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ART WORDS

The Lake Country Art Gallery Blog keeps the conversation going with various guest writers on current topics within the local and global art discourse.

Contribute your words. Write a short piece about an exhibition you have seen. Share a story or poem that might relate to a current exhibitions. Send to us for consideration. 

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Curators statements - Atklokem

10/24/2019

1 Comment

 
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Exhibiting artist and co-curator David Wilson

Sometimes life’s little inconveniences lead you to the door of opportunity.
One morning I had made the bus trip from Vernon to Lake Country to take pictures of my collaborative mural project with some of the George Elliott Secondary School students that hung proudly on the wall beside the Creekside Theatre. I decided a beverage at the nearby Coffee House would be a good starting point, and it was there I noticed my phone was missing.
Wanda Lock, the Curator for the Lake Country Public Art Gallery, recognized me and after chatting she lent me her phone to see if I could relocate mine. Luckily, it had been turned in to the bus driver on duty. All I had to do was wait for the next bus loop.
This gave Wanda and me a chance to talk. She said she'd just been thinking about a possible First Nations focused exhibition to showcase our art in a meaningful form of reconciliation and mutual respect.
This led to the exhibition called Atklokem: the place where wild carrots grow.
Sometimes these little inconveniences lead you to the path of golden opportunities. 
David Wilson Sookinakin 



LC Art Gallery Curator Wanda Lock:
​As part of the Lake Country Art Gallery’s exploration of community I recognize the importance of providing opportunities for a discourse related to the Syilx, the Indigenous people of the Okanagan, and to facilitate discussions about the history and future of the people and this land.
My responsibility as the Curator at the Lake Country Art Gallery continues to evolve as the role of the artist morphs and responds to social and cultural needs. The Curator is an enabler, making space and giving voice to artists while at the same time researching and pulling together exhibitions that are stimulating, exciting, and thought-provoking to the public audience.
The role of a Curator is not a static one. It is prudent to invite others into the gallery space and to step aside when others can offer more qualified and different perspectives. And who can open up the conversation, break it apart and rebuild ideas. By inviting supporting curators into the Lake Country Art Gallery, we can stay relevant, reflect the times, move forward, and make space for other voices. This process then allows us to respond to conversations that are happening around the Okanagan Valley.
We must give voice to Okanagan artists and curators who create work intended to inform and challenge us. These exhibitions make us think about the history of the land and those who have come before us.
The Lake Country Art Gallery welcomes David Wilson, to serve as a supporting curator, for this exhibition. Atklokem featured work from Barb Marchand, Mariel Belanger, Sheldon Louis, and David Wilson.
Wanda Lock

1 Comment

About Mary

7/15/2019

4 Comments

 
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She’s Mary: a tribute to Mary Smith McCulloch from Carolyn MacHardy
​

Well yes, there IS something about Mary, isn’t there?! But how easy is it to identify just what that something
is? Mary moved to the Okanagan with her degree in printmaking from the Glasgow School of Art just as
the Fine Arts Department of Okanagan College was forming, and she became an integral part of this institution
and its successors. Mary’s teaching skills are legendary, and I was fortunate to have the chance to team-teach
with her for several years and to be a colleague and friend for many. I learned so much about teaching from
Mary: she was wise, very fair, and frankly, she was a ton of fun both inside and outside the studio, as the students
were well aware. Mary mentored her students, and I think the continuing success of printmaking in this
valley has a lot to do with her. She made it important and young artists understood that working with abrasive
chemicals, snapping etching plates like they were celery, and feeding paper into presses the size of small farm
machinery were all part of a day’s work in the printmaking studio. She was a role model for women in that she
combined an active family life with her full time work at the College, and I think it was a very important lesson
for her male students as well. At the time we had many women returning to do their studies in fine arts after
having started their own families and Mary gave them the confidence to do it. Nor did she ever pretend that it
was easy for a woman with a young family to succeed in a teaching career and as an artist, but her recognition
of that and her willingness to step forward and make sure her voice was heard on committees at all levels of
the College was important for all of us. She has also maintained a steady commitment to the local community,
working on many committees and boards, and giving countless workshops to groups in the Okanagan.

