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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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I've been making a lot of helpful packing suggestions to Sally & GVB in regards to the wilderness of Northern B.C. Actually none were helpful really. Unless Edith Wharton was going to be there, and her servants forgot to pack something in one of her 4 trunks, and Sally wanted to suck up to her by offering to share a bunch of back issues of the New Yorker ...that she would have missed reading since she's dead and all.
And then after I finished asking some really unhelpful questions about natural disasters, water purity and suitable flatware, she assured me that there was a satellite phone at the site and if any natural disaster takes place, they'll phone me, so I can google it, AND WAS THERE ANYTHING ELSE I THOUGHT THEY SHOULD WORRY ABOUT?????.
At that point I voiced some concerns about the SUPERNATURAL, but then I decided it would be quite advantageous if they were to befriend a magic talking crow that could forage for snack food.
Bomb Ride by Anitra Hamilton
Part of an upcoming group show "Run For Your Lives" curated by Diane Barber, opening at Diverseworks, Houston on September 7, 2006.
Still Life With Fruit by Anitra Hamilton
defused hand grenades covered with various eggshells:
L to R, Pear - French WW1 (duck), Pineapple (emu) and Cherry (robin and
starling). (Pineapple and Cherry are both US WW2.)
....she's packing.
Muskwa-Kechika photos by Wayne Sawchuk. See the full sized photo essay at The Tyee
A few weeks ago I reported that Nanmac and I walked from Trinity Bellwoods Park to the Toronto Zoo. In fact, our desintation was specifially the grizzly bear pen at the zoo. I wanted to make an urban expedition to bear country (shooting Grizzly Man-style video all the way) in preparation for my August expedition to a large tract of wilderness called the Muskwa-Kechika in Northern B.C. Von Bark and I are going there with my father, Don McKay, for an Artist Exploration Camp, co-organised by poet Donna Kane and photographer/ conservationist Wayne Sawchuk. Donna's website has more details on the camp and bios of all the participants. If you follow this link to a photo essay by Wayne Sawchuk in The Tyee you will see that, unlike the Toronto Zoo, the Muskwa-Kechika is a bona fide wilderness. The animals in this area are not contained for our viewing pleasure, and the grizzly bears just roam around all day doing bear stuff. This means the chances of us actually seeing one are pretty slim, and I'm definitely not hopefull about getting any big fauna on video. No worries, though, cause I am packing the following props.
The ultimate goal of the Artist Exploration Camp is to help draw attention to the Muskwa-Kechika, a unique, vast, mostly undeveloped area (the size of Ireland, they say), that has recently been designated a management area. The whole group of us artist/campers will be collaborating on a touring art exhibition about the region, so watch for us in your town! I will keep you posted.
A while ago I posted preliminary sketches, including the one above, for a video about the ghost of the victim of a grizzly bear attack, trapped forever in the grizzly bear afterlife. Yesterday we shot good ghost footage with actor Brian Marler, using a home-made green screen at Trinity Bellwoods Park. My work plan for the Muskwa-Kechika includes shooting some landscape video for the project to key in later. I also plan to create a digital "Muskwa-Kechika Menagerie" of animal gifs, similar to the windy tree-pig I posted a few days ago. I will also be doing drawings and research for the upcoming Thicket, an evolving series of multi-media installations, created in collaboration with Von Bark, that speculates on the interior consciousness of animals in diorama form. Thicket 1: The Voyage is coming up at Harbourfront Centre in November.
I am pretty excited about this expedition, and I'm very much looking forward to meeting and collaborating with the other participants. There ain't no internet in them thar hills, so L.M. will be holding the blog fort on her own for the month of August.
background notes...
The images above are from previous projects of mine involving the concept of wilderness. The first version of the Miss Mouse "Fight Club" lectures included a section on people who obssess about predators. The mouse herself had a slightly perverse interest in cats. The Killer Whale Victim performance was the story of a lost dog, told from the posthumous POV of a man who had been mauled at Marineland. The Trouble With Oscillation is about a tourist who tires of whale watching expeditions, and goes on a quantum physics vacation instead, seeking the ultimate wilderness 'hit'.
Lisa N. Goldman is a "Canadian-Israeli freelance journalist, based in Tel Aviv." She has a groovy looking blog called, On The Face. She also writes for Global Voices Online where her very thorough post of July 18th starts out:
"Israel is at war and the Israeli blogosphere is on fire. There are so many posts to mention that I can hardly think where to start. Since the events of the past week turned Israelis’ reality upside down literally overnight they are trying to make sense of it all - and many are doing so online."The rest of the post is a really great list of links and summaries to Israeli blogs about the war, and I highly recommend it as a starting point for exploring non-mass media perspectives on life in Israel.
