peripheral vision

This summer my work will be in two shows. Tonight is the opening for Insights, a juried exhibition at the Wellington County Museum, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. When I dropped off my two pieces a week or so ago, there was a ton of work, and it was all good so I have high expectations for the show. I’m looking forward to tonight’s opening, and would love to see some familiar faces if you’re up for it.

But my big excitement is a show at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, ON. Called Revealing Spaces, the show features the work of three Durham Region artists (I grew up in the region and still visit my parents there regularly.)

I have nine pieces in it, all from Yes These Bones Shall Live. The show has been in the works for a long time so I can’t wait to see it and meet the other artists. I hope to post the curator’s essay here or a link to it when it’s available. (It was SUCH an ego trip reading someone’s thoughtful analysis of my work.) The opening is on Friday, July 6. I know it’s a trek for most people I know, but I thought I’d mention it anyways in case you’re in the area.

We often go for a stroll after dinner if there’s time. We almost always go the same way and it’s just matter of how far we go before we turn around. But tonight my oldest asked, “Where should we go tonight, Mom?” And it suddenly struck me that we could go see Harris and Eva’s beauty bush. There are other beauty bushes in the neighbourhood, but Harris and Eva’s is spectacular. Indeed, when he saw it even my curmudgeonly husband (curmudgeonly as far as plants go that is) was kind of blown away. It’s as big as a tree and pretty much dwarfs the house.

I actually took this photo two years ago. When I checked the date stamp just now I realized it was exactly two years ago to the day.

For the last couple of years I’ve been entering competitions and juried exhibitions madly. But this year I’ve kind of stopped. It gets expensive fast, and I’m trying to live economically (yes, Canada has paid maternity leave but the legal amount is only 55 percent of your income to a maximum of about $400 a week). Not only the entry fees but the printing and framing and shipping. And of course, my time is short these days. Anyways… the other day I discovered one that I’m seriously considering. The juror is a renowned curator/collector/author but more than that he clearly took a lot of time to write about what he’s looking for. It makes him seem so human and approachable and passionate that I really want to try and please him. I want to see if it might be my work that “rings his chimes.” (Yep, I’m nothing if not ambitious… perhaps dreamer is a better word.)

And then today I saw this video

and this one

I love his advice for collectors. It seems to me that it’s good advice for photographers:

“When you look at the photograph you want it to push back at you.”

“The best part of the education is not only looking… but reacting and having a sense of how stuff plays on you.” “The best thing you can do is make yourself available to the experience. Do you like it? Listen to it. What are you responding to? It doesn’t have to make any rational sense but what’s doing it for you? … You can get a sense of what your taste is. … When you have an eye you walk into a situation and you go, ‘that one.’ … “It’s experience and instinct and the ability to hear yourself.”

Back in 2008, when I still volunteered at the Drop-In Centre, a young woman was found naked and dead in a local park. I had never met her but people I served at the drop-in knew her and grieved. It took the police more than a year to decide it was homicide. I guess because it’s common for mentally-ill, crack-addicted, part-time sex workers to end up naked and dead in a park from natural causes. I haven’t followed the details of the case closely, but they did finally arrest a man in 2010 and now his case is being tried. I have read precisely two articles in my local paper about the trial, and I am disgusted. I don’t know whether to be disgusted with the lawyers and legal system about the way the questioning is going, or whether it’s simply a matter of misogynist reporters and editors. But from the articles I can’t figure out who’s on trial: if it’s the accused, there hasn’t be a whole lot of coverage on him. It seems like it’s the victim who’s on trial, judging by the articles.

The first one is all about how mentally ill she was and how much crack she smoked and how much prostitution she did. The only mentions of the accused are how he sits quietly in the court and [politely] rises when the jury enters and exits, and how when the victim was killed, he was homeless… “on the street; he was distraught.”

The second article continues in the same vein. There is some small mention of how the accused was caught in the act of beating and sexually assaulting a prostitute in Barrie before being arrested in this case, but the bulk of the article is about the victim. How she didn’t pay the full amount for her last hit because she often waited until she got paid for sex. Whether all the sex she and a former boyfriend had was always alone and how his answer was that they never had a threesome. I’m sure that’s relevant to the case, somehow, but the way it’s being reported it’s all out of context and just ends up feeling horrible. Would they report it this way if she were still alive after the sexual assault? I thought we had laws about the relevance of a victim’s sexual history in sexual assault cases, but perhaps it goes out the window when the victim is dead. Or when she’s a crack-addicted sex worker…

It’s so discouraging to see how backwards we still are in so many ways. It’s disgusting that a human life is so disregarded. She was a person, like all of us, with flaws and grace and love. She sold roses to amorous couples. People loved her, people who have to read this trashy, disrespectful coverage. People who have to watch the system dehumanize and devalue her life over and over again. It’s sickening.