If I have to think of one work that really opened my eyes to Mary’s teaching and her approach to art, it would be
her work from 1982 called Kettle Valley Trestles. I saw it again recently in the home of some friends and was as
knocked out by it as I was when it was done. The sheer scale of it, and the immensity of the difficult geography
and topography of the scene which she tackled was a powerful demonstration for students and faculty alike
of what printmaking can do. The multiple perspectives, and the juxtaposition of battling views of the trestles,
first below your feet and then above and to either side of your field of vision, creates a revelatory statement
that uses etching to point out how complicated the terrain of this Valley is and how complicated its history is. I
understood something about my new home in a way that I hadn’t understood until then: that the Okanagan’s
challenging geography, best understood through multiple lenses, has been subjected to ongoing relentless
transformation whether by railroads, orcharding, vineyards or subdivisions.
So yes, there is something about Mary but I am no closer to being able to say what it is. The more I think about
it and the more I write, the less sure I am that I can put my finger on it, or if that is even possible.
She’s….. Mary.

Carolyn MacHardy
Asociate professor, Art History
Department of Creative Studies, UBC Okanagan

4 Comments

Behind the Studio Door

5/24/2019

2 Comments

 
by Carin Covin

I remember an eventful time when I had the experience of being, symbolically, behind a studio door.  The painter, Harold Klunder gave an artist talk in Wells, British Columbia, during one of the summers he was a mentor at the Toni Onley Project.[i]  He projected images of his paintings during his talk, but he also talked about his painting practice behind his studio door, where the mementos and objects collected, the quality of the light, the scaffolding rigged for painting his large canvases added another dimension to where his ideas and understanding of the visual world came from. 

In the studio, it is a particular space. The painter Mel Bochner describes art as a devise of thinking that begins in the studio space; “Most people consider thinking as a structured thing, but I think about it as a process.  While you’re making something, anything, you’re simultaneously thinking about it visually, emotionally and intellectually. “[ii] Behind the Studio Door is an exhibition about painting; work made in a studio environment that is polyphonic.

David Alexander, Malcolm McCormick, Katherine Pickering and Jeroen Witvliet are presenting paintings in this rotation of the Lake Country Art Gallery exhibitions.  Their artist statements contribute to the viewers understanding of their works, as they articulate the pluralistic thinking that went on behind their studio doors. 
 
PAINTING
These artists have chosen the act of painting to give visual voice to their current investigations.  This haptic medium has a rich history within the art historical discourse.  It could be argued that the Lascaux complex of caves and the Chauvet Cave begin our fascination with mark, colour and form.  Actually, one could stroll through art history and pick one’s favourites.  I think of Giotto and his angels, the flying lovers of Marc Chagall, or jumping ahead to Hockney and his Splash, the intention of Pollack’s drip.  Isms morphed into more isms and many theories, such as Post Structuralism and Feminism, deliberately interrupted the male gendered gaze, the gaze of male white power and privilege.  I think of Mary Pratt’s painted politics of the everyday, the painted gender politics of Jenny Seville, or the painted post-colonial politics of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptan.
​
Painting has been declared dead and then declared resurrected, however, the canon of painting has continually built upon the vocabulary of artists throughout time.
 
THE ARTISTS
I would suggest that David Alexander, Malcolm McCormick, Katherine Pickering and Jeroen Witvliet, with these works, are contributing to this interesting, complicated and varied discourse about painting. 

David Alexander explores mark making in his painting, from small intimate works to works commanding a single wall.  Travel and environmental advocacy inform his process, as he investigates his global interest in our finite resources of land and water through his international art residencies. 

Katherine Pickering has suggested that the world is her classroom, as she also travels the world and participates in international art residencies.  Her research involves the investigation of abstraction through the process of the materiality of paint and canvas, its limitations and confines.

Malcolm McCormick’s recent research examines the intersection of assembling and de-assembling painting and its history; his investigations of the gallery wall as a trope is twined with painted works. 

Jeroen Witvliet studio research involves investigations into the materiality of paint, often pushing the idea to a point of failure; his work is overlaid with speculations of memory, travel and identity of the self, as his travel and understanding of history underpins his practice.

These four artists have allowed us behind their studio doors, and shown us their current painting vocabularies.  The Lake Country Art Gallery has provided this light filled venue to see the works and contemplate the ideas and concepts that these artists are presenting.  And now it is up to us, as we, the viewers, bring our personal and subjective experiences to the act of seeing these paintings.

​Carin Covin
Visual Artist



[i] Harold Klunder is a Canadian painter.  He gave this talk in 2010 when he mentored at the Toni Onley Artist Project with the printmaker Libby Hague.

