GLIMPSES
2018- Work in Progress
During residency at La Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2011) I began to record everyday encounters in succinct texts, variously funny, ridiculous, tragic, poetic; producing hand-stitched fabric collages and printing text on a DIY t-shirt press. Commonalities in materials and methods reference Arte Povera, aesthetics reference Abstraction, and use of recycled clothing, scraps and populist methods recall “women’s work”. Re-cycling from fashion’s huge waste industry is important to my practice. We all have the chance to listen, to see more deeply in our daily lives. As MacArthur Award artist Robert Irwin said: “Art is an opportunity to pay attention.”
November 2015 Today, November 1, our attractive young Chinese neighbour is energetically raking leaves—dressed in flowered spandex short-shorts and black leather knee-high boots with high heels, her black hair gleaming against a bright red sweatshirt.
Spain July 2017
The bulls hurtle and roar down the narrow ancient street of Pamplona, past the Burger King.
Oaxaca, Mexico 2015
“Polvo de aqua” scrawled on a wall. (“powdered water”)
August 25, 2017 Vancouver BC
We've just watched the solar eclipse—when my daughter suddenly looks up from Instagram and comments: “Beyonce’s breasts are almost as awesome as the eclipse”
July 22, 2017 Vancouver BC
Robin, art critic/writer and friend, came to dinner last night and admired my dress. I said I’d acquired it in Paris. She told us that at 18 she’d won the prize for French in her Alberta high school: a trip to Paris. She arrived determined to buy a little black dress. She went into a shop with two snooty employees, and came out with a pink pantsuit.
March 2017
I come through the front door, greet P. and ask if Bob has been there. “Yes”, she replies, “he bit my nose and made me cry.” Bad cat. How did that happen? “Well, I put my nose in his mouth.”
December 3, 2016 Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico
I see her from a passing bus in downtown Guadalajara. The beauty and vivacity of the woman’s face--made up, smiling--causes me to stare. She is sitting in a doorway beside another woman. A sign behind them says “apartments for rent”. There is something strange, at first I wonder if they are prostitutes. Then I see that the beautiful woman with the made-up face, sitting on the step in the afternoon sun, has no arms and no legs.
April 2018 Vancouver BC
It is Juanita’s birthday, and we are eating a delicious chocolate mousse cake. I ask her boyfriend, Daniel, where the cake is from. He hesitates briefly, trying to think, then says “from Wholesale Foods…(pause)….Whole Foods, she got it there. I don’t shop there.”
Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico November 13, 2016
It’s hamburger Sunday at the American Legion in Chapala. The two Mexican women frying burgers in the patio burst into laughter with the young Mexican bartender, Marcos, who only works Sundays. I wonder aloud what they’re laughing at. Apparently, at the man who just left after two vodkas, with only one shoe
September 2017 Chicago Illinois
It’s a mid-September Saturday morning, still hot in Chicago. He passes like a dream: hipster black man driving a mile-long powder-blue vintage convertible w gigantic fins; he and his ride both so cool, so smooth… he wears a short-sleeved blue shirt, a watch w blue face, minimal contemporary design on his wrist, his left arm resting on the driver’s door.
Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico November 23, 2016
We are momentarily stopped in traffic on our narrow Mexican street. I look to the left at the two men on the sidewalk outside the Funeral Parlour. They are heavily tattooed all over their necks and faces—one has a star tattoo in the corner of his right eye and a large “81” tattoo on his neck; if that’s his birth year he is 35. The other wears a worried look while talking on his cell phone; probably one of their gang members is lying dead, inside.
October 29, 2017 Pacific Spirit Park, Vancouver BC
On the forest walk a group of teenager guys pass, one is telling the others: “hey, did you hear there’s a flesh-eating amoeba named after Trump?”
Composite Collages