Extraordinary interview with Robert Fisk at the Democracy Now! web site.
I just received links to the following blogs through an email thread initiated by Palestinian artist Emily Jacir. I've just glanced through the drawing blog and it is totally fantastic. Scroll down for the talking bombed out building.
A Beiruti's drawn diaries: "How can I show sound in a drawing?"
Mazen Kerbaj, Live from Lebanon, 18 July 2006
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5082.shtml
Laila al Haddad's blog in Gaza:
http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com/
Message from e-flux:
Dear friends, we are forwarding this request for help for refugees in Lebanon on behalf of Ashkal Alwan, an organization we highly respect which organizes some of the most important contemporary art events in the Middle East. We ourselves are making a financial contribution and strongly urge you to also do so, if possible, as it is really a critical situation.More information and donation details here.
many thanks,
all of us at e-flux
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"I'm very grateful for the lucky accident that plopped me into the world during this particular junction of space/time because once in a while I get to read Paul Hong's writing." - Sally McKay |
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That quote by me appears on the back jacket of Paul Hong's new book, Your Love is Murder, Or the Case of the Mangled Pie, from Tightrope Books. Having been raised in a writerly setting, I am somewhat phobic about first books by new authors I am accquainted with and I rarely read them unless I absolutely have to. This one is different. Having read some of Hong's perfectly balanced, lateral, frightening and surprising stories in Kiss Machine magazine, I was waiting for the book with out-and-out anticipation. While reading it I experienced not one flinch, nor sigh of awkward pity, but rather found myself completely absorbed, disbelief suspended, with utter confidence in the author and eagerness to see what would happen next. The stories are hard to describe: they are short and precise, and a lot of them have animals. The animals are sometimes sort of supernatural, like the shark that appears to the boy in the hospital. Other times they are locked in the material world with the rest of us, like the dog who must borrow a child's plastic shovel in order to scratch complaints to his owner in the sand box. The stories are also about aliens. Neurologist Ramachandran talks about the zombie in our brain, a literal aspect of our physiological functionality that is impassive but observant. I recognize a certain deatchment in Hong's point of view, as if the narrator was just a visitor to this world, seeing through the eyes of a human boy. Except for the parts of the book that express a deep, confused and seething rage. This is the subtext, and it is linked to racial discrimination, to the infuriating impotence that comes from witnessing and experiencing human violence, and to the alienation of swimming through a culture's tropes and modes that do not speak to you, yet envelope you. In some cases the animals seem to proffer a bridge across a chasm. A creature that functions as icon in one set of mythologies (for instance a beaver) functions for our protagonist as a kind of existential entry-point to forming relationships with the world, or maybe, and this is where it all gets spooky, a relationship with the underworld? Ben Okri's Famished Road springs to mind, with his boy protagonist trapped between the spirit world and the living world, constantly courted and seduced by ghosts, barely clinging to the version of reality that is shared by friends and family. The struggles in Paul Hong's stories are handled with a light touch, with perfect tension, with lots of humour, and efficient yet unpredictable prose. He is an incredibly good writer, and I am an envious, admiring and enriched-for-the-experience die-hard fan. | |
JINGLE
A group exhibition curated by *Andrew Harwood
Gladstone Hotel Public Spaces 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Floors
July 15 to Aug 27, 2006 12-5pm
OPENING RECEPTION 7PM TO 9PM JULY 14, 2006
Patricia Aldridge, Katie Bethune-Leamen, Amy Bowles, Cecilia Berkovic,
John Caffery, Keith Cole, Chris Curerri, Michael Comeau, Pete Dako,
Fastwürms, Sadko Hadzihasanovic, Luis Jacob, Melissa Levin, Scott
McEwan, John McLachlin, Allyson Mitchell, Will Munro, Andrew J.
Paterson, Lisa Pereira,* **R. M. Vaughan, Natalie Wood
* recently responsible for the destruction of the Toronto Art Awards
**recently indicted on a charge of lacking appropriate reverence for Vancouver art
The show I'm in called Neutrinos They are Very Small opened last week in Kingston at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (curated by Corinna Ghazanvi, and hosted by Celeste Scopelites and Jan Allen). It looks fantastic, if I do say so myself. There is a catalogue coming soon designed by Lisa Kiss (superstar). The same show was on exhibit in Sudbury last fall, where it also looked great. The space in Kingston is smaller and the works are more jammed together, which I really like a lot. The three artists — myself, Rebecca Diederichs, and Gordon Hicks — all worked together on the topic of neutrinos for several years (during which time many pints of beer were consumed, much information was shared, any many outlandish speculations were floated). The show is a really great amalgamation of our three very different approaches to the same big topic. The collaborative element was really important to me and, while I hope to work with both Gordon and Rebecca again, I know that the good chemistry we had for this exhibition is impossible to fabricate or reproduce.