[ii] Mel Bochner is an American conceptual artist who is interested in language based works. This quote comes from an interview that Robert Enright conducted with Bochner in BorderCrossings, Volume 38, Number 1 Issue No. 149.

2 Comments

Collaborators

2/6/2019

1 Comment

 
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When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness... That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue. (Brian Eno)
 
Like all good exhibits, What’s Still Here, What Came Before Us started with a conversation over a cup of coffee. Liz Ranney and Nicole Young approached me two years ago to pitch their idea for an art exhibition in Lake Country. We sat outside and sipped coffee as Liz and Nicole shared their ideas, thoughts and vision. They wanted to do something that can make some artists shudder, including myself: Collaborate.
 
Painting can be an isolated endeavour. Artists spend weeks, months, and years on their self-imposed islands of creativity, narrowly focusing on their own ideas. For some artist, sharing this solitary experience can be intimidating. But Ranney and Young wanted to jump head first into it.
 
Art, like everything, cannot exist in a vacuum. Paintings do not spring onto canvases fully formed without influences and inspirations. Society, politics, philosophy, culture, and a laundry list of other elements feed into art. Artists take the noise from the world and filter it into something striking, something bold, something that makes us think.
 
Ranney and Young have made that influence explicit with this exhibit. They used the lyrics from Leila Neverland to inspire their paintings. They plumbed the depths of another medium to create a unique vision for the gallery. Three artists, all with their individual experiences, talents, and perspectives, came together to build a unified series of paintings.
 
But when you walk into the gallery, do you see that collaboration? When you study the paintings, do you see the work of one artist? Two artists? Three? Maybe more? Is the collaboration clear as day? Do the two painters’ styles stand out? Or is the line separating their techniques completely blurred? Did Ranney, Young, and Neverland successfully merge their styles into one voice? Does such a fusion matter with collaboration? When artists work together, should they maintain their individual voices? Should they completely meld together? Or should it be something in between? I hope these paintings provoke similar questions for you as you absorb the exhibit.
 
Art history, of course, has many examples of collaborations. Numerous artists have made some their best work when they team-up with like-minded people. Some of the most popular and enduring art pieces have come from collaborations. A quick google search brings up:
 
Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat
Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray
Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns
Pablo Picasso and Gjon Mili
Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali
Chuck Close and Philip Glass
Bjork and Matthew Barney
Marina Abramovic and Ulay… to name but a few.
 
 
When you enter the gallery you happen upon a series of paintings, a wall ‘collage’ and an installation in the back of the gallery.
 
Each painting and installation in the gallery is accompanied with a set of notes. A dialogue
between the three artists is recorded…contemplation, reflection, questions, ideas and lists of colours are scribble across sheets of paper.
 
viridian green + parchment
muted grey + titan buff
phthalo turquoise
yellow oxide
nickel azo gold
quinacridone magenta
carmine
brownish paint water
 
For example, Leila Neverland’s words, ‘You can hide all you want, but those spirits will haunt ya…you can hide, under those covers, but you’ll never see the stars…you’ll never see the stars and the spirits will haunt ya’ , form the foundation for the painting Under Cover. Ranney and Young take these words and build a composition with paint, fabric, line and texture. By interpreting these lyrics and the back and forth of the canvas between Ranney and Young, a final image comes together.
 
As a viewer, you’re a collaborator. Gallery exhibitions create a relationship between you and the artist. You bring your own perspective and experience to bear when you study art. You define the meaning of each piece on your own terms. This exhibition is a celebration of how we all work together to discuss, debate, and build something new. In our daily lives, we’re all collaborators.
 
Even this introduction is a collaboration between writer Sean Mott and curator Wanda Lock. 
 
 
Sean Mott is a reporter, a writer, and an amateur knitter. He’s written plays, short film scripts, theatre reviews, and novellas. His work has been featured in publications in Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. He’s currently based in Lake Country.

1 Comment

On being an Artist ...

1/2/2019

2 Comments

 
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Wanda Lock writes for Opus Newsletter January 2019 

going "down the rabbit hole" has become a common metaphor in popular culture, symbolizing everything from exploring a new world to delving into something unknown. ... In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the rabbit hole is the place where it all begins.* [*taken from our friend google…]
 
 Shortly after graduating from art school I was told the worst thing that can happen to your art practice is that your work starts selling, the commodification of art is a trap that sucks you in and dissolves all your ambition for being curious, exploring new ideas, takes away all critical thinking and it makes for weak work that becomes absorbed into a banal, boring, predictable, redundant world that escaping from is pretty much impossible. Making art that is adored by the masses is easy, but to travel down deep into a rabbit hole, now that takes courage…How does that saying go? … If you are making something others disapprove of, you are probably on to something.
 
