MFA Thesis — Jacob Dundee Appleby Maddison

Glitsh

[[Glitsh|August 1972]] is [[presented|Work]] and [[written|Position]] in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People. This territory is covered by the “Treaties of Peace and Friendship” which Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) Peoples first signed with the British Crown in 1725. The treaties did not deal with surrender of lands and resources but in fact recognized Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) title and established the rules for what was to be an ongoing relationship between nations. My narratives span a number of complex territories and spaces I wish to acknowledge. In no particular order, these stories span: the traditional territory of the [[Kwanlin Dun First Nation and the Ta’an Kwach’an Council of the Yukon Territory|June 2002/2008/2014]]; [[the former Soviet Czech Republic|June 2007]], the Hul'qumi'num on Galiano Island; [[occupied Poland under Nazi Germany|February 1943]]; [[the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (TsleilWaututh), Kwantlen, Semiahmoo, Tsawwassen, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, and Qayqayt of greater Vancouver|Fall]]; unified Germany; [[the traditional territory of seven First Nations in northwest British Columbia|July 1999]]: [[Haida, Tsimshian, Nisga'a, Haisla, Gitxsan, Wet'suwet'en, and Tahltan|June 1998]]; [[the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Israel|May 2007]]; [[the traditional territory of the Wendat, the Anishnaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Métis, Huron and the Mississaugas of the Scugog, Hiawatga, and Alderville First Nation in and around Toronto|July 1995]]; and [[the Robinson-Huron Treaty territory, the traditional territory of the Atikameksheng Anishnaabeg in northern Ontario|November 1939]].

February, 1943 Chana Z__________ is marching along a narrow tree lined woods in Southern Poland. Her face is gaunt and skeletal. Her strong cheekbones are made more pronounced through starvation and illness. Her knees are bony, devoid of the muscle and tone she was known for; they are mere slivers of their former beauty. Still she walks passing fields of dirt and debris. Her arms are weak, her back ladened down with the few possessions still left to her name: scraps of Shabbat tablecloth; the base of a silver candlestick; a couple scraps of a Siddur, ripped from the spine and storied away deep inside her worn clothes. The air is frozen, it is early February 1943, and her short breaths hang in sparkling clouds of ice before her bulging tired blue eyes. Her curly hair, once full and thick, is tied in thinning whisps out of her eyes and tucked loosely into a scarf made from an old bedsheet. The road is torn by vehicle traffic with deep gouges in the thick mud, as it cuts straight as an arrow through the remains of small farms, along the perfectly flat steppes of southern Poland. She had been marching for two days, having left Lodz the previous Shabbat. They were heading south, passing Kielce after dark, heading towards Krakow. Chana remembered these roads from her childhood. She took wheat to market in the back of her grandfather Wolef’s farmyard cart. The smell of wheel grease and the deep caustic scent of wood stain mixed with the sweet smell of hay. Now she focuses on the old village outside Lodz, and of her summers spent in the country helping the family. Her father Gavriel would take her to Mniow each August to work on the farm before the harvest. She remembers begging to stay until the fall, to build a Sukkah from all the farmyard straw. On good years they would buy grapes to hang, and would braid garlic stocks together into long fronds. On starry nights they would lay after dinner looking up through the leaves towards the stars, which would glitter and move in the dense fall air. But her frozen feet bring her back to reality, as the ice cracks beneath her, and she stumbles and falls into a deep muddy puddle. Breaking through shards of ice, her ankle is trapped and twists. She hears her tibia crack under her meager weight -- the under nourished bone splintering as she falls. Before she can scream, a gruff hand, gloved in thick leather grabs her by the scraps of her collar, lifting her clean off her feet and [[pushing her forward|Anxiety]]. She tries. She stumbles and cries in pain. She can’t. The thousands of other marchers flow past her like the determined rivers of the [[Sandomierz Basin|Maps]]. There is yelling between officers. German. Incomprehensible and unrelenting. Lokshen putz she thinks - noodle dick - her father’s favourite insult. She is pulled once again by the back of her shirt, out of the line of marching bodies, towards a deep snow bank. She looks out through a row of trees, small pines lining the road, the peaks of which are heavy with snow, which sag towards her, opening a small gap through which a view of a snow covered field reveals itself. She is forced to her knees, but strains to keep an eye on the view. Across the field she notices a small farmhouse, with white washed walls and rosy red trim. The single story cottage opens onto a barn, the back of which houses a small stack of hay bales, steaming as they are caught in a long ray of sunshine. The pain in her leg reverberates up her spine. She can’t move. She watches the steam spiral off the hay, remembering her Time spent in the Sukkot with her grandfather, the sweetness of the horse manure and the chirp of birds preparing to migrate south. She drifts so deeply into the embrace of memory she doesn’t hear the [[shot|Darkness]] to the back of [[her head|Loss]]. Chana Z___________ was born in Lodz, Poland. She died in 1943 near Kielce, Poland. She married Hillel Scislowski on Unknown. Death Notes: Source Pages of Testimony Last Name Z___________ First Name CHANA Father's First Name GAVRIEL Mother's First Name FAJGA Permanent residence LODZ, POLAND Place during the war LODZ, POLAND Place of Death SHOT IN WOODS NEAR KIELCE, POLAND [[Date of Death 1943|Haunted]]

August, 1972 J is flying down a straight stretch of highway with the wind whistling through the split windshield of his 1947 Cadillac Series 62. His strong arm is dangling out the driver’s side window, his massive fingers, scarred and tanned, clutch the slow burning embers of a Marlboro cigarette. The black cadillac soaks up the road, undulating too and fro, up and down, with its gas shocks controlling its two tonne body over the cracked asphalt. It is noon on a high plane, and J and his partner roar past truck stop cafes in the August sunshine. Ravens heckle the cars which stream past neglected [[telephone poles|Monument]] which have sunken lazily into the soft shoulder. J’s beard is full, reaching down to the collar of his tattered plaid shirt, and his sleeves are rolled up high. Flicking his cigarette butt into the ashtray, he switches hands on the wheel, his left hand traces familiar patterns between his thumb and forefinger. The scarred leatherette of the steering wheel is peeling where his fingers rub; the center of the wheel is crowned with an ornate chrome molding. He relieves his right hand of responsibility so it can settle into the lap of his companion, whose bare legs are tucked up into his side on the spacious bench seat. The seat, black fading to brown, is cracking along it’s quilted edges, and is partially covered with a Navajo blanket bought along the highway. John takes his hands off the wheel to pull the sticky rubber gasketed quarter window open to reduce the incessant buffeting through his long loosely bunched hair. His lips never stop moving. He aimlessly turns the chrome knobs on the radio, scanning for Little Richard, The Band, Dylan, The Supremes or The Doors, taking a moment to sing along with each song before changing to the next station. His leather boots protrude from a pair of worn out jeans, the hem of which is rolled twice. His right foot buries itself in the carpet, pushing the cadillac’s tired v8 hard, as it flies towards the sun. J’s lover grins, smiling amorously across at his relaxed eyes. In his drawl – his consummate enthusiasm -- he is yammering on. He fantasizes about his next meal and the antique car he is coveting. “Holy dukes,” he says. He laughs with his head tilted back… [[Our mother is somewhere nearby doing a little tap dance to celebrate his arrival. He is back in his wheelchair. She kisses him gently on the forehead, warming all around her with her smile|Love]].

