Sointula

Malcolm Island, June 2016.

Memories of a sunset.

I was staying at the hotel above the bar beside the ferry terminal. Part of my research into rural art spaces, residencies... BC Ferries representatives had come for the day (and night) to look around. They had chosen to promote Sointula in its literature.

Do you get sunsets like this every night? one of them asked the proprietor.

Oh yes, said the proprietor. Every night the sun sets.

"I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel"

The image above is a re-photograph of a photograph I took of Peter Schuyff at his Chelsea Hotel home in New York City on March 7, 1998.

Peter and I had met the previous spring, at the Banff Centre, when we were guests of the Centre's Writing and Visual Arts programs, respectively. He asked me if I might trade him a copy of my book Kingsway (1995), which I had read from the night before, for an artwork, and I said yes. Below is a picture of the 3"x3" tile Peter shaped, painted, glazed and traded.

This evening Anne Low and Gareth Moore are coming by to look at what Judy Radul and I have in our collections, toward an exhibition they are curating at the Griffin Gallery this September. I will show them Peter's tile as an example of what I hold dear.

On Wednesday morning I woke early, completed my routines, then left the house with a lightly packed shoulder bag, walking south on Clark. Six blocks later I caught the King Ed bus west to Cambie, where I boarded the southbound Olympic Line for YVR -- a $5.00 trip that took forty minutes versus a thirty-five dollar cab ride that took half that.

Air Canada’s Dash-8 flight to Kamloops is estimated at 45 minutes. On this day most of it occurred in the clouds. But we started blue enough: a sharp turn over West Van, where I stared down at the old world roads of the principality's historic subdivisions, her turquoise swimming pools, and above them, in the lap of the mountains, a lake I had never seen before.

The purpose of my journey was the Esther Shalev-Gerz show at the Kamloops Art Gallery, which I was asked to review for Canadian Art. I am familiar with Esther’s work, having included a piece of hers in a group exhibition I curated last September at Gallery 1965, called "Vancouver/Vancouver". The name of the KAG exhibition is "WHITE-OUT: Between Telling and Listening" (2002), and it is up until June 16th.

Yesterday morning I woke early, completed half my routines, then left the house of KAG curator Charo Neville for the passenger seat of her car. Although the drive from Kamloops to Vancouver was as gorgeous as the transition from high desert to maritime forest was palpable, all I could think about were the old world roads of West Vancouver’s historic subdivisions, her turquoise swimming pools, and above them, in the heavens, the exhibition’s co-curator, Annette Hurtig, whose Hornby Island memorial – the one Charo was travelling to – is today.