of year, when the grip of cold air and random storms serve as continual reminders that not yet is the refrain when we ask for the next, warmer season to begin in earnest.
And then I came across this, and understood why ice fascinates me as much as want it al to melt – I want to see this in person one day – to experience seeing that still surface reveal whats really going on … always only change.
This morning offered a landscape rimed with frost.
The mundane and usually overlooked things that surround us, flung into high relief, augmented.
A moment in which things as they are become something more – at least for a little while.
Warm enough (just) for pulling gloves off, grabbing the phone and capturing a moment or two.
Those chance meetings between the dailiness of getting from here to there, and moments of extraordinary loveliness.
… some frost drawings from the day, courtesy back alley weeds and a pickup truck tailgate.
Enjoy.
It seems growth and change are afoot in almost every way imaginable.
Last night, the province in which I live held a remarkable election, with results that have transformed the political landscape here – and certainly made history. A blast of fresh Spring air in this place.
I’ve been back for a couple of weeks from Vienna, recovered from the jet lag and hit the ground running; digging into a big new project that has me very excited: York:Moments. A project that revolves around reclaiming the history of a place and a neighbourhood, gathering stories and memories with a community. A new life of sorts for streets and empty spaces that allow them in some small way to live again through images and (re)tellings … making a place that no longer exists live again.
These things are about potential, about working and building new things out of the old, and saving what’s precious in one way or another … just like the birds do each year:
Here, a nest within a nest. A bird decided that one of my nest sculptures would be a good spot to build a new home, perhaps.
It remains to be seen what will come of these various activities – for me and for the birds.
But I do know that right now, starting new things and seeing change unfold is exactly what has to happen. It’s Spring (even if the snow today would have us believe otherwise).
The weather offered some lovely reminders yesterday morning that this has been a rather humid winter for my part of the world so far.
Having spent the last three weeks + feeling like I was running all the time, these frosty feathers were a perfect reminder to me of the importance of paying attention to the details in one’s environment. And, of course, that taking the time to stop and really see offers worlds of peace and refreshment in this ever-busy world.
I’ve been coming across articles everywhere lately that are addressing the endless business that seems to pervade existence; the prevalence of being constantly plugged-in, constantly in touch, continually working, endlessly busy – and how counter-productive that pace actually is. How little we really wind up accomplishing, and at what cost. Busy isn’t necessarily any of the things we want to be: efficient in our days, producing quality work (whatever work we do).
The frost reminded me that it takes time to really create anything that’s worth making; that being present for the process is a great gift. And that time allows the mind to still, and to really work.
I woke up this morning to a text from my daughter.
Her place of work was in lockdown because someone had spotted a man in black combats, with an earpiece, carrying what appeared to be a rifle wrapped in black fabric.
This, on the heels of what are being described as two other ‘terrorist’ attacks in various places in my country in the past couple of days.
These events are frightening and terrible – as is the loss of life, regardless of whose life is lost in these events.
What I want is a voice of reason. Not violence, not retribution, not hatred and fear matching hatred and fear.
So, this morning, I offer the words of Elizabeth May … One of the few voices of reason I am hearing out I the world right now:
… we must ensure that this appalling act of violence is not used to justify a disproportionate response. We must not resort to hyperbolic rhetoric. We need to determine if these actions are coordinated to any larger group or are the actions of one or two deranged individuals. If it is the latter we must develop tools and a systematic approach to dissuade our youth from being attracted to violent extremist groups of any kind. We need to protect our rights and liberties in a democracy.
I have no answers – but I do know that responding to violence with inflammatory rhetoric and more violence will lead to no good for anyone. There are no winners in a world filled with hatred and fear and violence. None.
I am immensely thankful that things turned out fine – she is safe, and no one was harmed. But I am also immensely concerned that histrionic, nationalistic responses to events like these will only make matters worse, and ultimately place many more people at significant risk.
There has to be a better way.
Since we got back from points East, I don’t really feel like my feet have touched the ground. A series of shifts, of changes and new developments – one after the other – and of course, the work of getting settled back in.
Ordinarily, routine helps immensely with the process of readjustment. But this time, it’s been different. There hasn’t been much that’s been ‘routine’ to settle into, so I feel it’s take an inordinate amount of time to get my bearings (and I”m not entirely there yet … but it’s coming).
It also seems that my entire neighbourhood – and much of the city I live in – is currently undergoing roadworks or construction of some sort. It’s a reality in a Prairie town, of course, that the summers are short and so the construction and road repair needs to be compressed into just a few months between last frost and first snow … . But feeling as dislocated as I have, I find the visual and auditory impact of the upheaval around me more unsettling than I normally would.
Everyone’s digging holes in the ground.
