One and Less-Than-One Chairs

Nothing says "I'm waiting" like a chair. Unless "I'm resting, give me a minute." Or unless it is this chair, which is missing a piece so rectangular you wouldn't think it was part of it. I defy anyone who hasn't seen this chair to find its "missing" piece and say, "Ah, I know what this belongs to."

Hard not to see the guitar(s) in this chair. Or not consider the carpentry that has the centre spindles held so firmly in the chair's upper rail. I see a lyre in these spindles, not to mention the entire reorientation of this chair above a hole in a forest. A place to think about these things with our pants down while waiting for something to leave us.

Hate Sticker

A bank line-up in Vancouver's Collingwood neighbourhood last month. The white "dot" on the fence to the left of the woman (above) is a sticker. Every section had one, placed at "eye level".  This is what they said:

Terrazza del Garage

New teeth added. (Still some flossing to do.)

200 Block Alexander Street, North Side

Photo-based artists Roy Arden and Kelly Wood have made better use of "garbage" than I ever will. (Recall what Stan Douglas once said of the photography of Wolfgang Tillmans -- how he didn't realize how great Tillmans was until he was barraged by Tillmans's imitators.) But if the still-lifes of an art critic only bring to mind the acuity of artists Arden and Wood, so be it! They are among its better exemplars.

Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon

Every now and then an unidentified flying object (UFO) is sighted and it is the nature of its media coverage (and our response to it) that tells us who we are and where we are at. The most recent coverage, which includes the U.S. Navy's decision to re-brand that which is unknown and travels by air as an Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP), comes at a time when our collective minds are pre-occupied, much like they were in 1938, when the world stood by and watched as Nazi Germany gobbled up parts of Czechoslovakia and all of Austria, and in October of that year Orson Wells broadcast his fake-umentary adaptation of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds (1898), an event so convincing that some jumped out their windows to their death.

Wait Until Dark

February 2020. A simpler time. Or an increasingly complicated time made simpler through our familiarity with it. Not the time itself but its associated attitudes, gadgets. Today, the times are neither simple nor complicated. We are numbed by subtraction, lost in new spaces both vast (why are there no other cars on the road?) and minuscule (half my day is spent at the kitchen table). I miss the hugs, the occasional restaurant dinner, going to art galleries ...

Back in February art advisor Krista Howard opened Howard 495 at 495 Railway Street (2nd Floor). I was not there for the opening, but I was there yesterday with Reid to walk through its current exhibition, held in conjunction with the Capture Photography Festival.

Curated by artist Stephen Waddell, Wait Until Dark features eleven works by eight artists -- Hannah Collins, Wols, Miroslav Tichy,  Giulio Paolini, Jacqueline De Jong, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Rineke Dijkstra and Thomas Ruff. All but one work offer evidence of the figure, though to be fair Collins's In the Course of Time 12 (Small Fire) (1988) contains within its burn what looks to be a printed budget, as evidenced by its column of figures.

Columns are also evoked in Paolini's gridded quartet Ritratto Dell'Artista Come Modella (Portrait of the Artist as a Model) (1980), where imposed over/montaged onto a photo of a statue is a slightly smaller vertical rectangle, inside which the statue is reproduced, redrawn, redesigned or voided (white). In addition to the backgrounded statue's head are its feet, bringing to mind Shelley's as-told-to poem "Ozymandias" (1818) -- "'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/ Stand in the desert ...'" So more spaces to explore, negotiate, contend with.

(Was this a dream -- that I went to a gallery yesterday? I look at my notes again, the pictures I took. I was there, wasn't I? Krista was dressed in black, and Stephen told us how he cold-called Collins to ask her for some work -- "and she said yes!")

Some People's Teens

I am doing my best to make each day different from the day before it, otherwise it all turns into a pre-Expo '86 Sunday, where everything is closed and everyone is mopey. My only constant is my after-supper walk: out the back up the lane through the park to Kingsway east to Clark up the alley and home again. There are stops along the way -- a friendly neighbour, a curious gardening decision, the cat who darts from a bush and rolls on the sidewalk before me -- but all told it never takes more than thirty minutes -- enough to put some distance between me and the computer.

The park tends to have more people in it than usual, with most everyone obeying the distancing regulations (despite disobeying the open consumption of alcohol by-law). Couples are obvious because they sit closest to each other; with certain younger groupings it is harder to tell. Surely these teenagers don't all live together, I think to myself as I near a particularly vocal group, one of whom is performing that cliche known as drinking from a brown paper bag.

I don't get much exposure to teenagers anymore, so when I am walking near them I tend to take my time. A group from the other night has stayed with me.

Their conversation, if you could call it that, was a hissing match between those defending social distancing and those opposed. The death blow came not from a point of reason but from an attitude mistaken for an idea: "I don't care about social distancing because I'm too young and too healthy to die from it." When asked by the brown bagger how they felt about unknowingly passing on the virus to someone older or more susceptible, the death blower boasted: "I'm allergic to old people -- there's no way I could get that close to one." At which point a soccer ball rolled towards the group. Who should jump up and kick it back to grandpa but the death blower.