co-heart

One month ago, I entered the second July Intensive, which is the halfway point for my Masters of Applied Arts at Emily Carr. On my first day in the studio, I transcribed the following on a big sheet of paper and posted it on my little piece of wall:

The story never stops beginning or ending. 
It appears headless and bottomless, for it is built on differences. 
The story circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it it to taste, yet can never truly possess. 
A gift that stays inexhaustible within its own limits.

-Trinh T. Minh-Ha, from Woman, Native, Other

This became a theme for the work I undertook in July, but I think it also describes my relationship with my cohort of fellow low-residency students.

This particular Masters is a low-residency program. I spend eleven months of the year talking to my instructors and fellow students online, and one month together in person. It's a fascinating and dynamic pedagogical project, but it also feels like a social experiment. We are subjected to the extremes of communication methods. For the majority of the time, we are writing quasi-academic forum posts that might never be read by each other. Then, for one month, we are lounging in a hottub together, sweating together through long days and nights as we install our interim exhibition, swimming in our underwear under the moon at Kits Beach, or dancing until the sun rises at an all-night party in Stanley Park.

Near the last day of the intensive, I removed Minh-Ha's quote, and posted another transcription:

I'll leave the stones here
But I'm taking the dream with me
Into the unknown.

-Fischli and Weiss, from The Right Way

See you next year, co-heart.

reflection

The arrangement of objects on my big tabletop called out to me, so I photographed it. I didn't adjust anything on or around the table, including the light umbrella. The object in the center is a rock.

This image makes me aware of how my art practice has transformed over the last year. It's nice to get that perspective every once in a while.

Four Stories

I just got back from two weeks in the Yukon. The first few days were spent mounting this beast at the Yukon Arts Center. More details on the project are here:

http://draworbedrawn.wordpress.com/works-in-progress/four-stories/

I'll talk more about the second project I was working on, coyote, another time.

Maui I

dawn at Haleakala

from temple of Cloud
red Sun emerges, humble and tentative
rising into a perfect portal
greater than sight


Sea Turtle

how embarrassing
to think you might be:
aggressive, competitive, defensive, hopeful, ambitious
lessons taught with a glance


Nakalele blowhole

weeping nostril of the rock
ancient conversations
speak of distant futures


graves in the Rainforest

leaves and great vines shower
lessons
of compassion


compost bin

writhing with life:
Cockroaches and Maggots
here is a gift.

tracing feeling remembering forgetting

For one hundred days last year, I did six drawings per day. Each day was a single sheet of watercolour paper; six drawings per page.

I did the drawings at completely random times. I made a spreadsheet on my computer that made random times, and entered the times into my watch. My alarm would go off, and I'd draw.

The drawings are also in random directions and attitudes (up/down-ness). So there are floors, skies, leaves, lots of ceilings, keyboards, signs, desks, cars, trees.

Eventually, times came up when I couldn't, or wouldn't, draw, when the alarm went off. I filled these in with black spaces.

I'm presenting the hundred pages (along with another work) at the Yukon Arts Center as part of their Summer exhibition. In doing so, I've decided to reflect on the drawings, and on my sense of time and memory. At first I was going to just put them up in a grid, but I'm realizing that that's not how I see time, necessarily. At the least, it's not the way I want to represent time. And it's certainly not the way I remember those hundred days. I'm not a human calculator. Time is way more fluid than what I see on a calendar, and it's interrelated with memory, feelings.

The final installation will probably be about 14 feet high, and sprawl across the wall. We'll see. Still lots of work to do - remembering, recording, experimenting, tracing, feeling. Responding to the images that are already there. A diagram of real time, which is not always measurable on a watch.

Passing-Between Place

If I were a deer I'd feel safer passing through this place.

The solution (this time) is to look where I'm going, 

look away from the machine I hear him operating.

Fully inhabit the trail

deer steps man steps ape steps 

the machine fades

lost 

in the hills

passing-back

speed up
look like you got somewhere to go

someone gardening says hi
say hi back
he turns away, unaware
of what I just was

Drawing Deer

DRAWING DEER
with my body as an instrument
tracing lines
  with perceptive steps

layers of time:
      sun, birdsong
a calendar of pebbled scat: soft and bright to hard and dark, to earth
to moss

the startling permanence of discarded plastic

a misstep

that dislodged a stone

---

There is such a variety of places on this mountain I've begun to explore. Carefully picked trails up shadowed mossy ledges, dry airy heights where ravens call far above the arbutus. Broad sweeping valley of old trees, where trails braid open like a Northern river, then diverge into no-trail, across the western slope.

I wonder how Deer conceive of relationships to these places? Is their passage across these slopes a similar journey of sentiment? The confusion and complexity of a deadfall-strewn gorge, the restful ease of a secluded ledge, bedded with ages of moss.

Do they return to specific places that they feel a fondness towards?

Do Deer gather somewhere on this mountain, on moonlit nights,
at the small lake
only seen in aerial photographs and dreams