WilMar:: what will not remain...

From the days when demanding calls were made from inside the house, when there were others at one's beck and call, when every command was heeded with haste...

+++++

As one ages, the bathtub is no longer a negotiable option and one must install a contraption of sorts, a contrivance crossed between a laundry machine and an amusement park ride to facilitate bathtime...

+++++

And of course, the fireplaces will no longer burn brightly on cold rainy nights - no more gathering around the hearth to read or tell secrets or feel grateful for the privileged life in a large roomy mansion that now sits empty, waiting patiently for a resurrection, but most likely a complete overhaul...

in the beat of a heart...

in the beat of a heart...
we concede to the compromised evaluation of the other...
                                                                         
nailed to a tree

in the beat of a heart...

we lose the generalized compression of a charred life...

sprayed on a wall

in the beat of a heart...
we drop the controlled savagery of a fading smile...

staining the sidewalk

in the beat of a heart...
we evade a concentric descend into unrelenting love...

mere words on the page*



*the hand-scripted heart (text from "The Book of Knowledge, Little Reference Series Part I") is by Kim Kennedy Austin, exhibited in "Industry Charity Faith Hope", her solo show at the West Vancouver Museum, January 14 - March 7, 2015

a mud-slinging screamfest

a clay orifice upon flesh -

fill the dark hollow with a howl...

sonic containment within,

psychical release without -
mouth to mouth resurrect.

If you feel the need to unleash the mother of all screams without disturbing the peaceful setting of West Vancouver, go and pick up one of these clay pots at the West Vancouver Museum and expand your lungs for a major howl into it. Your muffled bellow will barely ruffle the feathers of any sedate West Van matrons around!

These "scream pots" are the objets d'artifice of an exhibition conceived by the not so vociferous Babak Golkar whose magic persian carpet mushroomed a miniature city of intricate buildings at the Charles H. Scott Gallery last year. The terracotta pots are hand-crafted into varied shapes and sizes to affect the tenor of the screams emitted into them. Even if one does not feel the need to cry out, the tactile nature of the clay invites one to touch, hold, caress...

*****

The second part of the exhibit includes a digital projection of blobs of clay being hurled at a wall with the accompanying plopping sound effects - the aptly scatological visual [and audio] is somewhat mesmerizing to watch and presents another release of sorts in the physical force of flinging mud...
[Gabriel Orozco also once pitched clay balls in one of his projects, but at the pots themselves as they were being turned on the wheel...[Cazuelas (Beginnings), 2002]

The "turds" dried and fell off with the resultant staining still manifest on the wall, creating a monochrome messy dot "painting" a la the Japanese eccentric Yayoi Kusama - with the baked pieces scattered on the floor below their previous elevated surface like so many dropped and inedible crumbs...

in the end, a lumpen being of baked clay

lies dejected, hardened, unused -

and failing to rise again,

sinks to the floorboards of life...

Dialectic of Failure
New Work by Babak Golkar
October 11 to December 7, 2013
West Vancouver Museum 

the echoing moon...

"vanity guards us from introspection.

what guards us from vanity?

to think of ourselves like the moon,

dead and beautiful,

and of an origin no one can be sure of?"*

[*"Meeting an Astronomer on the Buddha's Birthday" by Diane WAKOSKI]

[the image is from a durational performance/installation entitled "Echoes" in the Audain Gallery  by Luciana D'Anunciacao, a student in the MFA program at Simon Fraser University's School for the Contemporary Arts, at the MFA Spring Exhibition "Syllogisms", March 27-Apri 6, 2013]

gathering fresh moss...

through frosty grass and icy rocks to come upon the lone tree

an ancient japanese maple with a hundred mossy branches

reaching up gnarly and menacing...
below its thick trunk beats a mossy heart lying in a bed of fallen leaves glistening red as drying blood...

unwindowed

Norman is a friendly guy and his produce is as cheap as they come on the Drive, but you have to wonder about the concatenated neurosis that goes on behind this graphically barricaded window on the side wall of his building... 

the chains of light squeezing through the bars of nondescript darkness dangle in casual defiance of a blinded quarry...

door no more

 "Ara baixare les escales que donen a l'exterior i no penso defraudar."*
[Now I'll descend the stairs that lead outside and not worry about letting anybody down.]

