The performance of The Distance of Their Mouths was one week ago. Yesterday, I took a qi-kung class that was truly mind-blowing (I felt like I was flying in one section of it), and except for food shopping, the rest of the day was spent in obsession over Puccini’s Tosca, it being the rep for the day’s  Saturday Afternoon at the Opera Met broadcast. To my surprise, as I pulled into my driveway with the car radio on, I found myself dissolved in violent tears upon hearing Tosca’s aria, Vissi d’arte. Maybe the qi-kung opened a channel.

Much of the rest of the day went to listening to the broadcast and trying to find English translations to two of the arias. I had missed hearing the Ta Deum in the broadcast but heard it in my head. I wanted to know what the singers were saying. What were the words that didn’t even matter since the emotion of the singing was so powerful?

I found the translation and it did not disappoint – Go, Tosca. Scarpia now sets loose the roaring falcon of your jealousy!….Ah, to see the flame of those imperious eyes  grow faint and languid with passion.  Tosca has been described by a contemporary critic as, “a shabby little shocker” and the dismissiveness reminded me of opinions I have had about contemporary art.

It has often seemed to me that much contemporary visual art is overly-intellectualized , severely imbalanced towards the head and excluding the body. No heart. The dysfunctional psycho disconnected from his emotion, incapable of empathy and jeering at the masses. Perhaps I overstate.

What is the position of emotion and experience in art now? Experience that is internal and personal, without the focus of the lens of social and political affairs? Is it still suspect?

The Distance of Their Mouths is intensely personal. There is a theoretical reason for the emotion to do with disrupting the subject/object view of the landscape, and although I am completely committed to the theoretical reason, it had nothing to do with the creative process. It is a lens that comes after, to don in order to see what one has done.

I am happy about my performance of the emotion I experienced and translated into words. Being a very occasional performer, my skills are limited and I did not want to sink into the horrors of disconnected, sentimental delivery. However, beyond the having the chops or not part, there is another quality, one bone-deep. It’s easy to access when you are young and raw and then it can disappear in “the hazards of life”*. I knew I had managed to get my ducks in a row in order to let it shine last Saturday. I don’t care what a cliché that phrase is, that’s just too bad, because it is a light.

Front: Rose Bolton, composer; Julie Baumgartel, violin; Back: Margaret Gay, cello; me; Alison Melville, recorder

My spiritual practice teaches me to fully experience as the middle way between getting caught up in reactive patterns or repressing; to fully experience whatever you are experiencing and be able to rest within it. Be fully in something instead of avoiding it either by being overwhelmed or pushing it away. I think contemporary art is a lot about repressing and popular culture is a lot about being caught up in reactive patterns. I want to make art that expresses my experience.

* A phrase used by Francoise Sullivan when I interviewed her and which has resonated with me since.

Peter Pan wait staff Hilary & I circa 1978

Dear Editor,
It takes nothing away from the magnificence of The Cameron to remember what everyone seems to forget when writing about the history of Queen  St. West – both The Cameron and the music scene built on what was  already established by other artists in the 70s. I lived over Jacob’s Hardware (beside The Cameron) from 1975-1988 and most of the “new  dance” community as well as the infant modern dance Dancemakers  rehearsed there in the mid-70s. General Idea’s Art  Metropole moved from Yonge St. to Richmond and Duncan in the mid-70s  and CCMC opened The Music Gallery on St. Patrick St. just north of  Queen. The Centre for Experimental Art and Communications (CEAC) was on Duncan and the independent film organization, The Funnel, was in  its basement. Lots of artists lived in the lofts along Queen St. W. around Spadina (protected by provincial rent control) including John Scott, Peter McCallum,  Randy & Bernicci and many others. Before The Cameron we drank at The Beverley and occasionally The Rex Hotel or Horseshoe (speaking personally of course).  The Cabana Room of The Spadina Hotel was the original artists’ bar of area.

The restaurants were key to the scene and provided employment for visual artists, dancers and musicians. Peter Pan opened in the fall of 1976 and was the game-changer to hipsterism. General Idea’s Jorge  Zontal and myself were amongst the first wait staff. Le Select opened  up before The Peter Pan and was a hangout for theatre people including  Montreal emigrés from Bill 101 who opened the Soho Theatre on  the second floor in the building that later became The Rivoli. Around this time, the hippie Beggar’s Banquet changed to The Parrot and its  owners and chefs were the soon-to-be-superchefs Greg Couilliard and  Andrew Milne-Allen. The Clichettes are other dancers formed most of the wait staff.