A bit over dramatic? Maybe. But hey, don’t shoot the messenger…I’m just repeating a warning that I was given some 27 plus years ago. And I must admit, to this day, I keep those words very close to me, they have formed a foundation to which I have built an art practice on. My art work lives in a big messy Black Widow’s web that only I can navigate, there is no map or logical path to take, each studio visit is a mystery. The goal has always been to observe, think critically, do good, solid, work and to never settle for average. Of course, when it comes to my work, this is open for debate. Everything is meant to be challenged, analyzed, dissected, reconfigured and scrutinize over and over again, being relentless is good.
 
The ability to experiment, with subject and/or materials, means to go down rabbit holes, alone, it is what makes one an artist. Anyone can make ‘art’ but to be an artist is something entirely different. It involves taking chances, absorbing the world around you and reflecting it back to others (society).
 
When everything is stripped away, I am an oil painter who draws. When I walk into my studio the smell of linseed oil makes my heart sing… the intoxicating perfume wraps its big arms around me and pulls me into the room where we spend days and nights chatting, sometimes arguing, about the fundamentals of art making and how we can go about deciphering and responding to all that surrounds us. Using all the various art materials that are available to me at any one time helps put the pieces together. Am I an artist? That is not for me to decide.
 
I have no answers or advice for those trying to carve out a living in the arts, and maybe that is a good thing, it means the road is wide open, enjoy the ride and see where it takes you.
 
Wanda Lock

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2 Comments

The Molecular Weight of Water - by Jody DeSchutter

10/24/2018

7 Comments

 
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I took the images with me
Packed them up in a case
And sat by the shore, I listened:
 
Water as Noise
As Silence.
 
I wore the images, took them off
I re-sized them, tailored and trimmed them.
I spread them out over the valley and watched them fill every quiet cranny.
 
They didn’t fit.
 
Body. Mountain. Waves of flesh. Wings. Haze. My roots are heavy. Primordial now.
 
I needed to re-sew them so:
Frogs as time tanks
Fish as silicon boatmen
Bones as water thread
Body as horizon, horizon as body
Time as tree fingers
Water as time machine.
 
But when expectation shifts its gaze
It faces the perils of non-truths
And falls into the rhythm of a certain non-history.
 
Time stands still.
 
Much like Alice’s rabbit hole
Much like Eve’s forbidden fruit
We enter, we eat, or we ignore
A curiosity of what comes next
An openness to what came before.
 
The now is dissolving fast underfoot
Droplet by droplet.
 
I don my primordial gown
To hunt the now
To chase the rabbit
And catch something I have yet to understand.
 
I ran to the shore, seaweed green.
 
“Let droplets form and re-form”
Cried the mountain, guiding the water bodies.
“How do you measure it at all?”
 
I didn’t know
All I knew was how the breeze smelled of salt
And how my hands were pillowed secrets I could cup around it all
Never holding it in but only touching each tiny molecule for a moment.
 
I knew the shoreline
Like dad’s hairline
Shifted and swayed
It collected our intentions and swept them away.
 
I knew that wavering watery lines connected all I could see:
The cockroach boats
Fishes freed
Ugly swans
Particularly me.
 
I knew the layers: silt, salt, and silicon
All settled among the layers of my body too.
 
I will keep these images and use them to listen
As long as there is silence and as there is noise.
 
I will keep running fast until I find the space I take up
Or some other useful notion
So I can ask why time doesn’t stand still anymore.
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BLUEPRINTS FOR HOMEWORK [1]

8/15/2018

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​Catalogue Essay by [1] Sara Ahmed for the exhibition  Paper Jam, Pulp Fiction

LAKE COUNTRY ART GALLERY, July-August, 2018 
 
As a literary critic and feminist academic, I revere paper as it conveys the ideas and thoughts of others in the form of text or image, transcending time and space—and makes my own thinking and writing possible.  In a sense, you might say, paper enables me to be me. But here I am thinking only of paper as a conveyor of a message and forgetting about its materiality—easy to do when I write upon a computer screen with only the ghostly semblance of the original paper in front of me.  Carin Covin’s recent work interrupts that thinking, jams that sense of paper as a medium and asks me to think of the object itself. What does paper mean for the woman artist?  This question is one of many posed by Covin’s compelling and beautiful presentation of her work, of women’s work.
 