*the last line from "Stairway, 1949" by Ernest FARRES, translated from the Catalan by Lawrence Venuti, 2009 [from Edward Hopper: Cinquanta poemes sobre la seva obra pictorica (Fifty poems on his pictorial work; Barcelona: Viena, 2006)]

downtown westside:: the sexy sixties [episode one]

Soaring glass behemoths squeeze around the odd oldie still holding out on its tiny piece of developer's baitlot...
they may be sleek and shiny, with self-contained promises of high efficiency appliances and measured to the millimeter space-planning illusions, but these 21st century luminous colossi have none of the idiosyncratic sexiness of some of the modernist structures implanted on downtown soil in the oh-so-long-ago 1960's when Vancouver was nary a blip on the world map of architectural avant-gardism...

The well-hung Westcoast Transmission Building at 1333 West Georgia Street [1968-69, by Rhone and Iredale] has ridden out the decades in suspended glass-sheathed immutability...and has recently been transformed into a QUBE-full of too-cool condos for dark shades wearing sophisticates...

The virginal white and coquettish detailing of the East Asiatic House building at 1201 West Pender Street [1963, by Gerald Hamilton and Associates] still marks her as a delicately alluring stand-out amongst the leggy glamour-glazed models now posing all around her...and almost half a century on, her proportional compactness and fineness of features have been left relatively unmolested by over-excitable upgrade casanovas!

[after all, her corner stone had already once been laid by a suave and elegant danish royal!]

granville island:: rounded up

 During these spring-like days of summer [only in Vancouver!], the living is easy and I am quite quite lazy - but I managed to wander around Granville Island one recent breezy day and take in some sculptural forms with a circular theme - starting with the lucky boy sinking into multi-scooped balls of ice cream...

 "BLISS" by Ron Simmer

 "HONKFEST" by Douglas Walker

[sorry, missed the title and artist's name]

[the titled pieces are part of a temporary exhibit "REVISION: The Art of Recycling" featuring art made from recycled, salvaged, scrounged or found materials...installed around the Creekhouse building and courtyard]

eyeing windows

Who is watching me from behind glazed house-eyes when I aim my camera at them?...

nobody has opened up their windows [yet!] to confront me for imposing my lens towards them,

perhaps because sometimes they are all too oblivious to my intrusion!

 soundproofed - and sightless...
[at "Grave Level" - by Vancouver Mountain View Cemetery off Fraser Street - where an all-day multi-band infestation rocked the house last summer - and almost woke the dead!] 

 industrialized benign neglect...
[on that artist menagerie and tourista destination, Granville Island] 

 glass-blocked intervention...
[at the aging yet still life-supporting Vancouver General Hospital on West 12th Avenue] 

 seasonal adaptive decorama...
[on the determinedly DIY Commercial Drive] 

 sandwiched and grilled...
[on the warmed-up but still crunchy part of Cambie Street off Hastings] 

ghostly belle of the ball...
[sometimes "observed" floating around the grand ballroom of the Vancouver Hotel on Georgia Street]

concrete evidence

Like multi-barreled camera lenses or more sinister weaponry, these concrete pipes sit stacked three rows high on a dusty lot awaiting their fate to snake through some deep dank underground tunnel...

Something about the intricately messy and yet essentially functional structures of industrial sites always catches my attention, and on this deserted Sunday afternoon we had ventured down to the gritty part of the Fraser River where the sprawling Ocean Concrete Products outfit is located [near the Arthur Laing Bridge on West 77th Avenue]... 

[We admit to innocently trespassing on our bikes but we were only looking for a trail to ride along the river - really!]

Further along we came upon the decrepit remains [that only a savage eye could love!] of a home-made raft stuck indefinitely on the muddy bank...

 and presumably its owner still bunk out of this graffiti decorated metal container lodged on a concrete pad above with the same million dollar view as the macmansions proliferating up river in Southlands, [and its spacious river front deck is invitingly furnished with a table and comfortable patio chairs]...

 We "trespassed" again for lunch at the smallest picnic table ever built behind the studios at the old Celtic Shipyards while watching the mighty Fraser at work...[logs for money and the Chinese have new houses!]