Tweedledee and Tweedledum hum drum

Ok. So since the last time I wrote, emblazoned with this fabulous strength from my schizophrenic angel’s advice, I have been back home for exactly a month and that feeling is well, not really there anymore. How time flies! With no time for anything, while each day seems agonizingly long. This is the subjective pace of my adult life. I apologize for a few weeks of artpost MIA but as I said the weeks have flown and I hardly even knew as I have been caught up mind body and spirit with teaching printmaking and sculpture to 70 children a day at Cedar Ridge Creative Centre, which is basically my second home in Scarbs. My brain lies somewhere within the realm of 8-13 year old fixations such as clapping games, Alice in Wonderland and Justin Bieber. I’ll admit I’ve been pretty frazzled with adjusting to Scarborough life as I do every time, from moving back in with the lovely fam and being HOME, setting up the show at INDEXG, taking it down, trying to get organized, home renovation, a million chores etc. Not so exciting but extremely busy, bitchy and exhausted. Basically, I am on a really different angle these days.

But you know what, last week for the parent’s night installation I created a 10 foot painting of Paul the psychic octopus from the FIFA world cup, attached to painted tubes where balls rolled down onto a rotating carnie wheel that answered questions with ‘YES’, ‘NO’, or ‘maybe’. I was pretty proud of that: my first fortune telling, motorized art made with the help of teenage volunteers, cool! At the end of this 12 hour day I nervously asked Paul whether I would someday be able to worry only of art and not pay, and Paul answered YES. Bre, my workmate, gave me a congratulatory high five of relief.

On another good note, I have also been working (with some of the kids) on a group project with my Canadian art collective the YPF, of which we will be presenting our yearly art installation at Osheaga music festival in Montreal. I participate whenever I am in Canada and I’m so psyched about going back for a weekend reunion with all my friends there alongside a free pass for the two days. I’m excited to see Sonic Youth, but almost more excited to see Snoop Dogg…

In terms of art I have seen only a tiny bit since I’ve been back in Toronto. I did check out ‘The Empire of Dreams: Phenomenology of the Built Environment’ at MOCCA, which unfortunately revealed no such thing to me (a title like that kind of sets up the sucker punch for disappointment doesn’t it…) All the work were one liners… I mean I think An Te Liu’s air conditioner’s grouped to suggest a cloud was ok, and I did like the idea of the video work by Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak but was bored by it to stay too long (I know that’s bad of me to say, but I swear I often love slow video art!). The car with the video projection by David Han reminded me too much of the hearse by the Bruce High Quality Foundation that I also didn’t like in the Whitney Biennale, so my opinion was already biased for that one. And the little piece based ‘after Asher and Huyghe’ of a few layers of paint scraped off the gallery wall, turned aesthetic, was a lame derivative yawn.

Ola kala (aka OK) I promise to sound more optimistic about contemporary art in the coming weeks... It's just that at this point I am having way more faith in the creativity of 8-13 year olds!

Samuel Beckett crazytown, see you later Brooklyn, and blesses to my guardian angel

This past week I’d been feeling really nuts from packing and leaving Brooklyn, matched with the psych out of preparing for show at INDEXG. It hadn’t really hit me until last minute, the stress of making sure that everything I had to do was crossed off my list and worrying about everything I forgot to put on that list. Have you ever heard that Umberto Eco said we make lists because we don’t want to die? Nice one, right!

I had made a day to ignore lists. After wandering the Brooklyn botanical garden in a bizarre and melancholy state, I passed the main branch of the mesmerizing Brooklyn public library on my way home, which seemed to draw me towards its art deco façade, borrow a book and sit outside under the umbrellas. I was sad that I would only be able to start a novel but not finish, as there was no point borrowing something I’d return days later. Anyway the first title that caught my eye was Samuel Beckett’s ‘Molloy, Malone dies and the Unnamable’. Yeah! I had just finished ‘Waiting for Godot’ (one insane read) the day before while I was waiting for my laundry to dry, and so it seemed apropos to continue on Beckett’s depressing literary tangents. Literature that you should have read when you were 19 but didn’t… well Beckett is that for me, so I was ecstatic.

