Fish:BOWL words & photographs by Slava Bart

First you notice the objectified “attractive female sleeping” character – flat, like out of a comic book. Then you read the captions: The hardest part / Is waking up alone. And the first thing you think of is the stereotypical, cinematic loneliness of a woman waking up alone. The sun, like a halo, behind her is already up. But is she awake and just keeping her eyes shut – or is she only about to wake up? Not unlike the Mona Lisa who only just begins to smile, this character is in between, in a half dream, which we are beginning to inhabit.
 
We know what loneliness is like. Loneliness is built into our commodified, mass-marketed bodies. The female character recurs in this artist’s work. Like an Andy Warhol Madonna. It could be someone’s avatar on social media. It could be any one of us. If there was a QR code to scan here, we would be raising our phones prayerfully to inhabit this icon’s digital dimension.
 
In the exquisite lettering around her – EXQS – we discern the hint of a hammer and sickle in the Q. The five-corner stars we noticed before now begin to acquire meaning. The circled anarchist A in one corner is balanced by the heart in the opposite. Arrows suggest movement – the movement of the mind, language, towards alternatives. If we can find a way not to be alone together, perhaps our social system would be different.
 
Waking up to a system of exploitation can be lonely business. To be alone is also a prerequisite for awareness, knowledge. To be aware and alone yet not lonely – perhaps that is the hardest of all. And here in this Lake Country skate park, several artists have come together for the first time to create something new out of highly individualized styles. In a dialogue of style and meaning new possibilities emerge.

Right opposite EXQS is the Eye Factory’s giant eye of surveillance and consciousness. Graffiti abounds in representations of eyes – and so does ancient and modern art, from Egyptian, Buddhist, and Indigenous iconography to Salvador Dali and Stanley Kubrick. Eyes are healing, rebirth, communication. Eyes are mystery, illusion and the afterlife. Eyes are a miracle of nature. They look at us from the wings of butterflies. To represent eyes as consciousness is to become aware of awareness – an ancient practice and a condition for waking up to life, truth, a higher reality.

The hills of Lake Country have eyes now. Look at how graffiti and landscape engage with each other. The hellish skull enjoining us to paint our dreams gestures towards a similar truth and visually echoes the work of the master opposite. At the other end of the park, what seems chaos up close acquires the features of Byzantine mosaics if you step back, step back far enough in time to allow connections.
Working with the manic intensity of a Michelangelo, Doktoer has been up through the night, improvising a dense web of free-form connections.
 
The space now is less a gallery and more a chapel – where you commune with the truth not in still supplication, but through movement. And if you ever stop, you stop midair.

​There is an ensemble here of artists who have previously exhibited along roadsides on the outskirts, under railway bridges, and in remote corners of cities big and small across the Okanagan and BC. An ecosystem of expression emerges in Lake Country where the evolution of art, community and consciousness becomes possible. With their help we may be able to look at art and the world with new eyes.

​Slava Bart is a first-year international MFA student at UBCO. He comes from Israel and enjoys multilingual and collaborative writing with a penchant for venturing deep into the past and far into the future, reaching across borders and disciplines, to promote community and peace. His thesis in poetry reinterprets the books of Genesis and Exodus using multiple languages to tell a personal story of the loss of home after the collapse of the USSR.