There is one piece in the show that is literally a collaborative work between the three of us (Agent B, Agent G, and Agent S) called " The Black Box." We have installed it in two different ways so far, but the current mode involves a website which Gordon designed, and which I completely adore. I'm not going to explain the project here because exploring the data for yourself is really the whole point.
WADE: Michael Caines and Leah Decter, Everyone in the Pool (Christie Pitts wading pool)
WADE: Nick Tobier and crew (Charles G. Williams wading pool)
WADE: Sandra Gregson, True Reflection (Stanley Park wading pool)
WADE: Shannon McMullen and Fabian Winkler, Waves (Trinity Bellwoods wading pool)
WADE: Louis Laberge-Côté performing Verbal Source, conceived in collaboration with Peter Chin (Dufferin Grove wading pool)WADE was super fun again this year. I took all the pictures above during my bicycle tour on Sunday afternoon. I started with Michael Caines and Leah Decter's felt making project at Christie Pitts. Unfortunately I missed the bit where everyone got to mush up the felt in the pool, but I did get to pick out a piece to take home, and chose this one cause it looks a bit like Google Earth.
In Nick Tobier's dance piece a group of people dressed as city workers mucked around in the pool making waves and patterns and acting out cute little loosely connected scenarios. The picture on the left shows my favourite part, when the very tall man was jumping and splashing, and the two women were following him making smoothing out gestures as if they were calming the water with their hands. I'm not normally a big dance fan but I enjoyed it a lot. All the chaotic clowning around was nicely timed and the whole thing flowed. I must also confess that all the little two-year old audience members and I were on the same wave-length regarding the innate hilariousness of people splashing each other on purpose.
Sandra Gregson's fake grass might have been my favourite piece of the ones I saw. She rolled out some really classy astro-turf-type lawn along the side of the pool and partway into the water. It was a very low-key transformation, and the very small kids were freakin' out of their minds happy with running and splatting themselves onto the softer surface. The plastic grass felt really good on your feet and the dry areas made a great place to sit — not as visually spectacular as some of the other works, but as a positive pool enhancement it was really successful.
I also really liked the subtle sound buoy by Shannon McMullen and Fabian Winkler. It just bobbed and warbled in the pool while all the regular kid activated water activities took place around it. I waded out and bonked the thing a few times and it had a nice robust construction, like a sturdy toy. While I was there, a little kid kept running his fire truck into it going "vroom."
The Peter Chin / Louise Laberge-Côté collaboration was a recipe doomed to fail...only it didn't. Laberge-Côté did an autobiographical dance/monologue in which he evoked the psychological states of his story with movement. Sounds horrid, doesn't it? But in fact his performance was super charismatic, well-paced, brave, and funny. I was very impressed at the courage of the man to put himself on the line in such a strange and intimate performer/audience setting. Again, the kids were totally captivated, shrieking with laughter as his persona flipped in an instant from angelic child to tormented demon and back again.
Unfortunately I did not get pictures of John Greyson and Margaret Moores' Roy and Silo’s Wedding, which I attended in the evening. The candle-lit floating balloon penguins in ice-laden water made for a great closing party centre-piece. A dvd was playing in the centre of the pool. Many of us managed to watch it despite the icy chill of the water, by hopping back and forth from one numb foot to the other. There were a lot of penguin references laid on, the footage being an apropriated comedic re-mash of March of the Penguins. The story was about the gay penguin marriage in New York City, with jokes about Penguin books re-releasing all their gay literature, and lots of gags with the Penguin logo. Lots of colder-blooded-than-I resilient youngsters spent time in the water encouraging the floating penguins and candles to drift this way or that, and the rest of us stood and sat about the pool chatting in the dark. Every once in a while a balloon penguin would explode when it got to close to a flame.
I know WADE is a big huge ton of work. Many congratulations to curators Sandra Rechico and Christie Pearson for pulling off this excellent weekend of watery outdoor park art.