As art historian, Dr. Carolyn MacHardy points out, paper and the cloth from which it comes have traditional associations with all sorts of things in the home, in the domestic realm—traditionally, the woman’s realm-- such as bandaging, pattern making, and sewing, wrappings as in gifts, and keeping items of value, both for protection and in order to evade detection. Ragging, weaving, knitting, embroidery—all associated with women’s work, were also means of artistic expression for women who had no access to paint, canvas or clay. Women’s search within the home for the particulars by which they could express themselves records their long history of repurposing non-traditional materials associated with craft. Covin’s exhibit at the Lake Country Art Gallery (August 2018) repurposes this craft and this craftiness, this story of diligence.
 
At the exhibit, Paper Jam, Pulp Fiction, I encountered paper in three dimensional form inhabiting space and speaking of itself as temporal process: here, paper is no longer merely a means, but has become the work itself with a palpable (pulpable?) sense of history: there is certainly some magic in this.  Coloured spools of paper are arranged along the initial wall, dyed, we are told, by means of an organic process called cyanotype.  Covin employs paper made by Laura Widmer (Widmer paper) from repurposed or natural fibres that are often recycled, such as an old t-shirt, soaked and processed, then printed by Covin by means of the light of the sun.  This printing process, colloquially more familiar to us as blue printing, has a domestic application as well, as the blue tinge was not always deemed suitable for aesthetic applications, but found its place, in the 19th century, in what have come to be known as blue prints.  Covin revives this technology in her current work, which imparts a cyan blue tinge to all the works in the exhibit and signals the reintegration of the human actor in the organic world.   She offers a blue print. 
 
While paper is often associated with the ground upon which a drawing or text is etched, Covin’s paper is incorporated in a series of works which are created through conventionally domestic methods such as knitting, weaving, rug-making, transforming the everydayness of knitted and hand-made elements of the home into a gallery installation.  Rather than floors, windows, and tabletops, these weavings gain another dimension hung on the wall of the gallery, directing our focus to their materiality, their history, their uncanny strangeness—haunting yet so very familiar.  This re-purposing moves these items from the background to the foreground and, in so doing, those pulpy fictions--about just what is, or isn’t, art--are relocated as well.
 
The initial spools I encounter are actually skeins of hand-made cyan printed paper, coiled around similarly hand-made yarn bobbins [reference photo], while the next work in the series presents the additional process of knitting: the paper yarn has been knitted on giant circular needles, presented three-dimensionally on the wall, revealing its texture, variations in colour and dye and even a dropped stitch that is never recovered [reference photo]. Covin’s piece refuses perfected mechanistic production; rather, the missing stitch is our assurance of the very human person producing this pattern and a record of the serendipity and spontaneity of any art practice.  It is the symbol of the subject as a woman at work.  The temporal dimension of the creation is also recorded by the dropped stitch, where the weave drags down, weighty, pulling with it the paper yarn, creating a gap, a space for a paper jam.  
 
“Paper Jam” 
 
Jamming suggests many things: the spontaneity of a group in collaboration. Then, also paper jam might be an impediment, a blockage, a resistance, or redirection.  Holding these ideas together despite their tension— tension is, after all, essential to the knitting process--we engage in a field of spontaneity, community and redirection.  Might we share in this relocation as a repurposing of this pulpy, jammy, messy medium of women’s work? 
 
Jamming has a sense of simultaneity--linked provocations of artists--women artists—jamming, dialoguing, reproducing, repurposing woman’s historical positioning in the domestic sphere—a positioning that has often been derided in its imposition of exclusionary practices keeping female artists at home. Reclamations of women artists from the past have often necessarily been accompanied by reclamations of different art forms, particularly those associated with the domestic sphere, folk art and craft, for instance.  This dual reclamation draws attention to the ways in which certain forms of artistic production gain prominence and meaning from the patriarchally inflected social and cultural norms with which we think about art and gender.  Women’s work is domestic and men’s is public—a long standing and imposed notion.  But when Virginia Woolf first called for the woman artist to have a “room of one’s own” in which to work, she was not excluding the domestic from the realm of art: rather, she was moving the domestic into the world of art.  This is an important point that bears repeating:  this is not delegating or denigrating the domestic as the sphere of the woman, but designating the woman’s sphere as that of the artist.   Feminism is home work. 
 