November 1939 William is sitting by the window. He is looking out over the frozen grounds outside. He notices a row of small saplings that are struggling to stay standing against the heavy hoarfrost that adorns their delicate branches. His eyes trace the long sloping lawn that leads down towards the edge of a thick woods. The branches of oak and elms reach like spidery arms from the darkness of the woods. Little mementos of his life sit on a solid oak table that is screwed into the wall of his room: an official seal, a copy of his law degree, and a picture of his youngest child -- one of the few things he [[holds dear|Love]]. A cold wind whistles through the thin window pane as the trees in the distance bend towards the forest floor, and the clean air, air so dry it cuts through his nostrils, washes away the bleach and starch of his room. [[William has been here over a year; a recovering writer, sent to a sanitorium in northern Ontario|Darkness]]. He was put away when he failed to defeat his need to write under the influence of hooch. He can’t remember why he wrote in the first place. The demons must have been exorcised by shock therapy and isolation. He is without motivation or concern. He is merely a frame of a man, sitting in a hard wooden chair, staring out the window, trying his hardest to remember what remembering felt like. His legs, even hidden by his grey slacks, are bony and underfed, and hang loosely down to the floor. His feet rest in large slippers and wool socks that cover his calves. His temples are devoid of fat and flesh, just the etching of veins and bone [[beneath his skin|Anxiety]]. His face is gaunt,and his eyes are tired and lifeless, as he stares into the woods, trying to [[remember why he was trying to remember what remembering felt like|Memory]].

June 2002/2008/2014 The ashes are caught in the wind high above the [[Yukon River|Maps]]. They are floating into the clouds, over a fertile valley, bathed in summer sunshine. Far below, the snaking heart of a mighty river carves lazy S bends in the steep gravel banks and sheer rock cliffs of the worn grey mountains. The sun reflects sharply off the surface of Marsh Lake, one of a few lakes that interrupt the river’s flow. J steadies himself against the magnitude of the view. He is perched on an exposed granite shelf high above the city of Whitehorse. He is forced to focus on his feet as they settle into the moss and lichen. He searches for purchase in between chunks of shale-like detritus, trying to find a solid footing. Looking down he notices rose hips, with prickly burrs which pierce his socks and rough up his ankles. Above his shoulder floats a grey whiskey jack, caught in the warm updraft, circling above his head, hoping for a snack. Its soft white underbelly ruffles silently in the breeze, its small wings make easy work of diving and climbing, spinning and playing effortlessly in the wind. It swoops down to explore a backpack nestled against the edge of a short rock shelf. It jumps along the zipper, looking for a way in. Ingress impossible, it hops into the air to circle about once more, like the ashes that are caught in the wind. He’s [[reminded|Memory]] of a summer drive when he was young, when the forest along the highway was engulfed in flames. The air was thick with acrid black smoke and a lingering particulate that turned the distant sun into a sickly yellow haze. They were driving north of town to set their canoes into the water. Flames jumped from treetop to treetop in the distance, racing with the wind, and fighting furiously against the onslaught of air-tankers, which were swooping down dropping white sheets of water from the air. The cabin of their van was filling with a light dusting of ash. Ashy -- smoky -- reminiscences of [[life|Haunted]] are being thrown sorrowfully into the wind by gentle hands behind crying eyes. The smell of peat moss, scotch and smoke fill the air, as the grey cloud floats off the mountain towards the valley floor.

July 1999 She’s sitting in small shack warmed by a small electric oven, lost in the aroma of cinnamon buns slowly baking. The stove is old with enamel edges that are flaking down to bare steal. She’s been there since dawn, waiting as the hours ticked by, hoping that passer buys and truck drivers would stop for gas and a snack. Sitting in a clearing on the corner of two forgotten highways, her shack is nothing more than a plywood box with a view. Moisture leaks in through the haphazardly stapled membrane covering the unfinished siding. The roof is partially shingled, but a fall wind storm has torn at its integrity. She’s listening to the steady drip of water, not rain but a mountain fog, condensing on a single pain window and running down the wall. The bare studs and loosely packed bubble gum pink insulation give the illusion of a dwelling, while the passing storm clouds and jagged peaks paint a more [[ominous|Anxiety]] picture out the window. She [[casts her mind back|Memory]] to some ravens she’d seen playing near the garbage bins in her youth. Back then, her mother and her worked the pumps together. She was supposed to be helping refill the windshield wash basins, but she’d wandered off to follow a family of ravens who were wandering off across the dirt lot. They hopped gleefully sideways and yammered incessantly in their distinctively playful clicks and caws. She followed them down to the bins bordering the forest, the large steel enclosures they used to keep the bears out of their trash. To her horror, and the ravens’ glee, someone had dumped a bag of garbage next to the bins during the night, and the murder of birds were whooping and hollering, sorting the best shiny bits and rancid meat to steal away. Their call rang in her ears. The joy and playfulness. The conversational tones and complex sounds. The skill with which they sorted and teased the trash apart. Her mother was livid: “Why didn’t you stop them? This is your mess to clean up!” Now she sits trapped in her [[daily routine|Time]], alone, waiting for someone to drive past or for the laminated plywood sheets to dissolve like cardboard revealed outside after a long winter.

June 2007 The railyard is swamped with copper coloured tailing ponds that are trapped between gravel embankments, the result of relentless erosion. Traces of wasted industry are everywhere, left to fester and rot. The earth is red, the mud a thick oxide clay, filled with copper, iron and carbon; puddles of stagnant water ooze with rainbows of spilt oil. The rails themselves are flaking and disintegrating in the moist air. There is a complex interleaving of raw steel rail -- [[a boundless maze|Maps]]. The sky is crisscrossed with entangled systems of power and motion; as many forgotten lines as functioning ones slice across the grey sky in chaos and disorder. Trains wait while cargo is loaded and unloaded, and passengers shuffle silently in and out, while pneumatic brakes hiss and worn doors creak open and closed. Alien soviet locomotives with bulbous bullheaded noses sit forgotten on dead end tracks. Rust flakes and floats on the breeze like discarded feathers. Ghosts shimmer along the surface of the ponds and evaporate into wisps of steam. Soviet ghosts, romantic eastern ghouls that make real communist literature and the wistful idealizing of the east block, but also the ghouls of the transported, displaced and murdered. [[Meanwhile|Time]], in another world nearby, a swan swims lazily towards the edge of a marble lined pond. With a slow reach of it’s crooked neck, it grabs a scrap of bread off the edge of a reflecting pool. The water is part of a park, which leads for miles down the center of a germanic town, lined with neatly planted trees which sway gently in the breeze. Groups of young men run in circles playing soccer on long evenly cut grass lawns, while cyclists glide smoothly down the paved paths that crisscross the highly designed space. Yet in the trainyard a young man, a teenager, sits at the window of a stopped passenger car, staring out the window with sullen eyes. His face shows the wear of travel, his hair matted and long, his beard unkempt and forgotten, and his clothes worn thin and unwashed. His mind has wandered from the view outside, to the ghosts of thin bodied Jews in pajama stripes, being marched in droves through the cattle gates and loading docks of these rail sites. His mind is on black and white photos seen as a child, of piles of clothing and goods stripped from his family and left to decay -- forgotten in transport. Now the blood red earth holds the traces of their journeys, not of their bodies, but of the cruel and deliberate efficiency of their [[passing|Yeti]]. With a violent shudder, a squeak and a tremendous thump the old train moves on, the bodies of the passengers being carried eastward, but the mind of the young boy [[lost somewhere between|Haunted]].