I'm back on the grid for a few weeks and then I am going away again in August for a fullblown art in the wilderness grizzly bear territory adventure thing. More on that soon (yikes!). In the meantime, I'll be posting on and off as usual. I'm keeping L.M.'s name up there in the header cause she's pretty much signed on a guest poster for the summer. So you can expect to hear from either of us at any time.
Nothing like Euro advertisers for weirdly mixed messages.
Jan, darling, I didn't mind the booze
or the drugs
but the STD's really pissed me off.
great article here about the 1998 tour: A pharmacy on Wheels
The history of modern doping begins with the cycling craze of the 1890s. Here, for example, is a description of what went on during the six-day races that lasted from Monday morning to Saturday night: " The riders' black coffee was "boosted" with extra caffeine and peppermint, and as the race progressed the mixture was spiked with increasing doses of cocaine and strychnine. Brandy was also frequently added to cups of tea. Following the sprint sequences of the race, nitroglycerine capsules were often given to the cyclists to ease breathing difficulties. The individual 6-day races were eventually replaced by two-man races, but the doping continued unabated. Since drugs such as heroin or cocaine were widely taken in these tournaments without supervision, it was perhaps likely that fatalities would occur."
Peppermint? Huh?
La Coppa Del Mondo Fifa
Hey La Francia!
On Sunday mio gatto Italiano is going to whup the hell
out of votre ugly-ass chien Français.
And then mio gatto is going to roll around on the ground writhing
in fake agony and votre chien is going to get all the blame.
That's why we call it The Beautiful Game.
As well as the WADE opening tonight, Sally McKay, Rebecca Diederichs and Gordon Hicks are opening their exhibition, Neutrinos They are Very Small at the AGNES ETHERINGTON ART CENTRE in Kingston, Ontario.
So lets send out a great big manipulative & perved-out hug to all of them.
(because it's the kind of emoticon that they'd all kick to death if it came near them)
But they'd love the dancing banana, everyone loves the dancing banana.
blue: Gwen MacGregor, wade 2004
wade 2006 - curated by Christie Pearson + Sandra Rechico
A weekend of performances and installations in Toronto's wading pools
July 7,8 and 9 (schedule here)
wade 2006 opens Friday, July 7th, 8 to 11 pm
at Bellevue Square, Kensington Market.
with an installation by Tony Stallard:
Here's a link to an interview with Sandra Rechico (includes a picture of her
and Christie looking like casual ho's)
As well as posting shit upside down and screwing with my head, joester has his hilarious PreReview site.
So just grow the fuck up everyone, you don't have to actually see something in order to express your opinion, I bet you thought that it could just be done with visual arts, but you're wrong, you can have your say about anything before they remove the bubble wrap.
b/t/w I've tried to write one, but he doesn't provide those cute little animated emoticons that I require.
Catherine Bodmer
John Dickson
from natureinthegarage curated by Janet Bellotto
(la bella donna Bellotto, she is so romantic!)
ITALY! ITALY! ITALY!
From the Guardian today:
"World Cup: Wayne Rooney says he never meant to tread on Ricardo Carvalho's groin, and says he's disappointed that Cristiano Ronaldo got involved."
But all the players of the beautiful game are just one tiny little jet crash from feasting on each other's flesh.
Therefore we are fans.
Happy Birthday Cute Little Canada!
This is the day when all the smart gardeners blow-torch those flower buds open (short growing season),
so that Joint Task Force 2 (Canada's top-secret anti-terrorist commando unit) can pollinate the garden.
As for the soccer fans, sad day Brazilian Canadian neighbours - you threw the best parties, shut up already Portuguese Canadian neighbours, you've been at it for hours, and I see you driving up from Dundas St. to College St. just to gloat.
The rest of the evening belongs to my Pyromaniac Canadian neighbours.
Shit! Fuck!Damn!
(France won)
Now who's going to buy this shit? Me. That's who. Especially the jersey for the mountain races, because the polka dots remind me of pills
Oodles of fun sending e-cards to my friends from Jan Ullrich's site. And I can still purchase a Kinder - Cap mit Klettverschluß / verstellbar, bestickt, the material is 100% Baumwolle available in blau but only size available is Kindergröße.
My first email this morning(ish) had this link:Tour de France hit by massive doping scandal
Damn those stoners on bikes.(it's rather rich that I'm complaining)
My friend A.B. refers to them as the "Thunderous Thighs of Europe", I'm in it for the garish colours, the scenery, improving my babelfish French skills and best of all, the crashes. (I also think it's brilliant that the whole Peloton jumps off their bikes at the same time to pee in the woods.)
Fuck them all for picking on Lance all these years.