Insisting on the collaborative nature of this project-- between women and water and pulp and sun, Covin particularly highlights her work with her dear friend and fellow artist, Laura Widmer (who makes the paper with which Covin works), but also overtly acknowledges other women artists, some present, some absent, some paper-bound, textual friends. One of the latter, who is a key impetus for the current project, is the Canadian poet Bronwen Wallace (1945-1989) whose collection, Keep that Candle Burning Bright and other Poems (Coach House: 1991), has particular resonance.
 
Wallace’s feminism repudiated the academic trends of the time that were turning to postmodernism and poststructuralism in order to deconstruct received knowledges and the autonomy of the subject, the self. For many feminists, artists and authors at that time, the questioning of subjectivity and of the possibility (or impossibility) of the autonomous self, just when women were beginning to be able to assert a subject position in the larger society, was suspect to say the least.  In response, Wallace mused, “Who needs Freud and Lacan?” [2] Instead, Wallace produced the poetry of the every day woman in all her wonder, articulating the imagery of our daily experiences and refusing the abstractions of high theory, validating those “schools of slithery thought where most of us spend most of our time, just swimming along”(Keep that Candle Burning 45)[3]. 
 
We don’t always know, observes Wallace, whether to be grateful or terrified, when witnessing the miraculous of the everyday as

we all try to make sense of ourselves
that way, which parts we hold on to, which
we hold at arms’ length, squinting
just as we do the photo
of that face some people see
on Mars these days, seeing if we can
make it into mountains. 
What else
can we do?  

 
Despite her repudiation of grand theory, what Wallace does share with Freud, is an interest in the homely and the strange.  What in German is called the heimlich—the familiar (“familiar,” “native,” “be- longing to the home”) is haunted by its deeply connected (and necessary) other--the strange, the unfamiliar, the unheimlich. In English, this is generally understood as the “uncanny” (un-kenned/unknown): that “species of strangeness embedded in the familiar” –that strangeness that often arises in the every day. In Wallace this is caught in her fascination with the expansive expertise of the already dead in the tabloids, like Elvis or Jesus.  Or when she recounts the visitation of a friend, a dead friend:           
on the anniversary,
to the day, of a friend’s death, she appeared,
in the laundromat where I was folding underwear,
by the dryer, putting in a load of towels.  (Candles 56)
 
Or when she writes,
 
….It’s just how we look
at the world sometimes, tensed
with the effort that makes our brains
hurt, all that work, rejecting what
the senses tell us.  No wonder we think
We have to look so hard.  No wonder
We stand here, blinking.
Grateful and terrified.

                        (Candles 56-7)
 
In Covin, this uncanny strangeness is provoked when the everyday creativity of the home, such as making jam, hooking rugs, weaving, knitting, also reveals the haunting of the home by the historical and ongoing dismissal of domestic activity and the displacement of the woman as artist.  In Covin, we glimpse the unseen other-- the behind the scenes--that has us “blinking./Grateful and terrified.” Covin’s historicized sense that the male artist had better access to the public sphere and to the means necessary to communicate in that sphere is “jammed” in this exhibit by her return to the “domestic” work of paper production and women’s aesthetic practice, exposing the unnecessary fiction that genders the pubic and private divide.  Perhaps paper would be more available to women artists, muses Covin:  it could be found here and there by those with little disposable income, maybe available to make shopping lists, to write notes, to create art.  Covin’s process is to recycle the everyday, quotidian and domestic objects and transform such an object exposing it to the bright light of the sun. This process of making the everyday domestic do its work as art is a blueprint, to my minf, for the reclamation of the historical weight of women’s work. 
 
Covin’s work is communicative and collaborative, building on processes visible and invisible, recorded in its very palpable pulpy history.  In this sense, the hidden and haunting history of female artistic production is woven into the present, giving weight to the linkage between traditional women’s work-- weaving, knitting, creating connections—and the weight of the these sculptural forms.  The domestic jams the public, relocating women’s work in place. 
 
Dr. Jennifer Gustar, UBC Okanagan
Kelowna, British Columbia
[email protected]
 
References:
Sara Ahmed.  Living a Feminist Life.  Duke University Press, 2017.
Erin Moure and Bronwen Wallace.  Two Women Talking: Correspondence 1985-1987. 
Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets (1993).  Susan McMaster, Ed. 
Bronwen Wallace.  Keep that Candle Burning Bright and Other Poems. Coach House
Press, (1993).

