Strategies Deployed, Objects Enacted

Garden Don't Care

Subsistance Garden

Gallery Decor

Home Sculpture

City Maintenance 1

City Maintenance 2

Autism Stares Down Sociopathy

Felines

This cat lives in the neighbourhood and eats out a lot.

As for this "Kitty", it belongs to Mary Kelly and has toured the world many times over.

Vernon

Yesterday Brian and I drove into Vernon. Brian wanted a haircut, and I thought I did too, but somewhere between Little Kingdom and the Village Green I decided to hold out until I was in Vancouver later this week, when I would visit my usual guy, Amir, and catch up on what he's thinking.

While Brian was getting sheared, I wandered about the neighbourhood, where I came upon an apartment building with an unusual addition at its northeast aspect. Unfortunately the detail got lost in the shadows, but as is often the case with me and my phone, something unforeseen happens -- in this instance, the floral line and the line at the top of those clouds.

Powers of Association

Top: Jock MacDonald, Black Tusk (1932)

Middle: Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown (1969)

Bottom: Michael Snow, Still from New York Eye and Ear Control (1964)

Hornby Island Xmases (2015, 2016)

Spring Clean #3

While in Germany last summer, Antonia Hirsch took me to Pfauninsel (also known as Peacock Island), near Potsdam.

What was a drive-in-cum-car-lot at the northeast corner of Kingsway and Inverness was torn down last fall to make way for a four-storey condo/retail complex, called Charm.

In April I attended the opening of Brian Jungen's exhibition at the Kunstverein Hannover. Because I was reviewing the show, I arrived early with my camera (not the one in the picture).

Spring Clean #2

A picture I took last July in the water-closet of our Berlin residence.

This picture was also taken in Berlin, but in April, a couple evenings before I visited the Kippenberger exhibition. The occasion was a DAAD dinner, and the man across the table (his hand not unlike my fork) is the artist Jimmie Durham. To Jimmie's left, the artist Maria Theresa Alves.

The entrance to Active Pass (moving east to west) has Mayne Island to the south and Galiano Island to the north. The picture below is mostly of the southern sky above the Strait of Georgia, though it includes the tip of Mayne, a strip of land that, over the years, has come to mean something to me.

After the opening of my exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria we moved to a 1950s-era bar located in the huge copper dome above Paul's Motor Inn. This bar has had many names over the years, but the current version is called the Copper Owl and is run by a group of twenty-something artists.

Spring Clean

Just as we clean house each spring, now we do the same with our cameras.

Below is a recent picture I took of my friend Olive, who lives down the block. Olive likes to pick flowers. On this day I surprised her with a bouquet of daphne and alyssum from my garden.

Here is a picture I took while hosting the Sweetwater Festival in Rolla, B.C. last June:

Here is a picture I took while at the Martin Kippenberger exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in April:

Dan Siney

The crowd that gathered for Michael Drebert's Gather (2013) included a tall handsome man in his mid-30s. An artist, I gathered from his conversations. A photographer, to be more specific. Someone coy about his current project, but spoke of it anyway. Dan, as his friends called him. Dan Siney? I asked, and he nodded a guilty yes.

My introduction to Siney's work came a number of years ago, as a member of the Presentation House Gallery fundraising committee. The picture Dan gave us focused on the stump of a large Douglas fir tree in the middle of a forest. Although the two spaces near the top of the stump give the impression of eyes, they are in fact slots loggers made so that they could insert planks that would allow them a platform from which to saw through and fall what remained of its tree, turning that tree from a work of Nature into a platform, or plinth, in "support" of what was.

The other Siney picture I am familiar with is another work he donated to PHG. In this picture we have both the shadow of a window (a bay window?) and its reflection against a heavily Verathaned wooden floor. Could this floor be compromised of what gave us the stump in the previous picture?

Curious to know what else I was missing, I spent a few minutes this morning in search of other Siney pictures.

Here is a Siney picture that brought to mind another picture:

Here is that picture:

The above picture is by Wolfgang Tillmans, an artist whose work has influenced a legion of artists, most notably Tim Barber and Ryan McGinley. Like Barber and McGinley, Siney has also contributed to that design aesthetic known as Vice Magazine.

Here is a picture Siney contributed to Vice:

Not sure what I have to say about this picture, but it haunts me, and perhaps one day I will have something to add to its conversation.

Here is another picture that comes up when you Google "Dan Siney", and click on "Images":

What is this baby in the shadow of? The rest of his or her life?