title : eye
medium : oil pastel on paper, wood support
dimensions : approx. 2′ x 3′

This piece came along with a herd of others, in 1997-8. I was still in the habit of harvesting from magazines, excising text and snippets of images for free-association reassembly. Increasingly these collage experiments were hit with more and more pastel and paint.

Women’s fashion magazines are among the richest veins to mine, eye-candy, page after page. I was stunned by the emergence of the junkie aesthetic. I won’t be surprised if you don’t remember this period, especially if you have sense enough to pass by such things. Suddenly the supermodels dropped another 20 pounds. Their bodies looked and indeed had to be – starved. The pallor of their flesh was deathly. The goal of cosmetic application was to render bruising around their eyes, hollow their cheeks. These women looked drug addicted and beaten up. What was the effect of this visual radiation on the children and young people who absorbed it?

Those magazines are full of eyes. I looked and looked and looked into their eyes. I began cutting them out. I spent three weeks, nine to eleven hours a day, slicing out small rectangles with an eye in each one. I pasted them on a board four feet high and nearly two feet wide … this is a study of one of them, no more than half an inch wide.

I’ll offer up another poem that seems … fitting :

Niagara Falls summer 2001

Pilgrim’s progress –
wax museums, haunted houses.
Theatre of virtuality.
Twice as real.

Waxen women wait
for the currency exchange.
Animatronic fortune teller
likewise waits, boxed in.
Subroutines activate
transubstantiations of cash.

Severed voices slurp down outside walls,
gravy from a can.
Family dining, prime rib of beef,
our heads are full of voices.

“Your blood will curdle
as you edge your way
through the crypt.”

Young women play oyster,
loiter in restaurant doorways,
entreat you with
“best food in town… ”

CIRCUS WORLD
writ large in blazing pink
neon and flashing bulbs,
noon sun.
FUNLAND!
Plywood and fading red,
five options;

* Become A Human Cannon Ball
* See Circus Freaks
* Change Your Appearance In Our Magic Mirrors
* Become A Circus Clown
* See If You Can Keep Your Balance On Our Tilting Floor

Rat king, dance us around.

Oh the Disney weighs heavily, yes? Yes. Let us step back and refresh ourselves again. There will be many days marching ahead…

title : waiting for lily
medium : oil pastel on paper, wood support
dimensions : 5″ x 7″ (ish)

title : mixed wood
medium : oil pastel on paper, wood support
dimensions : 5″ x 7 ” (ish)

title : lake Calabogie
medium : oil pastel on paper, wood support
dimensions : 5″ x 7 ” (ish)

title : drift
medium : oil pastel on paper, wood support
dimensions : 5″ x 7 ” (ish)

title : cedars
medium : oil pastel on paper, wood support
dimensions : 5″ x 7 ” (ish)

These were all made during a cottage visit with my family in July of 2001. They’re not what I’d call spectacular but they are sincere. cedars is quite good. As a matter of fact they represent a period of a few months between bars of the Disney Suite when I had turned the Sticky Rat et. al to the wall and tried to put it all out of mind.

Not long after returning to my apartment in Toronto I was invited to show with three other Canadian women at the University of Wisconsin. But what? The rat, of course. Who else to send to cheese-country? Three days into my underdrawing for what would become my rendering of Our Way of Life planes crashed mercilessly into buildings.

There wasn’t much resting after that, not for a long time.

I will end this post with another poem from my one and only compilation, Miss Ellaneous – Image, image, image.

September 13, 2001/Oscar Night spring 2002

It’s like a movie.
Everyone said so.

I saw you on television,
cell phones
nailed to your heads,
your attention — evenly divided.

Waiting outside a Boston hotel,
all you see are cameras.
You vibrate.
The need to be
in the pictures, your pulse;
you imagine yourself
watching you later.

“Tape it! Are you taping it…?”

“Of course!”

You smiled. You laugh.

You’re waiting for
movie stars.
Your Oswald.
Your Boston strangler.

Whomever whispers
in your ear — sees you.
I saw you search the screen.
Never more real in your life.
You waved. You preen.