But don’t take my word for it - see The Toronto Star article, “A new village lures the creative crowd”, Saturday, June 125, 1977 by Bruce Kirkland.

Lower Balls Falls on the Twenty

I have completed the video files for this Saturday’s performance of my first new performance since 2004, Distance of Their Mouths. It is so great to be making a performance.

I am live mixing 6 video files with video from a webcam. I am using an Edirol V-4 video mixer, courtesy of Marinko Jareb and Niagara Artists’ Centre. The files are a combination of video shot in fall of 2008 for the installation, Fall, with a very good camera from Charles St. Video, and web-quality video shot in October 2010 and recently. I could not open the stored files from 2008 and was rescued by my dear friend, Berenicci Hershorn (click on her name to go to the 7a*11d blog and a description of her most excellent recent performance). We drank delicious rose tea and I devoured the remains of her holiday baking while she edited 3 files for me in File Maker Pro. On my way to her, I stopped at the Apple store to buy a DVI to S-video cable. On the bus on the way home, I edited the last of the 6 files; I use the free software on my employer’s MacBook Pro, iMovie, which is dreadful but a huge step forward from nothing! Editing video is the most pleasant way to commute, that and reading the comics my mother kindly cuts out of the newspaper for me.

During the performance, I will open each file, at the right time and place one hopes, and mix live footage of the musicians playing. I have yet to finalize the places and times for this. I don’t have video for one of the sections but serenditiously it works because the text is about disappearances. I have not yet completed the very modest, gestural choreography, funny thing about that, since it is the one artistic subject I have actually taught. Text - check. Video – check. Equipment – check. Vocal delivery and choreography, not so much, still to complete with 3 days to go.

The performance is presented by Gallery Players of Niagara on Janaury 22 @ 8:00 p.m. at Niagara Artists’ Centre in St. Catharines. Here is the artist statement to be printed in the program:

Notes on The Distance of Their Mouths: a journey from west to east

The Distance of Their Mouths charts six of the waterfalls in the numbered creek system of the North Niagara watershed. I previously worked with this imagery in the video installation, Fall, shown at Grimsby Public Art Gallery in 2008. Both of these works are rooted in my sense of place and appreciation for the power of waterfalls, which dot the north Niagara landscape.

 In this work, a deeply personal narrative is layered with this landscape. Relationships and stories in verse of grief and despair are embedded in the geology and geography. The narrative journey following the creeks from west to east leads to the great waterfall, which I have described as if viewed in a meditative state associated with a Buddhist path, Dzogchen. The epilogue enumerates the creeks opening into Lake Ontario. Empty and open are identified as states of being overcoming despair and turmoil.

 These expressions of place, emotions and spiritual states are joined to an expression of a theoretical position. Landscape in art is conventionally that viewed and consumed by us. As object to our subject, it is passive and neutral. Through embodying the landscape of my birth and residence with my personal narrative, I disrupt that convention. I support this visually by electronically overlaying the images of the musicians engaged in the live, physical act of playing their instruments. In so doing, I make my small hole in the exploitative relationship with the land and the objectification that sees us as separate to nature.

 I have not addressed the music, which I leave to the composer, Rose Bolton, and I thank her and the musicians of Gallery Players of Niagara for their generous and inspired collaboration in realizing this work.

I worked for 3 hours this afternoon. My goal  is to come into my body enough that I can speak from the heart, uncontrived, in what will be a challenging performance situation for me as I am a performer who does not perform (well, hardly ever). I want to be more aware of sound resonance in parts of my body I can’t feel it, loosen this old body that spends way too much time earning a living at a computer and be responsive to the words I wrote (but no drama! rest easy you performance art people!).

