Safe Piñata

A small room inside a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

Home now. The groceries on the table, still in the bag, the celery sticking out the top.

The contrast -- the relationship -- between the celery and the bag's paper.

Electrically green, and the bag a somber brown.

I close my eyes and dream of my mother  arranging things below a sign that reads USED PIÑATAS. She pretends not to notice, even though I am travelling a 100 miles an hour.

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Ai Weiwei

Among the many exhibitions opening this week and next week, I would recommend a visit to the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery for Ai Weiwei New York 1983 - 1993.

Equal parts street photography and sly ethnography, this sequence of 227 black-and-white pictures (captured and selected by the artist himself) contains within it kernels of the world we are living in today.

Yesterday Canadian Art published my preview. Hopefully they will make space for someone to write a more comprehensive piece, one that speaks to the elements contained with this nicely-braided installation.

Edward Hopper

Last Sunday I posted a book cover that features a reproduction of Edward Hopper's High Road (1931). Yesterday I looked up High Road and found that the book cover contains only a detail (the left quarter of the painting is cropped). Not only that, but what I thought was a body of water in the distance is a bluff. Suddenly my relationship to this painting changed, and I have yet to see it in the flesh.

Nineteen-thirty-one was a busy year for Hopper, and a terrible year for the United States, whose GNP fell by 8.5%, and whose unemployment figures rose to 15.9%.

Here is another painting Hopper made in 1931, entitled Freight Car at Truro.

Hard to tell if the freight car is derailed, or if the track is covered in dust.

Further down the line, New York, New Haven and Hartford (1931).

And beyond that, The Camel's Hump (1931).

Until we come to Hotel Room (1931), where a woman in a bathing suit sits on the side of the bed reading a large paperback book.

Too large to be a Bible. Even larger than the book that inspired this post.

Empire Line (1998)

Artist Antonia Hirsch is a former Vancouver resident now living in Berlin. This Saturday she is opening a new exhibition at SFU Gallery (Burnaby), entitled Negative Space.

Here is what artist Marina Roy wrote about Hirsch's Empire Line (1998) on the occasion of the Vancouver Art Gallery's 2001 These Days exhibition.

"subject line"

Tiziana La Melia is a Vancouver-based visual artist who writes poems, some of which are about, amongst other things, haircuts, make-up and clothes; some of which can be found here.

This Friday an exhibition of La Melia's work and the work of Chief Beau Dick, Dan Graham and Jeremy Shaw will open at Macaulay & Co Fine Art, under the title Altered States.

The poem below is, amongst other things, La Melia's response to Ezra Pound's "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" (1917).


subject line
/.


the first major

line i stole in my

20s was from

ezra pound

who translated the line

from a chinese poet

Li Po


a line about a hairstyle

graphically producing a line


the line along the forehead

of a girl


i took this being unformed

and ill formed

and emotionally ill


those were forming years i

can't undo, i try


the line was something like

i cut my hair straight across my forehead


in the original poem, his

and his

and mine


about some girl

bent over

working.


i picture her grey-blue dress

something a mennonite might

wear, but without the gathering

below the waist


an identity crisis

again and cut

my bangs again.


i look like an

earlier self,

i do not mind.