Process: Time Sculpture

On a stop-over in Toronto, I visited the AGO. Bypassed the KingTut exhibit in favour of Beautiful Fictions, an engrossing photography exhibit. Highlights amongst others were Arnaud Maggs' Hotel series and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Watertowers (Typology), 1980. Anyone who has been to Sudbury would appreciate this series of industrial architecture. Taken out of context and aligned together, the structures are quite otherworldly.

Gazed out over the city from Gehry's light-filled staircases, and explored the Vivian and David Campbell Centre for Contemporary Art on the 4th and 5th floors. I particularly enjoyed the “land art” room. Remembered Ian Hamilton Finlay from my Scotland days. Responded to Robert Fones’ (b. London, CA, 1949) woodcut, Natural Range of Canada Plum, 1984.

Completely intrigued by Cycling Sculpture, 1-3 Dec. 1967 by Richard Long (b. Bristol, UK, 1945) — the simplicity of his documentation (a photo, a typed page with instructions, and a map with waypoints). His work has often been cast as “romantic” yet the artist always referred to his objective method of documentation. Perhaps it is because his photographs, devoid of human presense, are often strikingly beautiful.

I too tend to favour the rural scenes in my own project, conscious of how my documentation of placenames veer from an objective method in my reach for beauty. Finding the right vantage point to witness the play of light on water for instance. The gold of a swaying field. They are empty landscapes with no direct human intervention like cars or people walking, though the occasional house does figure in the background. To be fair, most of my genealogical/geographical waypoints have been in rural settings as they are related to waterways. Urban waterways are habitually underground.

I also try and shy away from direct self-representation in my photos. My rule is to not represent the figure, but to allow the trace of the artist through a stand-in: the growing “path-map” — the tracing of my passage on the Quebec landscape or the occasional glimpse of my bike in the panoramas. The bike is much like the artist’s knapsack in Long's photo A Night of Rain Sleeping Place An 8 Day Mountain Walk in Sobaeksan Korea Spring 1993. It is possible to completely erase the artist? Without this human impulse to leave a trace, would the artist be driven to create work? Is ego a necessary part of the creative process?

Where I do respond to Long’s work is the aspect of “discovery” of a space — not in a colonial fashion (claiming something as one’s own in conqueror mode), but more on an intimate level through simple movements in time and space. The act of searching and being uncertain of where I am going (both physically and conceptually) is a necessary part of my art practice. There is an element of risk in the unknown. The subject emerges through time.

Looking forward to the Sculpture as Time exhibit coming up in March.

Progress: December 17, 2009

Gave a presentation of my work at Laboratoire NT2 at UQAM as part of FAIS TA VALISE!, a Montreal School Board project co-produced with the Fine Art faculty at Concordia and Hexagram. While I concentrated on the collaborative project Fugues, I briefly showed the Tongue Rug project to talk about process.

Trying to describe my project to a class of grade 6 students (age 10), I quickly realized that I needed to resort to plain everyday language. Vague art speak was not going to cut it. What was this project about?

Told them that I was cycling to different bodies of water with my family names and this was creating a path in the landscape. Each waypoint is represented by a tongue in the tongue rug. The structure is participative as the public can send their own stories about these placenames by commenting on the blog, filling out a form or simply through haphazard meetings. In this way, I do not know what the final tongue rug will look like. It will depend on my travels in space and in time, with my interactions with people.

They seemed to readily accept the logic (or whimsy) behind it. I loved that the kids didn’t focus on the “why” of the project but honed in on specific details: why were the tongues labeled so? I tried to explain that the tongue rug could have a different shape and be animated differently were we to travel to waypoints with their family names for example.

I showed them my dusty old Lake of the Woods Tongue Rug, that had initially served as my inspiration. (The back of the rug is made with burlap sack from Lake of the Woods Milling). Talked of objects that can be used as archives, both past (handicraft) and present (virtual). I truly enjoyed sharing my ideas and the creative process with them. Their spontaneous and uncluttered feedback was refreshing.