trapezius muscle - mine needs to be softened a lot

I began with 20″ of Kundalini yoga followed by the resonance exercises on the Orville Heyn CD,  The Singer’s Body. Next I lay on a somewhat flattened, 7″ (used to be 8″) air-filled ball placed mid-back -  I learned Kinetic Awareness Ballwork from Fiona Griffiths who learned it from the horse’ mouth, Elaine Summers. I followed with an exercise I learned from Fides Krucker in which you stick out your tongue as far as you can for a long time and very odd things go on with it. If I remember correctly, when I did this with her around 2000, she said there had been interesting results with this with brain injury patients. (I might have that wrong.) I did some simple vocal exercises which I wrote down from my Fides studies and sang a couple of ballads from the Joan Baez songbook (some strange teenage connection going on there). The work with both Fiona and Fides was done in the 6 years it took to prepare (and to raise the funds) to perform Song For A Blue Moon . I have not performed since then (2004) except for the Aung San Sui Kyi part at benefits and in David Fancy’s Social Justice and the Arts class at Brock. Oh! Not true – I performed at Banff a couple of years ago for the Walter Phillips Gallery anniversary and re-created History, Colour T.V. & You.

Then I started working with the actual piece. Last month Rose sent me MIDI versions of the music via Soundcloud. I am working right now on the first 2 stanzas, pretty much know the words by heart and am working on when to say them mostly by just following along with the audio draft Rose sent me. I listened to the music without the text once and then followed the score twice. I am not musically literate and my music reading skills are not much more than following notes going up or down but it’s surprising really, how much I am able to follow.

I am working to resist the urge to resent the fact that I am unable to spend the next 8 weeks focusing on this work because I have to earn a living. I am very, very happy to be working on this.

photos: Bethany Scholl

I showed Projecting Want on October 15, 2010 at the 5th annual James St. Night of Art presented by the St. Catharines and Area Arts Council. I founded the event and it is one of the legacies of my years in the trenches in cultural development in St. Catharines.

For some foolish reason I did not take my camera and last week picked up these images courtesy of the St. Catharines and Area Arts Council – no long shot, too bad. I had some nervousness about the quality of the projector after news that the best projector in town was not available and was thrilled with the outcome. Many thanks to the volunteers who helped with set-up. The projection surface was a 3 storey high brick exterior wall on the vacant lot that was once the site of the Russell Hotel. I shared the site with a young artist, Tracey van Oosten. It was beside the all-ages nightclub, L3, and when I arrived on site I appeared to be interrupting a drug deal.

Projecting Want is yet another iteration of Want and I really like to see the piece morph along in different expressions that engage audience in different ways. You can track its progress on this blog – it started as a participatory, performative installation on the street, carried out 3 times in different downtown locations, culminating in a street audio installation (severely compromised by available resources). Then I postered the text on downtown kiosks. I had hoped to mount a larger-scale version of postering but this did not (yet?) come to pass. Now the video projection.

I took the 90 recorded responses to the question, “What do you want?”, and entered the text in iMovie. Each faded in and out at varying durations, most 6″. I was interested to notice how different outdoor projection “time” is to computer screen “time” – the outdoor begged for a slightly more luxurious duration. I enjoyed playing with rhythm and duration while editing the piece which I mostly did on the train commuting from work.

I would like to find opportunities to continue this type of work; interacting with the public in public places about defining, personal content and playing it back to them in different media. I was pleased that at least a few people at James St. Night of Art remembered participating in 2009 and saw their own desire projected – I wonder if anyone’s desire had been met? (That’s actually the first time I have substituted the word “desire” for “want” and I have mixed feelings about its desireability, ha ha.) I liked that projecting the wants reflects the idea that all of our desires are projections; this continues the core of my interest in the question to begin with – which is that wanting is the basis of the human condition. To be alive as a human is to want, to desire, even if only for a next breath. Wanting is an expression of being alive and its conundrum is deepened in our consumerist society.

The video is based on a video installation I exhibited at Grimsby Public Art Gallery in November/December 2008. (The image on this blog is from that piece.) The three beautiful photos are by Isaac Applebaum. (Who would not be happy that I have uploaded jpegs but WordPress doesn’t allow tiffs.) Here is the text from the didactic panel of the installation:

 The waterfalls in Fall are Swayze Falls which is on a tributary of the Twelve Mile Creek, Rockway Falls on the Fifteen Mile Creek, Louth Falls on the Sixteen Mile Creek, Upper Balls Falls and Lower Balls Falls on the Twenty Mile Creek and Beamer Falls on the Forty Mile Creek.  These falls are publicly-owned either by the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority or Ontario Provincial Parks.