July 1995 A little boy is standing in a bakery, his tiny feet barely supporting his growing frame. He stares upward at a mechanized spiral conveyor that shoots towards the rafters three stories above his head. He teaters back, having to steady himself by placing his right leg back. He is studying the scaffold maze which acts as massive cooling rack. His eyes are wide and stinging in the steaming hot air. The entire world smells of yeast and the sweet and sour bubbles of proofing bread. Three large ovens churn incessantly beside him, transporting raw dough into a large stainless steel stove, before conveying them out the far end perfectly baked and ready to ride the long cooling racks. Overcome by the power of the machinery churning and grinding away, the boy stumbles, but his grandfather is there to softly steady him; “watch out” he says “kaneinahora, don’t hurt yourself”. He takes the boy’s hand and shows him the large mixing vats full of eggie Challah dough, and tells the boy to take a piece of dough -- something to play with. They share the same blue eyes and round faces. [[The zaidy|Love]] is large and strong, with speckled olive skin. He is draped in the lingering scent of cigar smoke and cologne. He’s wearing black slacks, with a crease down the centre, a black belt and black leather shoes. He has a polo shirt tucked loosely into his pants, an old ball cap on his head and a windbreaker loosely undun over his shoulders. He caringly steers the boy out of [[harm's|Loss]] way, away from the factory floor, and up the backstairs to the offices. Upstairs the boy sits patiently, surrounded by mahogany veneer walls and [[portraits|Haunted]] of meshugena old men staring unblinking down from austere portraits in gelted frames. He’s more nervous here than around the equipment -- the severity and darkness of the decore makes him uneasy -- along with the hugs and handshakes from strangers he’s somehow related to.

Fall, Undated A man is slowly leafing through a Sunday paper. His long bony fingers delicately part and fold the pages, playing origami above his body. He is bundled in a grey fleece sweater, long sweatpants, and wool socks tucked into softening brown leather birkenstock sandals. A torrential rain is assaulting the window next to him, rattling the glass in a narrow wooden frame -- berating the surface with an unrelenting din. There is a sweetness to the fall rain: full of pine needles and soft leaves, a scent which seeps through the poorly sealed window panes. The view out the window is obscured by the sheets of water and the wavy settling of the slow downward flow of glass. Somewhere nearby a record needle scratches down, settling into the groove of a dusty [[45|Slip]]. Slowly, rhythmically, a high hat begins to keep a smooth walking beat, and a keyboard fills the in-between spaces with a wandering melancholic melody. Afrobeat singers come in over both, filling the air with calls and response. The man continues to read, slowly, while stopping periodically to sip an espresso from a delicate white porcelain mug which he grips by his thumb and forefinger, pinching a tiny handle. As he folds the paper over, turning the pages, the paper seems to fade in size, shedding flakes of its grey newsprint skin, which float in spirals beneath his feet, to form a [[miasmic swirl between his toes|Darkness]]. Bitter roasted nut and chocolate notes spiral with the cutting breeze, mixing coffee with the freshness of the west coast cedar, fir and pine. The piano comes in stronger. More forceful, but with a nostalgic sadness. It plays call and response momentarily with the exuberance of the singers. Eventually the man folds that last page of the paper in on itself, folded and disintegrated down to the size of business card, revealing a small smudged halftone portrait. The face in the photograph is obscured, and fades into the cloudy darkness of the background. Underneath, there’s a short note, [[a six word memorial: “______ is dead, Cadillac for sale.”|Loss]] “Swing low, sweet Cadillac” “Coming for to carry me home” “Swing-in low, sweet Cadillac” “Coming for to carry me home” “I look to Jordan, and what do I see” “Coming for to carry me home” “Oh, an Eldorado, comin’ after me” “Coming for to carry me home”

May, 2007 J is in the passenger seat of a small, red, three cylinder hatchback winding along barren highway, having just passed a militarized checkpoint leading into Palestine. The air is dry and hot. Mounds of brown dirt, sculpted to hold the desert at bay are dotted with crooked speckles of vegetation that come steeply down tiered embankments towards the highway. The car is filled with the scents of smoked cigarettes, stale and ashy, and the lingering traces of leaking gasoline. J’s mouth fills with the chalky dryness of fine desert dust and the metallic taste of rust. The bare ridge of the surrounding hills are interrupted by half finished or partially bulldozed concrete houses, and widely spaced hexagonal [[panoptic guard towers|Monument]], which sit atop cylindrical cement bases. The ridges are desolate, displaced and uninhabited. The car strains to climb out of the valley as the highway winds between tank guarded outposts. The borders are patrolled by teenagers in green uniforms and leather boots, sporting American made rifles, painted in ominous matte black.Young women and men with strong youthful frames tucked into square shouldered uniforms, stand with serious eyes surveying the approaching traffic. The driver of their car is a man in his mid thirties, handsome in a goofy loveable way, with a shaved balding head, dumbo ears and a gap between his front teeth, in contrast to his square jaw, olive skin and athletic build. He his fidgeting with an unlit cigarette in his left hand while he drives casually with his right. J settles down into the worn fabric seat, nervously clutching his passport, as they accelerate past the armed sentries. J closes his eyes and retreats into a [[Memory]] of the night before. He had spent the evening smoking flavoured tobacco with some traders, listening to stories of their lives, as parents, sellers, teachers and friends. He casts his mind back to the smell of pineapple, apple and wet tobacco, the smell of roasting meat mixed with the smooth smoke from their shisha. Later that evening he found himself lying at dusk on a warm sandy beach, resting completely still in near darkness, as the call to prayer emanated from a nearby minaret. The silhouette of a towering mosque, built on the precipice of a breakwall, was outlined against the grey blue of the fading light. The music of prayer filled his chest with unexplained warmth, as the salty spray filled his nose and lungs, and the warm air held his body in an embrace. He felt so safe, the air so full of love, the world so calm. Pulling through a final checkpoint, they enter a small village, with palm tree lined streets that are crumbling into dusty earthen clay. The houses are low, tiled with ceramic shingles, and lined with small windows. The road winds around large turning circles planted with palm fronds and dried up water features, styled to look like roman courtyards mixed with Mexican Zocalos. Lines in the road are fading, as are the red, white and yellow markings along the sloped curb edges. The sidewalks are lined with ornate tubular steel barriers, bent into the shape of three foot cleat hooks, painted a sickly baby blue, and spaced every few feet. An occupiers oasis in Palestine; a sign post; [[a message|Slip]]. They duck down a curving side lane and park in a perpendicular stall in front of a single story double wide home, cast in white cement, with black iron window bars and a heavy wooden front door. The yard is rust coloured gravel interrupted by small palms and dark green shrubs with waxy leaves. Small metal air conditioning boxes protrude sporadically from various surfaces, whining slowly and dripping a steady stream of condensed moisture. A collection of antennas and satellite dishes sit collecting dust on the roof. Inside the house they are greeted by a sparsely furnished dwelling, with hardly anything on the walls other than small gold framed watercolours of similarly palm frond’ utopias. Then, from the upper corner of the kitchen comes a loud Squawk from a grey Parrot. “Fuh-Caw-ktah” it yelps down from its perch. The reason they’d driven all this way: to catch a parrot, for a friend’s mother in law, in a shtetl, part of an aggressive occupation, built on a hillside in Palestine.