I note — my tenses shifting.
These mirrors are made of sand.
In concrete hives, in darkened cells,
blue screen drip feeds,
synchronous.

Look.
But you cast no shadow.
It is for nothing.
We are the extras.

They reopened Disney World today.
Business as usual.
Guaranteed.

title : tiger, tiger…
medium : oil on paper, wood support
dimensions : ummm … 2′ x 3′ approx.

Oh dear. This is not the title written on the back of the painting, sold last summer to a good friend. I am scouring my memory banks with no success, memories are scattered everywhere now … what a mess. I’m also guessing at the size again because that information is not lying about in here either. I begin to see how poorly organized this all must seem to the casual reader, just stopping by. You may be thinking; “No wonder artists so often die poor and starving in a garret.”

Sigh.

I can tell you it was painted in early 2001. It is the first in an infinite, ergo – unfinished series called The Disney Suite, assonance and dissonance in oil on paper.

I shall confess it. I went to Disney World, Florida compound, in the fall of 2000. The trip was a gift from my sister to my parents on the occassion of their fortieth wedding anniversary. My appearance at the US departures gate in the Ottawa International Airport, all expenses paid by my sister, came as a complete surprise to my parents whom I had not visited in two years.

My Dad saw me first. Bolting up out of the moulded plastic seating he asked, happy and perplexed; “Rob’! What are you doing here…?”

I smiled and hugged him and said; “Hi Dad! I’m on my way south to help out with Ralph Nader’s campaign for the presidency.”

“Oh, G-d. You’re not … ”

Poor Dad. Too large a part of him was afraid it was true. “No Dad, I’m not. I’m coming with you…!” Thus we embarked as a small, oddly compiled tribe, off to savour the decadent treacle of all that is Disney/all that has been sucked into the gaping Disney maw. I had struggled mightily with the horror of it all long before arriving on the hot Florida tarmac. I love my family and would never suggest my sister’s desire was anything less than to bring the family together and to celebrate together. I will not utter a word about their predilection for what I consider a fetid consumptive swamp fever of corporate evil. I know they don’t see it that way. They see cartoons, innocent entertainments and quality merchandising.

I see something different. I see the tenth circle of hell Dante could not bring himself to write about. I reasoned the only way to survive the environment itself was to go in data-mining, make art about it, tell the people what I saw. “I’m going to Disney world so that you don’t have to…” became my mottoe … unless you really want to of course, in which case you and I aren’t different exactly, we’re just on different planets.

This is a photo of the blessed tiger who was trapped and carted off to live in Disney’s resin-cast animal kingdom hell. I took it myself. I remember the day I wandered through animal kingdom hell very sharply, like a knife in the belly. I felt so powerfully ashamed of the depths which human beings casually sink to in order to amuse themselves. I wanted so much for the tigers to run free – and eat people.

I took photos of a silverback gorilla, similarly penned for Disney profit. I stood on the other side of thick glass, separating the 9-5 parade of our bloated human self indulgence from him and his family. The other gorillas that you could see were further up a slope and well away from the glass wall, paying us no mind, denying us our pre-paid close-up spectacle.

The silverback sat in one corner of the shaded arena with the built-in window, his back against one wall, staring at nothing, mere inches from the glass. He looked to me like a man in a pay-per-view jail cell, a man who knows he will never escape alive. His was the posture of the damned, the incarcerated spirit. My shame was ocean deep and ocean wide. I lifted my disposable camera for a picture, hardly able to swallow or breathe and slowly, slowly he turned his head. With boundless dignity he looked me in my eye. I hit the plastic button to release the plastic shutter, a sudden reflex-action, as though in response to being struck. I took the camera away from my face and tried to see him through my wall of shame. An instant later he looked away.

I compiled and self-published a very slim volume of poems in 2002 including one I wrote about my day in animal kingdom hell. It goes like this:

Overheard, November 2000

(a woman by the tiger-tank)

” They look just like stuffed animals …

soft and furry … ”

(two men by the gorilla-tank)

” They’re so human. ”

” It looks just like a person
waiting for a bus … or waiting
for his wife … [smiles] ”

” Heh, heh, yah;
What’s for dinner? “