As I sat down, hardly having gotten through the first page, a cute looking lady in her 30s plops down on the chair beside me to which I don’t take mind, except I was curious why she chose to sit with me when there were plenty of free tables around us. She had a notebook and scribbled in it occasionally, although during the two hours that I read, she spent her time mostly just sitting. I thought she was waiting for someone but when a man approached her, he only was selling bottled water.

At the table to my left was this sewing bee posse of Caribbean ladies, their kids running around to pass the time. I got to know these women by overhearing their conversation, serendipitously mixing with Beckett’s words. The sassiest voice was talking about walking with God, and how her friend did not walk with Him the way that she did! All the while, I read about Beckett’s bike. Within the first twenty pages of Molloy there is one random line about China, and as I read the word ‘China’, at exactly the same time, one of the ladies spoke the word ‘China’, exclaiming of a tale from a country close by ‘where people are Chinese and Indian looking too, but not Tibet’. What chances! At one point the mom was annoyed at the daughter for running around too much so she reprimanded half-heartedly, ‘Don’t you have an exam! Get a book, and go practice some STUFF.’ The lady at my table kept chuckling at this other table’s conversation as much as I was. As I read, I just thought to myself what a motley crew we all were, sitting together and not together at all.

Eventually the sewing bee left, and out of nowhere the lady next to me asked me whether my book was any good, so we began pleasantly to chitchat. It took me some time, but I realized slowly that everything she said was made up of non-sequiturs, and that she may have been schizophrenic or so. Whatever it was, it was really my kinda logic. It was so great to talk to her because everything she said made perfectly calm, prodigal sense, while not literally making any sense at all. The first piece of advice she gave me was when describing her ex-boyfriend after explaining what life was like, being a mother and sister to him, and that her ex, who ‘unlike a lion who lives only in the present, they don’t have to remember the past like we do. RIGHT. It’s important to let go of the past when it isn’t good for you to move on… RIGHT.’ She ended most sentences with a strong pause and… RIGHT. Totally affirming, and also analogous to Beckett’s infamous pausing. Once in a while she would pause, to point out a variety of passersby who all looked just like her cousin.

In the course our chatting the hour away, she seemed to indirectly tap into worries and desires I had on my mind like an oracle. Her conversation ranged all different places pulled out of thin air, from Atlanta to Iraq, how I should travel to Connecticut (I was just telling Kate how I forgot to check out Yale but never did), she asserted that I will be going back to school for marketing next year (I’m not, but considered more grad school, which is a sort of marketing isn’t it), the importance of walking away from and forgetting bad men (I like bad men!), and that all I needed to do is go to the post office tomorrow, apply for a new passport and SIN there to upgrade my life and get a job. WHAT!

When she complimented my sunglasses I told her they were actually my sister’s. Adrian (my new friend) told me that I should get a great gift for her, such as a bouquet of flowers, since material goods made superficial presents. I told her that was a great piece of advice! The more we talked, the more I found myself repeating that what she had to say was a great piece of advice. But eventually I got too hungry and cold with the sun setting, so I finally excused myself, returned the book, and said goodbye.

‘So nice to meet you baby boo, I know something good’s gonna happen to you, something good’s gonna happen to you’ she said as I shook her hand, curtseyed, and headed home.

I walked through industrial Gowanus with David Bowie’s LOW album on my headphones. With the second half of that album sounding like an alien epic, it added to the feeling I might have journeyed to the end of the world. I noticed that I held my head up with Polly’s shades staring into the sun, whereas that whole day I had looked to the ground, watching for tripping and dog shit. My guardian angel (!) blessed me with the most peculiar, triumphant feeling.