***“Re-arrange whatever pieces come your way”*** //Positioning / Meanderings// //“In keeping with the bookish, iconoclastic side of Jewish tradition…”// (Young 140) I would like to start this collection of writing with two discrete thoughts. First is my position towards argument, and the second is on why this document exists. 1. I feel there is a demand within academia to assert a position and argue a truth or falsehood. I feel this is a perpetuation of hegemonic power structures. Instead of laying out a document that argues a success, failure or clear vantage point for my thesis show, I will present a personal collection of overlapping departure points, which within their flows, strata and networks, this work emerged. As Rebecca Solnit critiques of criticism: it has “ a desire to make certain what is uncertain, to know what is unknowable, to turn the flight across the sky into the [[roast upon the plate|Darkness]], to [[classify|Maps]] and [[ontain|Fall]].” (Solnit 119) Instead of confinement, I hope this support paper will reveal new conversations about the indeterminacy, anxiety, vulnerability and unknowability within my practice. The subject matter is personal, which is a political motivation for making it. This personal positioning is designed to not be true or false, but in flux, and is written in aphoristic burts that reveal a personal position towards discourse and theory. Like this support paper, the work takes the stance that making work about states of being, relationships, phenomena, memory and love are more important than work that centres around theory, aesthetic play and art historical joke making. 2. Besides being a mandated element of completing an MFA, this document intends to act as a dialectic that bounces between theory and observation, memory and play. The affective tugs and meta decisions within this work are better left experienced than explained. This paper will spoil the show. As such I hope this document will be its own journey, that can be forgotten or set aside when setting foot in the gallery. 3. This document is designed to be read in pieces, scanned, browsed and dashed through. There is no order to the pieces, no hierarchy, only what stands out to you, the reader, as important. Drift, bounce and cruise through this collection -- [[enjoy|Glitsh]]. 4. “I can see, though, that I’m having a little of the usual trouble entailed in trying to make a very convenient generalization stay still and docile long enough to support a wild specific premise” (Salinger 141)

***The Work in Situ *** //Actualities / Didactics// //White walls that undulate through and space. // 1. At its most reducible form, [[Glitsh]] is an installation that attempts to redefine the Anna Leonowens Gallery as an immersive space that looks outwards through its own walls into new temporal spatialities. (See Appendix B) 2. The installation represents a covering and veiling of the hollowed white space of the gallery, tearing holes in the walls to create windows to other worlds. The site-responsivity, in design, proportion and technical constraint, are a negotiation and intervention into the architecture and programmed use of the gallery. The building is used as the framing device that holds the image space in tension between solidity and ephemerality. 3. Consisting of sixty-eight, seventy-two by thirty-six inch posters, wrapping the circumference of the gallery, I attempt to create a panoptic viewing space that reaches outwards from the centre of the gallery to spaces in Europe, the Middle East and Canada. 4. The all encompassing space is woven together with projected narrative traces that interlace with the image surface to provide undulating and tidal contexts that eb and flow with chance, to paint evolving understandings of [[place|Maps]], [[Memory]] and [[Time]] . 5. The stories lay out an interconnected archipelago of memories, moments and spaces that are floating at sea, approachable from any angle, and always appear on the horizon as new.

***Flows of Vaporous Fear*** //Pharmakon / Anxiety// //The photograph acts as the departed: as a remedy, a poison and a scapegoat. It floats between -- taking the viewer up and down, pulling them apart and reassembling their narratives through Time and space.// 1. When I view a photograph I am offered hope and gloom; a combination of death and desire, that act together. When I am made to think of the past, I lose hope. When I feel the past, I gain a moment of hope. 2. “What dazzles us, what wounds us, when we look at a photograph is a marginal and unexpected detail -- a kind of emanation of the unconscious within the body or the image -- which is excluded from the intentionality of the photographer or photographed subject or object.” [[(Cadava 22)|Bibliography]] 3. The viewing experience and presentation of [[Glitsh]] remains full of indeterminacies and unknowingness. It is vague as to what the viewer will see, offering a multitude of entry points, points of interest, profane illuminations -- within which the viewer might alternate. The image doesn’t have a reducible focal point. As such, each viewer brings to the image a difference of importance. This is what Barthes refers to as the punctum: the moment which captures the most attention and desire from the viewer. The punctum isn’t describing a central point, say the face in a traditional portrait. Instead the punctum is the gem that each viewer gets hung up on: a stray eyebrow hair; the laziness of one eye; a detail in the background. It is never directly pointed to, but is instead a fluid moment. I liken the punctum to being the Schrodinger's cat of visual interest; until x is found and pointed to, then all the points are potentially central. The image I’ve assembled is designed to be without pre-composed focal points, instead allowing a viewer to pass through the space searching for their own interest. By intentionally removing the focal point, I hope to create both an anxiety in the act of not knowing, and a personal relief in finding moments of eerie familiarity. 4. I feel [[nostalgia|June 1998]] has taken a bad rap within art making practices, as an often derided emotionally vulnerable condition that seems cornered by its association with weakness and dreaming. The nostalgia that is oft criticized in art making is the same as that which was treated as a disorder, opposed to a critical mode of personal reconciliation. The truth of the term might be far more complex. The definition put forward by Svetlana Boym in their book The Future of Nostalgia offers a wonderfully concise introduction: “Nostalgia (from the nostos return home, and algia longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a senTiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images -- of a home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life.” [[(Boym XIII)|Bibliography]] The diversity of this definition and the boundaries within which nostalgia operates begins to open up to what I would term a “critical nostalgia”, that attempts to marry a horror, a loss and a romance together, in order to paint a sense of identity and being. As a critical mode it becomes a lens through which we can look upon our present condition, our collective intergenerational and inherited trauma, and step a distance away from both to reflect on the conditions of contemporary life. Unlike the wistful and naive looking into the past, a critical nostalgia asks the questions: why can’t I return? And to where would I even go? It asks in order to draw those histories forward, painting a more complex and interleaved understanding of being: “... the mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility, is at the very core of the modern condition.” (Boym XVI) I feel that critical nostalgia isn’t a desire for a [[Time]] in the past. For many us, so much has improved. This nostalgia is instead a longing for a lost love, someone [[taken too soon|Loss]]. It is an object of want and desire, an objet petit-a, completely outside of our grasp. It is a want for affection, community or people that have disappeared, and of a place that can no longer house and nurture. Because of this the nostalgia becomes a complexly woven cathexis for the nostalgic, who is constantly tracing their fantasies sideways through Time to imagined border spaces full of fantasmic [[ghouls|Busted]] that haunt their psyche. 5. “... but Time, he went on, is an unreliable way of gauging these things, indeed it is nothing but a disquiet of the soul, there is neither a past or a future. At least, not for me. The fragmentary scenes that haunt my memories are obsessive in character.” ([[Sebald Emigrants 181|Bibliography]] )

