Perspective

Katharine Asals4 Comments

The other night I went out in the dark of the night to begin the project of refreshing the animals, the “critters” I’ve been installing, here and there underneath the Gardiner, along Lakeshore.

I’d done a couple of first instalments on the most front facing pillars on the west side of Sherbourne, and had waded in a little deeper, into a bit of a cavernous wasteland of concrete structures and detritus and so on, looking for another pillar that might hold a bear or a grackle…

And perhaps it’s here that I should mention that it’s the first time I’ve gone out on my own, a lone female at night?

Somewhere a few evenings into the project I realized we didn’t really need to be two people – two people is great if you want a ladder to go higher, or if you want to do larger posts with two parts that need to line up properly, or if you want someone to document what is happening. But it’s not strictly necessary…

I figured it was time to get efficient. To just get out there. Why not just do it on my own.

So there I was, a bit deeper into the gargantuan dark underneath the Gardiner, laying down layers of wheat paste, getting the image straight, when I sensed there was someone to my left.

I turned towards my sense of a figure, and must have jumped visibly, as he said, “sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you!”

He was leaning on his bike – a bike loaded down with what looked like probably all the stuff needed for navigating an entire life in a series of bags and compartments, living out in the city in precisely such liminal spaces as underneath the highway.

“I just wanted to come say, Hi”, he explained.

“I’ve been around here, in this neighbourhood for about four years, and I’ve seen your artworks around, and I just wanted to say, I appreciate you. I appreciate you, I appreciate your art.”

So very sweet, so pure of heart.

If ever I’d had a moment of doubt about the project, if ever I’d wondered if this little project mattered at all in these odd and difficult days in the world, it all vanished in that one sweet tiny phrase, “I appreciate you”.

More about this project – Downtown Critters

Lens Artists Challenge – Perspective, Depth and Scale

Landscapes lately

Katharine Asals2 Comments

At the grocery store checkout today, I lined up behind a woman with a massive stack of stuff in her cart, 6th or 7th in line. There was only one cashier open out of the 8 potential spots, and an absurd line up behind the one open cash.

She turned to me, impatience percolating. “I can’t believe they have 8 wickets and only one cashier on”.

“Profits are up”, I answered. There’d been a headline in the papers just yesterday – better than expected profits this quarter. Easy to see how they do it.

She took a beat, as if shifting into second gear, the better able to tell me what she really thought. “The greediest family! The only ones greedier are the Walmart family”.

THIS is the landscape everywhere. Across this country, and from the sounds of it, most others as well.

In our neighbourhood, all three businesses within view are closing their doors. The bank of course, it’s just the branch; the Popeyes, also a bit of a regional franchise failure; and the cannabis store beside the Popeyes, well… hard as we all tried, they just didn’t survive.

During my summer out west, I heard jokes about how BC stands for “bring cash”. Plenty of struggles out there as well.

But it was summertime, and so it was time to kick back and enjoy the good weather, and we went to all the beaches up and down the coast – one afternoon of full on Pacific Ocean, but mostly up and down the Strait of Georgia.

Everywhere we went was breathtakingly spectacular. Just insanely beautiful.

But I realized there was one beach that stayed with me especially.

There was something about the proximity of the mountains just across the way on the mainland and the almost protected feeling of the waters in between.

Tiny fish darting at every step, seaweed waving lazily, crabs scuttling in all directions.

Something about this grove of Ocean and Mountains and primeval life forms gave me a sense of a kind of Birth of the World, or the Origins of All Species.

Swimming there I felt almost as if I was swimming in the dawn of creation.

This sensation was the most beautiful reminder of all the stages of the world – all the mysterious pre-human stages, the early human hunter-gatherers, and then the slow slow move to agriculture… and only just recently the massive shifts to industry, to technology, to predatory capitalism.

Nothing is forever.

We can dream a better dream any time we want.

Lens Artists Challenge – Landscape