[1] Sara Ahmed.  Living a Feminist Life. Duke UP: 2017. P.7

[2] Erin Moure and Bronwen Wallace.  Two Women Talking: Correspondence 1985-1987. 
Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets (1993).  Susan McMaster, ed. 

[3] Bronwen Wallace.  Keep that Candle Burning Bright and Other Poems. Coach House Press, (1993).
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Fire, Folklore and Family Day by Angelika Offenwanger

6/29/2018

2 Comments

 
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The campfire light flickered over the floor as we sat around the circle, sipping hot chocolate, enthralled by the rise and fall of the storyteller’s voice.
“Coyote laughed at Crab. ‘Of course I will race you! How can you win, if you can only run backwards?'”
I had never heard these stories before, which is why I went to today’s Family Day event at the local art gallery – the promise of a First Nations storyteller giving Okanagan legends was too good to pass up. The “campfire” is an art installation comprised of rock, charcoal, and clear sheet plastic, with a projection of a digital fire on it. The effect is mesmerizing, real and not-real at the same time, the reflections dancing over the walls and the floor of the room reminiscent of both an actual fire and the play of light at the bottom of the lake on a summer’s day.
There were stories of “How Coyote Got His Name”, of “Coyote’s Race”, of “The Boy Who Grew Up With Grizzly Bears”. The one that most tickled my fancy was “Coyote’s Race”. I can’t give it to you in the words of the original storyteller, the way First Nations stories are meant to be told. But when I asked today’s re-teller*, David Florence, if I might share a piece of it here, he thought it could be all right for me to tell  bit of it in my own words. So here goes:
Coyote and the Race of Frog and the Turtles
Frog had won races against many animals, each time for his win taking away their tail. One day, Coyote said to his friends, the turtles, “I will get back your tails for you, don’t worry!” He went to Frog and said, “Will you have a race with me and my friends? The stake is all our tails, mine and the turtles.”
Frog agreed, hoping to add Coyote’s beautiful tail to his collection.
But Coyote said to the turtles, “Here is what you must do. Dig yourselves into the path along the race track, one of you every few hundred meters. The first one of you must jump into the air and come back down hard to raise a big dust cloud. Then the next one digs himself back out of the ground, and also jumps up and makes a dust cloud, and so on.”
And that is what they did. The race began, and the first turtle jumped up and came down and made a big dust cloud. When the dust settled, Frog saw far ahead of him a turtle running along the track. He ran as fast as he could to catch up with him, but the turtle jumped and made another big cloud of dust. When that was gone, there was a turtle again, far ahead of Frog. He ran as fast as he could, but try as he might, he could not catch up with the turtle. Finally he saw a turtle crossing the finish line far ahead of him, and he collapsed on the ground.
“Oh please,” he said to Coyote, “I’m so exhausted, let me rest for a while!”
“Did you let the other animals rest before you took away their tails?” said Coyote. “No, you shall not rest! Give me back the turtles’ tails, and your own too!”
And that is why Frog is such a small, weak creature, who jumps into the water to hide his ugly backside which has no tail on it at all.
What struck me about this tale is how very much it is like the Grimms’ “The Hare and the Hedgehog”, the tale of how the quick, proud hare is being tricked by the slow, humble hedgehog and his wife into exhausting himself running back and forth and thus losing the race. Unlike the similar “Hare and the Tortoise” with its moral of “Slow and steady wins the race”, here the moral is “Simple people working together can beat the proud.” Two tales from almost opposite sides of the globe with nearly the same structure and message. I told David Florence about “The Hare and the Hedgehog”, and he laughed.
Incidentally, in the story of the race of Coyote and Crab, it’s Coyote himself who gets tricked. Crab clicks his pincers and gets hold of Coyote’s tail hairs, hanging on through the whole race. At the finish line, Coyote turns around looking for crab, and crab lets go, flying across the finish and winning the race. I learned today that sometimes, Coyote the Trickster can also be the tricked. I’m still chuckling about the image of Coyote whirling around, calling, “Crab? Where are you, Crab? Hey, Crab!”
In the long, cold, dark Northern winters of the past, David Florence told us, the Okanagan people gathered around the fire in the middle of their big pit house, a space probably about as large as the room we were in today. Their fire was not an art installation with digital projections, and they weren’t sipping hot chocolate from Tim Horton’s paper cups. But the stories are the same, whether they are told in Okanagan or in English.
Life, the Universe, A Fire and Folklore. Together the people are strong.
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*Note: From my understanding, in First Nations storytelling the exact wording of the original teller is important. David Florence collected these tales from local people, and he read them to us from a paper so he would not “put his own words into it”. I appreciate his permission to tell a small part of it in my own words, and apologise for any mistakes I doubtlessly made in the retelling, having only heard the story once. If you want to read a very similar tale in the voice of a real Okanagan storyteller, check out “The Turtles Won the Race” told by Josephine Shuttlesworth (scroll to the bottom of the page past the error messages). In that one, it’s Coyote himself who gets tricked by the turtles, and it’s even more similar to “The Hare and the Hedgehog”.