The derby project is going SO slowly. The baby has developed a bunch of intolerances, which means my diet is pretty restricted and I have to make pretty much everything I eat from scratch. Which takes a lot of time. But I’m hopeful the project will pick up again in a couple of months. In the meantime, there are these:

Gender Bend’her

Clare De Lunatic and Demon-Ade

Furiouser ‘N’ Furiouser

It’s been too long since I posted photographs…

Dinosaur fossils waiting to be assembled into a grand dinosaur skeleton.

Birthday balloons

Light reading on motherhood

Easter basket

Morning after Valentine’s Day

I am shocked and sad that Adrienne Rich has died. I don’t really know what more to say about that, but I feel a connection with her. When I requested permission from her publisher to include one of her poems from “An Atlas of the Difficult World,” in Two-Powered, they sent my manuscript to her for her to decide. I was terrified and giddy when I read the notification. I’d thought the publisher would make its own decision, and that it would likely reject me flat out. While I waited I obsessed between extremes: “My work was crap – of course she’d hate it! But she wrote a book called Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Institution and Experience – surely she’d connect with my book!” Back and forth I went until I got an envelope in the mail from the publisher. I still feel so honoured that she agreed to have her poem be part of my wee, self-published book. I guess she must have seen at least some kernel of… something, authenticity at least?

I only actually read her Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Institution and Experience last fall. I mostly read it when my oldest was in school and the baby had tummy time (unfortunately he started crawling way too early for that to continue for long). I marked passages I wanted to share here, but I didn’t get around to writing about it and I had to return the book to the library long ago. It remains perfectly relevant to my experience as a young mother today, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in reading or art about motherhood.

Anyways, today I am sad. I’ll leave you with my favourite part of the poem:

I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

It’s been forever since I posted here, I know. We’ve been buried in illness since Christmas. We’d get a day or two of beginning to think we’re better and then it would start all over again. But I’m hoping there may actually be light ahead. Fingers crossed.

I haven’t forgotten about my Critical Mass Top 20 that I started months ago. In fact, some of my favourites are still to come. I was going to throw up a photo or two of my own, but then I decided to challenge myself to get closer to finishing that damn list. I think I won’t do this again. But I committed, and I’d like to finish.

First up, Ronit Citri’s Plan View of an Inner Life. I was almost just going to click past it, but this image stopped me in my tracks.

Citri is an architect in her other life, where she uses plan views to show what a space looks like from above.

The photos at first seem cold and distant but as you look, they suddenly become honest and raw. The inner states I imagine her experiencing may or may not be what she actually experienced. But I like that. I don’t need to know if what I’m imagining i ‘true.’ What first looks like emptiness becomes space for me to insert myself and imagine those are my own feet, and it’s me contemplating the distance to the cat or the baby or the cold tub.

I adore Bob Carey’s self-portraits wearing nothing but a pink tutu. I love them all so much, I want to post all ten images that he submitted to Critical Mass here and not choose three. So I’ll choose five. Unfortunately I can’t seem to get a better size here, but if you go look at them larger on his website (choose Personal from the menu), you can revel in the details.

At first glance, it’s tempting to write the series off as a sort of practical joke, documented in photographs. But when I look at them, I think about gender and conformity, about trying to fit into a world where you simply don’t fit. Of course it’s entirely possible that if you showed me an orange or a plate, I’d think about gender and conformity just because that’s big lens through which I view the world.

Carey’s submitted statement talks about different ideas. He does mention moving from Phoenix, Arizona to Brooklyn, New York. But he sees the pink tutu as a way in which he transforms himself into something he’s absolutely not. He sees the series as being about humour, play and introspection. I see that, but I also see more.

In almost all the photographs, visually, the pink tutu stands out from the visual field. I see it as a metaphor for the things about us that just don’t fit. Usually we try to keep those things at least a little bit private but Carey lets himself stand out. And all his imperfect and vulnerable skin is what our nightmares are made of. Look at where’s his naked toes are in the subway image: he’s crossing the yellow line. A man wearing a pink tutu in public is playing a dangerous game. And look at the spectacle he makes at Times Square, arguably the biggest spectacle of the known world itself. People are literally pointing at him and several have their cell phones out to photograph this strange man.

Writing this small amount has take two hours with my kids’ various interruptions. My oldest wants to watch a program on the computer now so I’ll sign off here.

A few months ago, we came upon an acquaintance giving out flyers outside the farmers’ market. She cooed over the baby and chatted very warmly with my oldest. We talked about her flyers (actually I wish I could find them now). After we left, I realized she’d never once asked whether the baby was a boy or a girl. She’d avoided gendered pronouns by talking about “the little one” or “the baby.” And it was SO refreshing. Whether the baby is a boy or girl really didn’t matter at all. What matters is that the baby is adorable and happy and smiling, and my oldest is clearly a great, nurturing older brother, and she covered all that most satisfactorily. coming away from that conversation made me want to see her again soon, but I haven’t.