***As Haunted I Come*** //Phantasmagoria / Body// //The viewer cannot approach a work without hauntings of past colliding with the ghouls of the present, and the desires of future unknown. “When I got out of the train in Lovosice after about an hour, I felt as if I had been travelling for weeks, going further and further east and further and further back in Time.”// [[(Sebald Austerlitz 262)|Bibliography]] 1. The photograph: “certifies that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing” [[(Barthes Camera Lucida 78-79)|Bibliography]] 2. My creative process developed to reconcile two oppositional needs. First it was to come to terms with an existential horror of all that can’t be known. I was hunting for people I could never touch, for places I would never return, and memories filled with long stretches of deep blank void. This absence is what is known as a white horror, a fear of all the things we can never know. This has slowly become replaced with a [[red horror|Darkness]], an illustrative and tangible (often [[bloody|February 1943]] and detailed) exploration of the macabre. Facing concrete horrors enables us to ground violence in a familiar form: that of the body. I have always had the stomach for looking at frightful images, for example of the concentration camps in which my ancestors died. In horrific images, there is an opportunity to make physical a loss so profound and widespread as to be unimaginable; the images of bodies and trauma make concrete the abstract loss of a nation, peoples and history in Europe. Losses like these hang in the air, sink into the soil, and carry on through generations. They linger. They tear. They manifest in what gets talked about and shared, and what gets stowed away out of fear. They betray themselves in landscapes as fertilized fields, neatly planted trees and demolished buildings. There is more ambiguity for me in [[Canada|July 1999]]. I started to trace out parallel lines of displacement and absence: as a child we would drive around [[Northern British Columbia|June 1998]], travelling to and from Whitehorse, Yukon. On these journeys we would drive through haunted empty stretches, with ruins of community, abandoned and worn, juxtaposed against river valleys full of mighty torrents, slicing through sublime backdrops. These ghostly spaces drifted into the tight weaving of my narrative history. When faced with these haunted spaces I was stunned. Quieted. Not as a subject standing in mountain glory, but as nothing, witnessing a loss that slowly percolates out of the damp earth. I feel a tension between being a settler, whose ancestors lives were saved by coming here, but at the potential cost of others; a haunting that haunts. 3. I was inspired by a quote from Susan Buck-Morss’ book The Dialectics of Seeing: “[c]osmic proportions, monumental solidarity, and panoramic perspectives were [are] the characteristics of the new urban phantasmagoria.” (Buck-Morss 92) This quote somewhat defined the [[form of the project|Work]]: I want to create something that places the viewer in this phantasmagoria of cosmic and panoramic proportion. I use the word phantasmagoria to mean both a dreamlike image scape and the form of horror theatre that grew in popularity through the 18th and 19th century. Playing with the spectacles of light, movement and scale, I hope to create an immersive space in which light/dark, love/loss, memory/Time can all play together, not as oppositions, but as one. 4. Installation as a strategy comes to me from a phenomenological and experiential place, rather than an art theoretical one. I remember standing amongst a Richard Serra installation at the Seattle Sculpture Park, allowing myself to become swallowed by the work. I became acutely aware of my position within the work, as part of it, as I was forced to negotiate and discover from within the field of the work, not as someone standing away from it. In this way I was forced to participate, and it is this participation and negotiation that inspires me. Large scale images increase the need to move our bodies, to scan the image - left to right - up and down - to move along its frame. I hope the viewer is reminded of their body, and of the implicated relationship their form has with the images on the wall. They move with the flow of the image, approach closer to attempt to find details or resolution, and recede to pull in a larger scope. “By shifting back and forth, we locate the right viewing position before a painting in the gallery, where the canvas exhibits simultaneously its detail and overall design, its mood and its representational effect. From the wrong distance we see not the lighting within the scene depicted, but the lighting of the gallery under which the colors and shapes are smears of clay on the canvas.” (Lingis 50) With the scale of my image space, this movement will be a constant act of compromise and negotiation with the work. I hope this grounds the viewer’s relationship, forcing the experience to exist from the contact point of their senses with the floor (through feet, seat etc), up through their twisting, searching and moving bodies, through the scanning of their eyes, and onto and through the photographic landscape. As Alphonso Lingis puts it: “There is in our body an immanent knowledge of how to center, how to position itself, how to take hold of things such that they are given and manifest in their intersensorial essence” (Lingis 58) . The goal of pushing the scale of the images is to draw attention to the need to interact and to this process of centering, shifting and flowing through the space. The quality of the image passes in and out of sharpness, asking the viewer to search and to discern details for themselves. It will take work to make meaning in the softness and the fuzz. By implicating our [[bodies|Anxiety]] in the process of viewing I hope to implicate the complexities, unknowns and anxieties within our own body, in that of the photographic media. As Cadava and Cortés-Rocca note in their paper Notes on Love and Photography: “...the photograph always appears as a form of haunting which, evoking a material trace of the past, condenses, among so many other things, the relation between the past and the present, the dead and living, and destruction and survival.” (Cadava 17) In this process, the body of the viewer will be positioned between these oppositions: living and dead, lost and found, corporeal and incorporeal. They will need to act a part in the theatrical display and narrative space. I hope the image, wrapping around the space, will create an immersive zone, that swallows the body into its womb. 5. I feel that to be Jewish in Canada is to be a ghost. Stuck between worlds; seen but not seen; privileged and derided; a negotiation between self-outing and fear. Like many demographics that ‘pass’ within greater hegemonic structures, standing up to hate makes myself vulnerable and exposed. It isn’t until moments of confrontation that I am forced to make the decision to reveal my origins. I was born in Toronto, which had a rash of anti-semitic riots in the 1930’s; I [[grew up in Vancouver|Memory]], where property in West Vancouver wasn’t allowed to be owned by Jews or people of colour; and I’m finishing my MFA in Halifax, where resorts and golf clubs hung exclusionary signs that proclaimed "No Jews or Dogs Allowed" or "Christians Only!" Now I haunt about, waiting to [[spook|Spook]] those filled with anti-semitism. I am also inhabited by Jewish ghosts. Much of our [[history|Time]] remains undiscussed and unclear; the pain of hate, persecution and loss force many to forget and push away their pasts. In my family I knew only sketches of why, when and how my ancestors left Poland. So now I weave what I know with what I can’t know, writing their stories. 6. “When I see them now they are not sepia, still, losing their edges to the light of a future afternoon, caught midway between was and must be. For me they are real. Sharply in focus and clicking.” [[(Morrison 226)|Bibliography]]

