Love and Strength to you, land of Tanuki, Hanami, and Manga! I was lucky to travel to Tokyo and Kyoto in 2005 through an Ontario Arts Council grant and can’t wait to return one day. Your artistic influence is still with me every day, thank you.
Let’s open our imagination for a moment and picture how we might relate to a place through a dream we share with the people who live there.
Let’s imagine real images to show the world what really moves us—though we create them together through fictitious situations. Let’s truly participate in the reality of our place through the imaginary frameworks of art projects.
And through these frameworks, let’s propose real encounters that have the power to redefine the meaning and purpose of art.
While we are dreaming, let us also re-imagine the ethics of current modes of production that constitute the map of this contemporary art world and its relationship to people and/or places that are not on this art “map.” Let’s propose something new to the art world’s systems of inclusion and exclusion. Let’s also reconsider aesthetics, because, in the real world, your view of what is beautiful may not be the same as mine, or someone else’s.
Let’s open up the possibilities of the discourses of beauty and art to alternative, hybrid forms of expression and diverse cultural circuits. And let’s storm the institutions with our new collective power to imagine that art can have a real purpose and also a new territory.
Still surfaces doubling symmetrical reflections of calm
Clouds over water, hands touch, giving what you take
Growth patterns, the seasons, the minutes of the hour
Passions in pure colour and important points of happiness
Routines, expectations, assumptions: tomorrows
The everyday.
Unseen, unexpected, unprepared
Turbulence developed in an undercurrent
The earth actually shifted, water covered land, cities washed away
Listened for a wilding wind but it lay hushed, composed, conspiring
A thousand years of secret plans
Put in motion in a moment.
A single body gone and missing
Too vast, too impossible, too important
To chronicle and list the loss
The landscape strange, unrecognizable
The look-out, a shared summit of debris
But I am still alive and you are still alive.
And you are still alive and I am still alive.