 In the video projection on the south wall, two minutes of footage of each falls is separated with a numeral identifying its creek. In the other video projection, footage from the first is edited in short clips based on the relevant number. The act of measurement by European settlers in Niagara that led to the naming of the creeks, and therefore our cultural geography, becomes the device for visually shaping the video.

 The sound of the installation is the sound of the south wall video as recorded on site. You will notice that the sound is not what you will hear on relaxation tapes and that the artist has not edited out the sounds of airplanes and voices. The sound is spatialized and moves around the gallery through eight speakers.

 Waterfalls are associated in the popular imagination both with elemental force and power as well as meditative tranquility – they have been harnessed for power for water wheels and hydroelectricity and served as calendar nature art. In Fall, the artist uses the sound and images of these waterfalls to ask questions about our relationship with nature.

 Elizabeth Chitty was born in Niagara, has lived most of her life here and is working from a deeply-felt sense of place and appreciation of the natural beauty of our region. The work has its origins in her love of the sheer emotional power of waterfalls, most of which she discovered – as you may have – while walking. Through the electronic media she uses and her artistic choices, her work is equally grounded in technology. Modernism approached nature and technology as opposing forces – “either/or” – and the environmental degradation we face is a product of that ideological construct. Fall is an expression of “both/and”, which is language of post-modernist discourse influenced by feminism, and which the artist believes is the only way forward in the decisions we must make about how we live on our planet.

 Elizabeth Chitty is an interdisciplinary artist who makes performances, installations and constructed photographs. Her outdoor photo and audio exhbition, Fly, was exhibited at Grimsby Public Art Gallery this fall and featured the image and sound of a red-tailed hawk. In October she exhibited photo-based work on sidewalks at the 3^rd annual James St. Night of Art presented by the St. Catharines and Area Arts Council and in August she performed at Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre as part of their anniversary exhibition, Bureau de Change. Her work is in the National Gallery of Canada’s touring exhibiton, Art Metropole: The Top 100, which makes a stop in Toronto at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) this November.

 The artist wishes to thank Darren Copeland for the spatialization and Charles St. Video for mobile equipment and post-production. Thanks also to Ross Turnbull, Matt Harley and many thanks to Grimsby Public Art Gallery. This exhibition was supported by an Exhibitions Assistance grant from the Ontario Arts Council.

 The exhibition was at the Royal Ontario Museum for one day, for the Greenbelt Foundation’s Friends of the Greenbelt  awards celebration, given to farmers including St. Catharines’ Whitty Farms. Presenters included  two ex-premiers and Sarah Harmer.  The sour note was that the ROM refused entry to Warren Quigley’s sculpture of wooden spheres (potential biological threat!) and Steve White’s metal sculpture was reported to not fit into the elevator (very hard to believe actually). The artist drove 5 hours to the opening and was understandably upset. Lunch was amazing deluxe locavore food and excellent Cave Springs and Henry of Pelham wine at the free bar. I do not know the names of the chefs. Drinking at lunch is not usually a good idea for me but I indulged nonetheless and survived to tell the tale. I enjoyed so much the experience of seeing a lot of people looking at my work.

At the Gallery 1313 opening. Photo courtesy Greenbelt Foundation.

I was delighted with the whole affair as I am increasingly leaning towards wanting to work with food security issues and the exhibition was a perfect combination of interests. I would love to leave arts management and be part of a team in Niagara in some kind of organization working with food and anti-poverty issues, a Foodshare Niagara type thing.

 On my way out and back to the office, I realized I could take a quick nip around the ROM for free. I was so happy to see the hundreds of children there on school trips. By coincidence the reception was on the same floor as the bird exhibit. I spent time there while researching for Part 4 of Song For A Blue Moon, probably in 2004. The ROM is a great place and I was happy to see my work there if only for one day.

 The exhibition has since travelled to Ajax and at the time of writing is in Hamilton. No Niagara venue could be found – the show was a pretty last minute affair for the Foundation. The Guardian had another outing in February as Soft Fruit Industry hung in the clients’ show at Toronto Image Works. Nice, but of course it means more when it’s in a curated show. Now, if only I could sell her! How to sell work without a dealer? The Guardian was always intended to hang in a public place like the Region of Niagara headquarters, for example.

P.S. – Stop the presses – the show is coming to St. Catharines after all.