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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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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. | |