Covering up and uncovering things.
Turning it all over and over.
Leaving things in undone heaps and putting up barriers everywhere.
Even so … I have been able to find some humour in all of it. There’s a certain absurdity to the whole process of roadworks that is starting to fascinate me. Especially the final clearing-up-and-getting-sorted for the next job stuff.
Just a block and a bit from my house, there seems to be a convention happening. A Congregating. A Gathering… in anticipation of Something Important Happening Very Soon.
Maybe they are preparing for migration. Autumn is on its way, to be sure … the leaves are beginning to turn her and there: early warning signs.
In any case, I think it requires a new word, something that speaks to the flocking, grouped nature of these things:
A Hazard of Barricades, perhaps…?
Or maybe it’s simpler than that. They’re just hanging out, relaxing after the work day.
And they decided to have a party?!?
It feels too good to be true, even though every cell in my body wants it to be so.
There’s been a rapid – and quite remarkable – change in the weather here the last few days, and (dare I say the ‘S’ word …) it feels like the first glimmers of Spring.
The warm days and sunshine have people smiling, climbing out of layers of clothing, anticipating more. Hungry for sun that actually heats the flesh.
The birds too. So much birdsong in the morning street, and the business of building and courting has begun in earnest; seemingly overnight, a switch has been flicked, and we all have permission to get on with the business of living in other ways than the stasis that months of cold bring.
And there are little moments of wonder built into this abrupt transition, everywhere.
Although it’s out of necessity I have spent as much time looking down at the ice-covered pavement than looking up at the brilliant blue sky these past few days, I’m not willing to (completely) curse the ice for its ability to send my feet flying in all directions at a moment’s notice. There’s some lovely stuff underfoot, between me and the battered and frost-heaved sidewalks.
Self-renewing sculptures pocketed the pavement this morning, and had me stopping to get some quick shots before they disappeared under the sun’s influence, at least for a few hours.
It’s all about surfaces just now – and what’s under them. Waiting to see the light of day. Again.
The idea of ‘place’ and its meaning is a recurring thread in my work. This preoccupation seems particularly apt at this point in my life, as I am really ‘betwixt and between’ in many ways: some projects have concluded, others are taking shape; I am revisiting the NEST work, and preparing for a new exhibition; the sabbatical here in Halifax is very quickly coming to a close, and so I will be back at packing and sorting and moving; we are also selling the place we have here, so that is another layer of transition, another shifting relationship to place.
The calendar year is coming to a close, the Winter Solstice just past … returning to light, to work, to a place I have called home for many years.
I think that’s why this building struck me so. I’ve gone by it many times over the years, over many walks downtown, but this time the layers seemed particularly evident, the exposure of change to the wide world more vivid.
Surfaces like this are also a rare thing in Edmonton – we are very good at erasing our history, at least when it comes to buildings. The boomtown preoccupation with the new, coupled with the relative youth of this city has contributed greatly to this erasure, as has the tendency for development to place profit and efficiency over preservation. So, place is different there; its associated narratives and threads of history are less easily read on the surface. They are there nonetheless, but it takes digging (or flying above it all) to really begin to grasp it.
I have often been thoroughly disheartened by what feel like thoughtless, short-sighted erasures and edits to the tangible records of place/history out west (certainly in relation to the preservation of buildings and history in Halifax the difference is most dramatic). But for all of that, there is a deeper thread to understanding the meaning of place for me, that cannot be broken by myriad (and seemingly endless) boom-town-construction changes. Or perhaps that thread is because of the change: because the economy has brought so very many ‘come from away’ people to Edmonton for its entire history – and especially so in the last 40 years – I am something of a rare bird. I was born there. It is a corner of the world that has shaped me irrevocably, if for no other reason than time in.
There are people out here who can go ‘home’ to a place that has been in the family for generations, to a house that has stood for centuries. I can’t do that – I am the daughter of an immigrant and a first generation Canadian, both of whom did their best to forget the past of the ‘old country’ and even of all but the barest snippets of their growing up years. They saw the house they called home as setting them apart from all of that by its modernity – they renovated the original house to their own design, laying claim to space, changing the land the house stood on, leaving their personal stamp on what they built. 20th Century Pioneers. The life of the place can only really be measured from the very late 1950’s or early 1960s as the place I knew as home. And now, the house and yard has been completely changed by the current owners, and almost everything around it has been transfigured by suburban expansion; even the long, straight roads I walked have been erased, in favour of winding asphalt and cup de sacs.
But the river is still there. The ravine is still there. The changes matter, impact the place deeply, make it a different city. But not entirely. I guess its in the blood, somehow, in much the same way the ties to ‘back home’ run so deep out here in the Maritimes.
It’s just the surface realities that are very different.