Monday 29 September 2014

Re-Creating, Part Two

the future through the lens of the past

So, one of the shows (of the three openings in eight days) of all this fall was at the Galt Museum and Archives in Lethbridge, AB, which closed last Sunday. I participated last year, entering Wild at Heart - A Shrine for Salmon, but in my submission this year, entered two pieces. The first one, which was complete when I sent off the application, is above: I call it the future through the lens of the past, but as one of the first viewers of it said "you could easily call it 'the past through the lens of the future' too."

I like it a lot. It riffs, and expands, on two pieces I've done in the past: "objects of crystalline desire" (the winter section of my seasonal solo photography show at Fish Creek Environmental Learning Centre, in spring 2011), which used pieces of shattered windshield glass surrounded by handspun/knitted edges, and my contribution to Emily Martin's Pantone Postcard Project, which, among other places, went to the Venice Biennale last year.

There's something nicely incremental on my past work about it.

Which is very unlike the second piece I slotted in at the last minute.

Neruda's Nest

This was the photograph I took just before I boxed it out to ship. The one I sent early in September was pretty rough (just the base, the stick, and the nest precariously balanced on some small piece of marble), and was not much further along when I got an email from the curator at the Galt wanting the finished piece a week later. That led to a lot of crazy thoughts about what I needed to do to complete it, and when I glued up the last piece four days later, then boxed and handed it over to a friend to drive down to Lethbridge, I had serious qualms about what it was, and what I could possibly say about it.

It's titled Neruda's Nest, which refers to one of the lines in Pablo Neruda's "The Book of Questions: which yellow bird fills its nest with lemons? I spun the yarn last summer to knit the lemon, had the bird's next since the spring before that (shortly after finding the quote), and the stick comes from a tree we trimmed in our backyard the summer of 2010. The travertine tile comes from work, where I found it a month or two ago.

Installation pictures will be in the next blog entry.

Before the snow flies

Meanwhile, in the rest of my life, we had a freak snowstorm three weeks ago -- I took this picture the day before. I love the colours of the trees in fall, and it was a soft evening when I took this picture.

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