Yesterday I stopped at Hespler on my way to the opening of The 23rd Annual Homer Watson Exhibition, "Reflections", at Homer Watson House Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario. I was early.
I find it both pleasant and upsetting to sit beside the rapid waters of a weir. I sat in the shade on the lawn of the portage park watching fishermen and the water, enjoying the old world charm of it, and trying to avoid thinking about the thousands of kilowatts of power going unharvested over the dam. Cambridge, which Hespler is a part of, is like all the towns and cities of Southern Ontario; it was originally a mill town with factories which were powered directly from the river by water wheels and later by turbines. They are all pleasant ruins now, ruins which irritate and charm me.
Now that I think about it I must have looked like a post-modern rendition of the intellectual reading a digital book on a smart phone portable computer. Also taking pictures and videos with it.
One of the fishermen asked me: "Do you like that phone? My wife is getting one exactly like it right now."
I told him, "I like it, I like it a lot", and went on to explain why.
Glazed and bored he said, "My wife is getting one right now."
I can almost imagine myself with a leather bound book and an oil sketch kit with a portable drawing table and a walking stick, and backpack but, I was glad to get back to my air conditioned truck.
I arrived at the gallery early so I took time to wander around the gardens.
My college friend, Andrew Todd, had attended the Doon School of Fine Arts before we met in Montreal at Sir George Williams University. He told me about the sleeping cabins in an email a few days ago.
I have a history with Homer Watson House. I exhibited a show of lithographs there in 1988.
Jock MacDonald, who taught summers at the Doon School between 1954 and 1960, with John Snow and Maxwell Bates (among others) established the Calgary Group in 1947. I worked as a studio assistant for John Snow and Maxwell Bates. Jock MacDonald was often mentioned at Kay Snow's dinner parties and salons where members of the group met in the middle 1960's.
I am writing this from my studio doing a few things at once. In the above video Bill Schwarz says that he gessoes his canvas with black. Sounds like fun.
“Barry uses exact details of the visual experience in his work and manipulates this detail to weave his story for the viewer, drawing an alternative perspective that brings many of us to question what is true vision and is it the same for everyone.”
Faith Hieblinger
This afternoon my daughter Jessica, six month grandson Alexander, and Mary were going to the wading pool. I couldn't resist. It was more fun, cooler, Piccasso-esque, and existential than blogging about past successes of a bygone era.
It is and was a good show and an honour to be included.
On July 27 (13:00h), eleven days from now, I am scheduled to give a presentation performance lecture at the gallery. I am planning to loosely base my jpeg projection illustrated talk upon Olexander Wlasenko's lecture - performance recorded in this blog on star date 13/01/20.
If you'd like to see my solo contribution to Reflections - The 23rd Annual Homer Watson Exhibition:
That is, if in your time, HTML is a "supported" computing language and if my particular codes of it and "frames pages" are still "cross platform" capable. Probably not. Either, my reader/viewer/hit patron; you do not exist or your viewing machine is incapable of reading this obsolete code.
In which case, you are not engaging this and I am, as usual, playing with myself. Writing a diary log obviously, one of the obvious reflections of The 23rd: Paintings do not obsolete until the paint rots off the surface (or vise versa & vis a vis ); not until the viewing machine, the human eye, is obsolesced by nature or by nurture; or, the institutionalised deconstructionist anti-institutional conceptuals manage to root out every secretive painting and destroy it (before destroying themselves and along with themselves the university institution). Ain' t gonna happen! Impossible for The Old Dons, past, to escape the departmental chairs into which bodies, like silver maples, have grown tenured. Impossible to rampage the culture with the paper jaws and paper teeth of the paper Derrida tigers.