***Time is a matter of Velocity and Position*** //Time / Slowness// //“When you sit with a nice for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”// -quote attributed to Einstein 1. This is a work about Time. In a sense it is about those lovely mornings that pass by, with a coffee or tea, sat by a window watching the birds bouncing along a powerline. Moments when the world glows in the sun, collapses in during a rain, and trembles with desire on a windy day. This work is about afternoons spent gently swinging in a hammock, a heavy book open to its final pages, with the thrill and excitement of a story coming to its end. Or those moments of sublime calm sat on freshly cut grass, a warm wind blowing through your fingertips, and [[the sweet smells of spring filling your nostrils|Memory]]. It is about taking Time: the only commodity any of us really own; that thing which we can’t purchase; that which will eventually run out; [[which slides past|Anxiety]], until we’re surprised to find, [[we have none left|Loss]]. This work is about taking enough Time to understand, to imagine and to breath in a work that doesn’t unfold in a single glance, but takes effort, curiosity and patience. It is a slow walk, without a final destination, or a clear start, towards a goal that may not exist. 2. I feel taking Time is a privileged act. It takes those moments of bourgeoisie security wherein there is no demand, no deadline, and no place to be. Socrates may not have wandered about thinking wildly (lustfully) had he worked two jobs -- had they been of colour or a woman (yet there is often a Diotima hiding out of sight). So making a case for enjoying, even luxuriating in the meandering pace of slow Time is a problematic want. It oozes a privilege I can’t hide. But I can’t shake the feeling that all we have is our bodies and an hourglass of indeterminate size and shape. We live under this [[Sword of Damocles|Darkness]] that remains invisible and unquantifiable. Faced with that truth I want to learn to slow down, to remember and imagine, and to savour the ceaseless dripping away of Time. In this mode I hope to advocate for what Foucault might describe as a ‘care of the self’: a knowing oneself through meditative self-reflection, discussion, slowness, care and thought. A meandering, meditative and circular practice, that takes Time and deliberation. 3. “When a woman is young she [[writes|November 1939]] because it seems to her she has discovered a new almighty truth which she must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, she begins to doubt her truths: and then she writes to convince herself. A few more years go by, and she knows she was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince herself. Nevertheless she continues to write, because she is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a "superfluous" person is so horrible.” (Part II, 19 Lev Shestov, The Apotheosis of Groundlessness, 1905) [[(Regendered)|Bibliography]] 4. [[Memory]] is a displacement in Time. On the one hand Time is fairly simple to talk about: it ticks by, we see it on clocks, a second is followed by another, to eventually form a minute and so forth. What is harder to articulate is perspectival notions of Time. From my present perspective, I can describe things as happening before or after, or will happen. Where things get more confused are in notions of memory and experiential storytelling. When I remember, I am facing a distance that I perceive, but the act of remembering is present to mind. So the act of remembering is contingent on my surroundings: the way my body moves, feels and absorbs information around it, which all affect the way memories fall to mind. As I remember, I feel a temporal shift, where what I would describe as past is experienced as present. A similar process is intended for the viewer, where a story which passes from present to past, even being defined by a past date, is drawn together in present experience. This asks the viewer to weave their experiences of the space, light, texture, understanding and text, with their own experience, body image and [[life experience|Haunted]]. “The past, therefore, is not the past, nor the future future. It exists only when a subjectivity is there to disrupt the plenitude of being in itself…” [[(Ponty 489)|Bibliography]] 5. The narrative voice is rooted in a present tense, demanding a nowness, a present placement within the unfolding events. The memories that are revealed by the characters are responses to their present condition acting on the perceptual experiences of their past, being relayed to the reader in their present place. In this way there is an attempt to deconstruct the temporal boundaries that keep past, memory and future from mixing like milk poured into a hot coffee. The narratives attempt to confuse these expected Timelines, by making the case for the perceptual immediacy of memory as a way of mediating the present. 6. This work takes Time: Time to watch; Time to read; Time to explore; Time to understand; Time to think; Time to look twice; Time to wait.

***The World Thunderstruck *** *Disreality / Loss* // “SenTiment of absence and withdrawal of reality experienced by the displaced subject, confronting the world.” “...as [they] awoke one morning from uneasy dreams [they] found themselves transformed into a gigantic insect.” Barthes x Kafka // 1. The room is completely dark, save for a single wax candle burning solemnly on a cutting board at the edge of a counter. The power is out, and there’s nothing to do but watch the dancing flame cast acrid [[black|Darkness]] smoke in spiralling columns into the air, filling the room with sulfurous [[Memory]]. 2. In [[Jewish|February 1943]] tradition we mark a death by stepping outside the constraints of daily life: i. We give ourselves over to being mourners through a tradition called Sitting Shiva. When a relative dies, we are asked to take a week off, to stay in the house of the deceased and lament, remember, and be-with grief. Traditionally, close friends and relatives will visit, bring food and check on the mourners. In our modified traditions, we also spread boxes of old photographs out across a table, and use the week to journey in and out of temporalities, living and dying through the [[photographs|Haunted]]. ii. Another tradition is to leave a stone on the gravestone of the deceased. Each Time you pass the spot, you leave a little reminder of your passing, and build an image to all the passing moments of remembrance. The site becomes piled with smooth stones and artifacts, each selected by loved ones and those who are trying to remember, and capture their love -- marking a wound in their being. They are photographs, as they mark a death, a Time and a place, and leave an altered image, quite literally developing over [[Time]]. iii. There is also a prayer that is recited in honour of those who have passed away, by those who are mourning. It is called the Mourner's Kaddish. It is recited daily for 30 days, for 11 months in the case of a parent, and on the anniversary of a death. It is a rhythmic, poetic and somber prayer, and even without an understanding of Hebrew, the voices of a wounded and haunted monotone chorus shake the soul. As I think and read more about affect and the unheimlech, I am struck by the use of music as a point of departure. For me, these moments of painful chorus feel universally moving in their chest splitting darkness, and offer the aesthetic pretense for my future work. I hope to find a way to share stories that open uncanny chorusing wounds and fill them with stories of love and memory. [[(Barthes, Thacker, Fischer)|Bibliography]] 3. Our relationship to photographic traces is a relationship to death and loss. What was once is no longer; what was captured has turned to dust. Photographs are just a trace of a fraction of a moment in Time that is receding into the past, with the object of the past receding again into the future; it deranges Time all together (Cadava). Since the subject of the photograph continues to live, age and die outside the photographic frame, the image “inhabits the present like a ghost” (Camera Lucida 9), haunting and creating an ambiguity in the fabric of Time and space.

***The Uncertainty of Signs*** //Storytelling / Darkness// //The clock nudged thirty seconds closer to the end of Time; this is the moment for humanity to pour forth. // 1. “... telling stories was as much a torment as an attempt at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself.” [[(Sebald 100)|Bibliography]] 2. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an agency that monitors nuclear proliferation, environmental catastrophe and which operates the Doomsday Clock, pushed the needle 30 seconds closer to the end of human existence. With each move of the needle, the scientists behind the clock release a statement as to why the move is necessary. This past January they nudged the needle to 11:58 and stated: “In 2017, we saw reckless language in the nuclear realm heat up already dangerous situations and re-learned that minimizing evidence-based assessments regarding climate and other global challenges does not lead to better public policies.” -- Rachel Bronson, PhD 3. I mention that anecdote because I write to [[face fear|Fall]], darkness and existential dread. I feel storytelling to be a liberatory practice. For me there is a catharsis and neurotic need to write, to tell stories, and to think about the anxieties and grief of living. I write because I feel I have a duty to tell stories, and to fill a void of my own creating. I continue due to the power of parrhesia. Michel Foucault, in his book Fearless Speech, defined parrhesia as a want to speak a personal truth, despite there being risks in doing so. Before being co-opted by Foucault, parrhesia was an ancient Greek word that was used by Rabbinical scholars to describe discourse that was in the public commons. To Foucault: “...parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty.”[[(19)|Bibliography]] My compulsion to write is driven by the need to tell personal truths that will confront the doom and pessimism, to create work that is from my body and experience, and speaks outward from that place to begin to tackle complex social, environmental and human issues. I’ve used it as a tool to overcome [[Anxiety]], to find purpose, to come to terms with trauma, and imagine a world worth living for, and to tell these findings forward. My personal narratives become an act of speculative realism, a sort of quasi science fiction of the real. I tell stories of my past, exaggerated by my political understandings and confused histories. They are reimagined through the veils of nostalgia, romance and longing, and twisted through the grief and pain of reliving them. As such they become simulacra of the past, a quasi-rational semi-real memory exercise that becomes as much future, present and past. 4. “To light a candle is to cast a shadow.” Ursula K. Le Guin A Wizard of Earthsea “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.” -Virginia Woolf I owe much of my coming to terms with darkness to Rebecca Solnit, who’s incredibly precise, well researched explorations paint lyrical new understandings of community, love and growth (in darkness). They were the first author to get me thinking: there would be no starry nights without darkness; it is the “same night in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted, aroused, impregnated, possessed, released, renewed” (Solnit 101). Darkness is beautiful, murky, unknowable and full of love, lust growth and change. This thinking has helped me to trust my vulnerabilities and anxieties, and to indulge moments of unknown as sublime, complex, textured and alluring. Darkness appears to me as a queer space, outside of expectation, full of possibility and life. This is a thank you note -- a thank you for giving me a permission to write. 5. Or I may merely be a brooder, the “pre-eminent melancholy subject, who dwells on fragments, clouded by a tormented sense of occluded significance dwelling in insignificant things”. [[(Leslie 117)|Bibliography]]

