artist : Paulosie Kanayook
medium : Canadian granite
title : Hunter with Seal
(Ontario Government Buildings, Bay St.,
Toronto, Ontario. 1968)

Here is a stone. Inside the stone a hunter and a seal waited until days arrived when they began to emerge. This is a story telling itself inside a stone until the blind stone was cut away and the story-telling came out.

Paulosie Kanayook was born in an arctic community called Povungnituk, northern Quebec, on the eastern shore of Hudson’s Bay. There his father taught him sealing and he also learned to carve. This story about the north caught eyes in the south buying art with the public purse. The story would have to be translated – written again in large terms. Soapstone cannot occupy the kind of space the southerners had in mind. Granite was chosen.  In September of 1968 Paulosie Kanayook made the trek south to work with hard-rock tools and finish the translation.

My photograph is just a transitory frame for Paulosie’s epic tale. I could not plan to have the man in the suit appear when he did.

This is an alley on the eastern shore of Bay Street. I was walking north when I turned my head and saw the people and opened the shutter. I got home and sifted through the bits and bytes and noticed the heart on the door, so easy to spot full-size, high resolution.

That heart on that door is the heart of the picture and I was oblivious when I pressed the button.  I’m near-sighted.  That heart is the invisible made visible. G-d is real and speaking out loud. You need not agree. You may call it a happy accident and we can still get along just fine.

Context is the mother of perspective.