A few weeks ago at the library, I came upon two fathers talking intimately. One of them had a child just a few months older than my oldest and the other had one a few months older than my youngest. I didn’t want to intrude on their conversation but we were the only people in the play area and somehow I just found myself included in the conversation. The baby happened to be wearing blue that day, so I noticed when the man asked me how old my child was. My child — not my son.

I’ve known for a long time how quickly and thoroughly we stuff gender onto our babies. But I hadn’t really thought about avoiding gendered pronouns, even when you have a good sense of the baby’s sex. Since the more recent conversation, I’ve become a lot more aware of how often I refer to a baby’s sex indirectly, and I don’t really like it. Not only that, but I’m finding I don’t even want talk about “my son” so much as I do “my child” or “my kid” or “my oldest or youngest.” It’s a small thing, but a nice thing.

My oldest’s teacher (who I adore in every other respect btw) often divides the class into girls and boys to facilitate certain activities (putting coats on, going outside, that kind of thing). And funnily enough, my kid now always tells me about how, at recess, he and his friends fight the girls’ team (which often also has boys on it). There is more to children than whether they’re a girl or a boy. And yet it seems to be our default setting, to notice and, however indirectly, comment on their gender. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Now here are some pictures of my oldest’s interventions in our home.

(later the same day)

decorations for Santa

mouse trap

Christmas tree

So I’m a little afraid to say it, but 2011 was awfully good to me. Sure there were disappointments (I’m not going to list all the exhibitions, contests and whatnot that didn’t pick my work, but there were many) and challenges (for example, I couldn’t eat any dairy at Christmas – wah!). But, on the whole, it was a pretty magical year. I had a baby AND a great birth experience. I met some wonderful new people and got to know others better. I made good progress on Yes these bones shall live before I birthed the baby, and some slower progress on it towards the end of the year. I’m starting to feel like the main purpose of the project is the conversations I have with these women, who I might not otherwise meet. And even if I did meet them, if it weren’t for the project, our conversations wouldn’t get so deep. I think every single one is a teacher for me; my perspective and learning are widened with every single woman, although some conversations reverberate in my mind for longer than others. I’m STILL thinking about stuff I talked about with people I photographed right at the start of the project in the summer of 2010.

Here is Kiss My Ashlinn, who I photographed just before Christmas.

In 2011, I was also named a Critical Mass finalist AND a Flash Forward Emerging Photographer. I had a two-person exhibition in a public gallery, and I learned so much about hanging artwork. I got to see one of my prints get auctioned off at a live auction, AND it went for a good price. I got to see my work in THREE printed books: The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art, Foam Magazine’s Book of Beds and Flash Forward 2011. I received my copy of The M Word in September, I think, and immediately started reading it during the baby’s tummy time. My plan was to read it cover to cover and do a semi, totally-biased book review. But these days I seem to read books like I browse the web, and I had at least four other books on the go and maybe finished one of them, and then I got more and more books from various libraries, and now The M Word is near the bottom of the pile somehow. I did get about halfway through, I think, I can say with confidence that the depth of this book is impressive. If you want to explore the history of motherhood in feminist art, this may be THE book on the subject. And I can’t believe my work is in it. Having said that, a lot of the early feminist art dealing with motherhood was WAY too heavy in psychoanalytic theory for my taste.

And Flash Forward 2011? Also amazing to be included. I remember when I first discovered the Flash Forward photographers. It was January 2009, I think, and I saw the 2008 Flash Forward book at Chapters of all places. So I bought it, and as I flipped through the very accomplished and diverse imagery, I thought to myself, “Wow, these photographers have really Made It.” And now here I am, in it, and no, I haven’t Made It. And yet it’s a beautiful book, and paging through it, I was impressed with how the images all flowed. I felt like I was being taken on a visual journey, not paging through a catalogue, and I thought the editor must have sequenced the images for flow rather than alphabetically by photographer’s name. But when I actually looked at the photographers’ names, I discovered they did in fact sequence it alphabetically and by country. So the fact that it flowed so well is a tremendous accomplishment for all involved in producing the book.

For 2012, I have a few goals. First is to keep shooting. Especially since I’m going to be in a big three-person show at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery this summer. Second is to develop a proposal for a solo exhibition of Yes these bones shall live. Ideally, I’ll even secure space before the end of the year (not to show it before the end of the year, but to have the space secured), but that depends on other people, and I hate making goals that depend on other people. Third is to maybe finish the series by the end of the year. But if I get to the end of the year, and I want to keep meeting and learning from these fascinating women, then I totally give myself permission not to finish (spoken like a true ENFP).

Personally, I want to learn how to make, grow, repair and barter for more, and buy or hire less. I want to do things I’ve never done before; not necessarily big things, just small, mildly uncomfortable, destabilizing things. So far, I’ve roasted a chicken, made stock from its carcass, made cinnamon buns (also my first time making yeasted bread at all), and made a card by cutting out construction paper. I have never done any of these before, and while none of the results were perfect, they were all enjoyable. This is life.

So what are your hopes for the New Year?