***A Slip in the Fabric of Time*** //[[Glitsh]] / [[Glitch|Position]] // //It started with a spike, a quick pull of the rug from under the feet of an engineer, who noticed an unresolved instability in a circuit. The glitch. // 1. The world outside is a sheet of ice. Rain over compacted snow has left the sidewalk an undulating mess. The sun sparkles off the polished edges, twinkling in the crystalized moisture stuck windshields. Children, on their way to school, flail their arms to catch themselves -- scared to slip, to slide, to fall away. 2. [[Glitsh]] is Yiddish. It refers to a slip, a slide, or a nosedive -- something on the order of a minor catastrophe. The word glitch has debated origins: from the german glitschen (to slide/slither) or the yiddish gletshn (to slip or skid). Without getting too diachronic, it evolved to mean an unexpected interference or aberration in a digital memory set. The first contemporary use was to describe unexpected current spikes in a circuit. For this work I’ve used the simplified phonetic spelling glitsh. The glitsh is the force that pushes against our personal narratives causing things to slide out of clarity. It is the wound, the tear, the melting and disappearances that haunt our present memory, and press against our misremembering to cause new truths. The very essence of a glitsh is the jogging of [[reality|Darkness]]. 3. “Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-Time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.” -Donna Harraway 4. I have chosen to project asynchronous narratives on various walls of the gallery, in a running crawl, that will only offer a narrow window into the stories. They are shown in fragments projected through the images, allowing only short ephemeral glimpses into the narrative world. Due to this disintegration, the viewer will need to fill gaps with their own narrative voice. This aims to discover within the viewer their own loss or desire, what might be described as the objet petit a. The “objet petit a is the object of desire that we seek in the other” -- an internal other that is desired and unattainable (Evans). The segmentation of the projected narratives attempts to paint pictures of things, Times and places that are open to interpretation and surreal new meaning, playing on the viewer’s diverse wants and [[experience|Anxiety]]. I have coded the texts to generate in a random sequence, so that any viewer, on any given day will be treated to a unique combination of narratives in progress. As Derrida writes in the opening to Psyche: “[a]n invention always presupposes some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract, it inserts disorder into the ordering of things…” (1 Derrida). I hope to break the order and sense that is assumed to be at the heart of narrative writing. By building this system of transmission, projection and distortion, I have created an intersection ripe for narrative collision. The real work, the desired work, is in “the mind’s movement, not the thing in itself that is necessarily the subject of the poem”. (Schwenger 108) I hope through these little textual moments the viewer becomes aware of their search for a place, a [[Time]], a scene or a memory of their own, which will fold into the work done mining my own histories and imagined spaces. 5. The Street View system confronts a series of noise and distortion inducing variables in the process of creating a panoramic alternate reality. i. The first is the distortion caused by Google’s camera arrays, which are mounted to a moving vehicle. These often fight with the distortions of a rolling shutter. This is the scanning motion these cameras use to capture a scene, not as an open/close shutter, but instead a linear scan. This means that on a moving vehicle, objects in motion can be compressed or elongated, or even sliced, depending on their velocity and direction. ii. . The array of cameras relies on a series of small wide angle lenses, creating an almost spherical set of images. Due to the limitations in camera technology, there are lens distortion errors that force the seams of the images to meet at odd angles. iii. These optical errors than get smoothed somewhat by the image building algorithms, but even these force decisions as to how the data collected is processed, prioritized and stitched into place. The algorithms fight to blur sensitive information out of the scenes all together such as identifying features on pedestrians, license plates etc. If the geographic site is the true image, than this first point of contact introduces unpredictable points of noise and disruption. Noise, as a point of interfering data and process, becomes amplified as the images are handled. They are saved first from a desktop as a screen capture: a low resolution image. They are then stitched together into a new panorama, a process which subjects the collected images to the human noise of aesthetic and practical decision making. In this phase, like with the algorithmic stitching, the images lose and gain information, as images that aren’t meant to overlap are forced into shape. Then finally these low resolution images are exported and printed into banners, using relatively low resolution plotter printers, printing what was once a colour image, into low fidelity black ink on bond paper. Through this process of degradation the images open up to interpretation. No longer are they merely pointing to the physical space from which the images were taken, but instead they are opening up further zones of mis-interpretation, mystery and unknown. “... a politicized viewer will be able to search a static image of the city for the detail that undoes the seams of an illusory reality.” [[(MacFarlane 26)|Bibliography]] 6. As a simulacra of evidence gathering and [[geo-spatial documentation|Maps]], these interfered upon images offer many zones of unknowability, in what otherwise feels like a faithful reproduction of a site and space through Google maps. Eyal Weizman, the central figure behind the group Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths London, has written extensively about the limits, both designed and technological, of image capture systems. Weizman argues they intentionally and unintentionally hide or exclude important evidence. In their examples, evidence of violence, atrocity and pain becomes hidden at the very limits of what aerial photography and satellite mapping allow us to see (in their case details of gas chambers or drone strike hits that are lost within the pixel size or silver particle size of a given image); he refers to this as “violence at the threshold of detectability”. Satellite images are purposefully degraded, therefore “the pixel resolution is not only a technical product of optics and data storage capacity, but a “modular” designed according to the dimensions of the human body”. (Weizman) This modular form is designed to hide representations of the human form much like the blurring of people in google street view it takes away the evidence of lives lived in a specific place. This systematic erasure then has the possibility to hide the trauma, violence and narratives of the people captured on camera, leaving the question: [[what happened|Existential]]? 7. “...is not every square inch of our cities the [[scene of a crime|May 2007]]? Every passer-by a culprit? Is it not the task of the photographer -- descendant of the augurs and haruspices -- to reveal guilt and point out the guilty is his pictures?” (Walter Benjamin - Little History of Photography) Walter Benjamin is asking the photographer to take responsibility, a duty to know the power of their medium. What happens then when an algorithm determines the guilt, innocence and truth in a photographic landscape? As soothsaying photographers have we lost our opportunity to intervene?