Blog post from:

https://amovitam.ca/2018/02/12/fire-folklore-and-family-day/​
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Big Fish Stories: Some reflections on prose, poetry, narrative, memory, film, dreams, dreaming, and magic spells.

1/14/2017

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Big Fish is about what's real and what's fantastic, what's true and what's not true, what's partially true and how, in the end, it's all true.’' - Tim Burton

Words make worlds. Not just words. That is, not words as such. Story. Story makes worlds. Narrative. The world expressed is the world lived. The words disappear and the dream surfaces. Like seduction. Like magic.


Writing is drawing is painting is filming is setting the stage for dreaming. Narrative. It’s not a matter of plot, it’s the ingredients, the recipe, of a magic potion, a spell. A charm. To work, it requires a good magician, who knows how to perform the incantation properly, to set the environment correctly. Magic is seduction, and seduction needs a willing partner. The magic fails if the person doesn’t receive it, doesn’t accept it’s trueness, doesn’t fall into the dream. 


Like Bloom’s son.


What is the one true thing? The story of the story, like as if it is not true. Like as if truth and facticity, as if what is true and what is real in the pedestrian sense, is the same. As though prose were more true than poetry.


So, it’s not about narrative in the prosaic sense; it’s about narrative in the poetic sense. 


Narrative is telling a story. Any story is telling. Any story telling is telling. What is said and the saying.


The novel, and now-a-days the independent TV series, are the long forms of story-telling. The prose of the world. They can be, and are at their best, of course, poetic. But it is film that is the poetic medium. Precisely because what is true in poetry is not stated but expressed.


It is not about the script as such. Nor any of its other constituent elements. It is an assemblage. But more accurately, it is a spell. 


I saw a review referring to Big Fish’s “greatest strength,” as its script, but to isolate one of its constituent elements, like it’s script, or the photography, the direction, the acting, or the music (Danny Elfman was nominated for an Oscar for his score), is to miss it’s truly greatest strength, which is its charm - it’s magic power - to make evident the poetic truth, through its narrative, which is to say, through its capacity to bring us willingly into the dream. 


The story makes the world, is the story-teller, is the world. The world is the worlds. The environment. The spell. The dream.


It’s not just a question of exaggeration. Of embellishment. It’s about the feeling, the heart of the matter. The poetry.


Kerouac said “life has no plot” in reference to his approach to writing from his life, which was not so much about describing actual people and events, but rather to express the inside of his experience, the poetic reality.


There is memory and there is dreaming. There are magic spells. There is the making and the story of the making is making once again - making it all over again. What is telling and is told and telling in the tale is the trueness of it, which is the poetry of it. 


Gertrude Stein said poetry is about nouns and prose is about verbs. The naming. The what. The is-ness. Poetry is the natural expressive form of philosophy. Memory is a philosophical poet. Which is film. Or can be. Big Fish is, certainly.


All films are like an inception project. An attempt to plant an idea into our subconscious through a dream - which is the film itself.


Films are our dreams teaching us. These are some of the ones that have shown us the way:


Citizen Kane (1941), Orson Welles


Rashôman (1950), Akira Kurosawa


Vertigo (1958), Alfred Hitchcock


Wild Strawberries (1958), Ingmar Bergman


8 1/2 (1963), Federico Fellini


Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky 


Stardust Memories (1980), Woody Allen


The Neverending Story (1984), Wolfgang Petersen


The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Woody Allen


The Thin Blue Line (1988), Errol Morris


Memento (2000), Christopher Nolan


Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Michel Gondry


Inception (2010) Christopher Nolan


And of course Big Fish, (2003), Tim Burton


Michael Boyce
is a writer and editor specializing in digital communications. He is the author of 2 published novels (Pedlar Press), and his short stories and critical pieces have been featured in a number of magazines and journals. You can read his experimental poetry and philosophy with his photography on Medium at: https://medium.com/@mjbwriting
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