souvenir switch-out 06/10/11

                                          The stranger walks past.
                                          When I ask, he says that he is going home

                                                      to get something

                                                                                      and bring it back.

 

So am I.

 

                                           driving away

                                           out of town

                                           along familiar lines

                                           stopping

                                           walking

                                           down to the lake

                                           up the bank

                                           over the dam

                                           through the woods

                                          along the stream

                                           to my old house

                                           where I left something...

                                           and brought something back.

My walk took an alternate route from my apartment to my childhood home.  By circumnavigating a familiar distance between two points and walking as the crow flies, I gave myself time to think about the land itself.  Just like adult perspective can sometimes lend itself to a revisionist history of the memories of childhood, what home means to me is being re-negotiated by a new corporation:

http://www.highlandcompanies.ca/

and the people like me who live here:

http://ndact.com/

http://www.inthehills.ca/2011/06/back/birth-of-a-protest/
http://www.inthehills.ca/2011/06/back/melancthon-mega-quarry-by-the-numbers/

I collected samples of limestone aggregate from the sidewalk, the road, a dam on the Pine River, and the inner walls of my old house, circa 1840s.

future walk proposal 25/09/11

Our CULTURE OF COLLECTING was the inspiration for a piece I made in 2009 displaying objects found in my home that corresponded to a map of points of colour made on a dried palette from a painting I had made previously.  I would like to further explore the relationships between collecting and walking, travel and memory...

Here lies a small example of inherited collections of driftwood, of which there are boxes and boxes, as well as an equal amount of stones, that represent a lifetime of solitary walks made by my father.  Such ancient objects contain an energy beyond their matter.  They are both a map of a place and a record of time.  When they are gathered together in one other place...
they become something else. 



Revisiting Andy Goldsworthy's work in Rivers and Tides is a good reminder of the importance of place and the energy and rhythm inherent in natural objects. 

Another artist I'm inspired by makes objects and installations from collected items and sometimes difficult to acquire materials that reference complex histories.  Fashioned together in a kind of poetic alchemy and listed like a recipe, Dario Robleto's work is more than the sum of its parts:

 http://www.acmelosangeles.com/artists/dario-robleto/?view=images

Scroll through his work and take a closer look at Image #27 :

The Melancholic Refuses to Surrender, 2003
Cast and carved bone, charcoal, melted vinyl record of Leadbelly's "The Titanic", broken male hand bones, ground coal, horse hair, dirt, pigments, lead salvaged from the sea, string and rust
11 x 5 x 14 inches

ALSO CONSIDER:

Psychometry!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometry_%28paranormal%29

Psychogeography! 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography

The Toronto Psychogeography Society:
http://www.psychogeography.ca/

One recently published Toronto Flaneur:
http://www.blogto.com/people/2010/05/toronto_through_the_eyes_of_shawn_micallef/

Bric-a-Brac!

As theorized by Dr. Anne Anderson:
http://www.uoguelph.ca/sofam/www.uoguelph.ca/sofam/ahvisiting.html

As elaborated by Guelph University's very own John Potvin and Alla Myzelev:
http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&isbn=9780754661443&lang=cy-GB

To be continued...

international walking commissions

I was reading Rebecca Solnit's beautiful chapter on Pilgrimages when I was reminded that "Walking came from Africa, from evolution..." p. 45

My partner is traveling to South Africa in November to collaborate with a friend who has an artist residency there.  Consequently I've become interested in the possibilities of asking them to collaborate with me on a walk in the place it was invented.

This idea got me thinking that some other friends of mine will be taking their band on tour in Argentina and Brazil in November, and perhaps they could walk for me in some way too. 

I'll have to wait for some spectacular accident to occur, linking these international walks with an appropriate concept.

In the spirit of musing, I'd like to share a quote from Solnit's Wanderlust that struck me profoundly.  It portrays pilgrimages so beautifully: 

"These devout and simple people travel sometimes two thousand miles, from China to Mongolia, and cover every inch of the way by measuring their length on the ground...They prostrate themselves on their faces, marking the soil with their fingers a little beyond their heads, arise and bring their toes to the mark they have made and fall again, stretched full length on the ground, their arms extended, muttering an already million-times-repeated prayer."

This bodily relationship with the land, marking the soil with fingers, measuring one's length on the ground; it all somehow reminded me of the various land/body artists (especially in the 1970s) who explored the physical mark-making of the body on the land.

Here are some photographs I took on a solitary walk in Mono Cliffs Park of earthworm trails:

aren't they beautiful?

...like this painting entitled Painting by Philip Guston, 1954, that I saw in New York last February...

naked hiking

Last Thursday I was quite shocked to learn from Amish Morrell's talk on 'Naked Hiking' that the Naturism movement developed out of FASCISM!...I've never been so disturbed by 'free-love'...apparently its not just for hippies.  In contrast, Morrell's detailed explanation of the sensual experience of outdoor nudity and spiritual commune with nature was affirming and inspiring.  

The wind is never so silky and every pore of your skin never feels so open and free as when you're CANUDING, as I discovered while gliding across the great waters of Alona Bay, Lake Superior in August 2011.  Highly recommended. 

I also highly recommend the truly inspiring and award winning cocktail "A Walk In The Woods" featuring pine needle infused tequila with elderflower and orange zest.  Enjoying this delicious concoction, I was reminded of something I learned in an interview with a tree scientist I heard a year or two ago on CBC radio.  The Victorians used to go on carriage rides or walks in the pine forests to inhale the healing, purifying, calming properties of pine trees.  They referred to these aroma-therapeutic walks/carriage rides as "spa's".  The chemical properties of pine trees and their effect on the human brain has since been affirmed by modern science.  Cheers!

 

A Victorian era buggy ride in the pine forest, and 'Pine Forest', 2005, by American photographer 

Justine Kurland visually combines these themes nicely I think. 

http://www.miandn.com/#/artists/justine-kurland/

walking rhythms

"...it starts with a step and then another step and then another step that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm...Moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time; the mind wanders from plans to recollections to observations.  The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts.  This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.  A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making."  from Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking, 2000.  
 

 

  

from a walk performed in 2007 at Lake Louise, Alberta.

what a SPECTACULAR ACCIDENT that i have been collecting documentation of walks through landscapes for years and years, for reasons not completely known...until now?  more than scenic memories, i would like to find ways to incorporate these past psychogeographic experiences in my future conceptual art walks. 

ECHOES

operating as modes of thinking, the physical rhythms of walking can be linked to the sonic perception of music!

walking in a large slow river 15/10/11

 There's a hole in the puzzle, something has been forgotten

 Wandering into the mystery, a voice sends whispers from a secret garden...

 It is here and not here. 

 Unlike the garden path,

 time is a large slow river

 and you are standing in it

 just as I am standing in it

 and everything that flows down to us

 flows away from us.

 The wisdom of ancestors

 and ghosts

 echo across the water

and other dimensions leave their traces in our time.

 Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's audio walk A Large Slow River at Oakville Galleries was a fascinating first-hand sensory experience.  As we discovered, site specificity is essential to the work.  

To listen to more audio and video walks visit  

http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/index.html

Included is Cardiff's account of what really happened the day recording for this project began.

For more disjointed exploration of 'place' visit

http://robotflaneur.com/

To make binaural recordings using ear-bud headphones like Nathan explained in class check out

http://art.simon.tripod.com/stealth.html