"To every thing there is a season"

We're well into September now, and many of us have attended events where we were asked about our summer. How was your summer? and I say various things, depending on my mood or the person I am talking to. Did you go anywhere? and my response to that is equally variable, wavering between My garden is where I go in the summer and How can I? I have a garden to tend.

I admit to being slow to the galleries this month. September was once a time when our state-sanctioned artist-run centres banded together to put on timed openings that would have us moving en masse throughout different parts of the city, reacquainting ourselves with each other, only now these centres are too burdened by their lack of funding or, in some cases, managing properties for other non-profits to encourage us.

I had a pleasant experience visiting Natalie Purshwitz's exhibition at Artspeak this summer, where the artist was there and gave me a piece of charcoal to draw with. Catriona Jeffries has some very old, never seen before work by Jerry Pethick which I think I mentioned in a past post. Amy Kazymerchyk's Pale Fire Projects opened with an exhibition that brings to mind Robert Morris's Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961) and Allan Sekula's wall-work ethnographies insofar as shoreline artist Graham Landin's semi-minimal faux'k art sculptures are not unrelated to architect Scott Cohen's contribution to the design of the gallery's activity space.

Today is a good day to visit the galleries, but there's more to do in the garden. Not plantings or weedings, but pulling out dying stuff, trimming branches and vines. The honeysuckle, I discovered last week, is strangling the grape, which might account for why it produced only one bunch of grapes this year. Have to do something about that. One of them might have to go.