***Love Letter to the Lacerations in [[Time]]*** //Tenderness / Nuance// [[March 26|Loss]], 2018 Dear ___________, 1. I love you. I adore you. You’re that little something that emerges from the dust to tear me, to surprise and haunt me. You’re that unknown space that rips open, like a rift in the cottony fabric of space and Time, between oppositional poles, to reform my doxa, to make me think anew. You’re that third meaning to the world I’ve always been longing for, even when you [[rip me down|Darkness]] to make me see again. 2. For you I drift -- I slide sideways -- always searching. I see past solid surfaces, through walls put up by Time and space. I allow the world to dissolve into permeable membranes, where my thought, my love, my lust and desire can penetrate beyond the confines of the expected, the performed and status quo, into the rich miasma of everyday life. I cruise, constantly waiting to find you, to find exactly what you are: a nuance; a footnote; [[a slice of perfection|August 1972]]. 3. When we first met you scared me. Your complex ways of weaving and picking apart made the world feel alien. You pointed, you prodded, you took your Time. But “such is love’s wound: a radical chasm (at the [[“roots”|Memory]] of being), which cannot be closed, and out of which the subject drains, constituting herself as a subject in this very draining”. 4. You made me see future as past and past as present. You confused my linear fabric, and queered my sense of [[being|Anxiety]]. You aren’t really gone. 5. [[But you make me look twice before I cross the street|Haunted]]. Forever Indebted, J

***A Sensitivity to Spaces and Memories*** //Memory / Rhyzomes // //“...she can’t hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries… La Mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and towards a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes” Gloria Anzaldúa - “La Conciencia de la mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness” - Borderlands/La Frontera// [[(101)|Bibliography]] 1. The work of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Soja’s Thirdspace mark nebulous and interleafing geographic zones. These theoretical, poetic and re-imaginative looks at urban and social spaces allow for complexity and overlap to define what are otherwise binary [[spaces|Maps]]. For example they define spaces as no longer rich vs poor, but rich/poor/vibrant/culturally rich/changing/flowing as an interconnected potentiality. My intention with this work is to weave these complexities into an imagined space, where past [[traumas|Haunted]] meet present [[fears|Anxiety]], where hope and beauty are folded into images of loss, were the histories in landscapes retain their embedded social history, without having to be defined. Instead I hope the critique of spatial politics becomes fluid, as the stories and spaces fold on each other in new ways. 2. I feel that each of us is a nodal point in a network of memories. In this way no single memory exists in isolation. Instead, our experiences and knowledges overlap as they interact. Thus a story I tell is only partly in my mouth and mind, and partly in that of others, waiting to be acted on, changed, distorted and passed along to the next. We are all just networks of matter in flux. We flow in and out of existence. Our carbon atoms will be broken apart, shared and reabsorbed by others; the air we breathe is shared between us, entering each other's lungs and sharing in the same medium; we erode into space dust and nothingness only to be pulled together into new matter and new life. Sharing stories, telling stories, and creating shared experience is laying the roots for a network of interwoven knowledges, epistemologies, about how we live and how we experience being. As Timothy Morton puts it: “beings exist precisely because they are nothing but relationships, deep down -- for the [[Love]] of matter”. [[(277)|Bibliography]] 3. >For the google map voyeur, peeping through the digital keyhole of Google Maps, wandering the streets of far away towns looking for details and mystery, “the city scape neatly splits for [her] into its dialectical poles: it opens up to [her] as a landscape, even as it closes around [her] as a room.” [[(Benjamin Arcades Project, 880/MacFarlane 23)|Bibliography]] 4. Walking is a huge part of my practice. It offers a space in which my body is active and tracing familiar neural pathways, firing accustomed muscles in rhythmic order. This subconscious neural activity stimulates my ability to draw out memory through my body. The shifting image space, the air temperature, the feeling of soreness in my bones or spring in my step, all work to create a new interaction with even the most well walked spaces or often pondered memories. I expanded my walking practice to include other specialities by visiting distant and lost places through Google Maps. This journey would follow a fluid, Situationist International derived methodology. Inspired by a remembered anecdote, a shred of memory, or a recent walk, I would hunt out spaces on the other side of the globe, and start a digital walk along intuitive routes. I would cross roads, duck down alleyways, and wander the lengths of long highways, searching for the little moments of familiarity that made my senses pang and tingle. The [[temporal|Time]] and spatial journey of Google maps is confusing in relation to a bodily experience. The view tends to remain fairly faithful to a standing human: mounted around six feet off the ground, the camera isn't overly tall, nor the view uncannily fish eyed. The strangeness comes from our ability to move the camera through spaces we know to be distant, using not our neck, head and eyes to look around, but our hands to lazily maneuver a mouse about our desks. But even in this experience our body is implicated as a passenger, someone seated and along for a ride, through different spatial and temporal zones, in search of something that triggers in our bodies a curiosity or familiarity, a fear or desire, that we are hunting for. 5. “Experience discloses beneath objective space, in which the body eventually finds its place, a primitive spatiality of which experience is merely the outer covering and which merges with the body’s very being. To be a body, is to be tied to a certain world, as we have seen; our body is not primarily in [[space|Fall]], but is of it.” [[(Ponty 171)|Bibliography]] 6. My mother wanted me to be a [[Rabbi|Monument]]. I don’t remember it being a [[religious calling|May 2007]], but a philosophical and caretaking one. She thinks I’m wise; she also thinks I’m cute. But this reminds me of an old story that goes a little something like this. There’s a farmer who is living in a little shtetl in a far off land. He goes to his Rabbi and says: “Rabbi, I’m so tired, and I can’t sleep because the baby is crying, and I keep stepping on my children’s lego, and the cat knocked my partner’s favourite mug off the counter, and I just don’t know what to do”. The Rabbi says: “[[Shlemiel|July 1995]], it’s going to be ok. All you have to do is bring a rooster into your house. Let it stay inside for a week, and then come see me.” A week later, the farmer is back. He kvetches some more: “not only do I stub my toes on old toys, but now the rooster yaps at my baby’s keppie, I can’t hear Game of Thrones over all the noise, and I’m losing my marbles.” “Look putz, you tried the rooster, but it may take more” the Rabbi replies. “Take in the field dogs. Give them a week to rest inside, and then come see me again.” So another week goes by, and again the farmer returns. On the verge of tears, he stammers: “I can’t do it anymore. The dogs are chasing the cat in circles, breaking furniture and chewing on the rug. The rooster won’t stop cawing. My children are hunting the animals like [[Muldoon|Raptor]] from Jurassic Park, and my partner thinks I’m nuts for trusting you.” “You poor thing” the Rabbi says consolingly. “You have a real serious case, and I think we have to step up to your old milk sows. Bring them in as well. Give it another week and I’ll see you again.” Now a month has gone by, and the farmer returns. “There isn’t a square inch of the house that isn’t covered in muck” he complains. “The animals own the place. The children have gone into hiding. My poor little baby is being woken by all the noise, and I can’t handle it anymore!” The Rabbi, looking concerned says: “Ok my dear Schlemiel, put them all back outside, tidy the mud off the walls, clean up the lego, and come see me in a week”. Another week goes by and the farmer returns. He’s smiling, full of spring in his steps. He comes into the Rabbi’s office and hugs him. “Reb” he says, “I don’t know how you did it. My children are so caring; my baby sleeps so soundly. I can rest when I get in from the field, and help around the house. I’ve never felt better.” What does any of this have to do with art? Everything. And nothing. But making art is as close as I can be to becoming a sage or a [[mystic|Slip]].

***“And the [[darkness|Darkness]] illuminated the night”*** //Counter / Monument// //“Those who wish to approach their own buried past must be prepared to dig, unafraid, to return repeatedly to the same matter, turning over soil in the manner of an archaeologist”.// (Leslie 117) 1. Instead of trying to give life meaning, I want to point to the gaps and absences that are missing from any coherent thread of history. I have put this to the fore using an ephemeral and experiential form. The purpose of which was to deny memory a permanent memorial, instead offering snippets and glimpses that can fold into other memories. James Young, in At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture gives a warning to those trying to anchor memory in a lasting vessel: “[i]t is as if once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember.” (Young 94) This has been the driving strategy behind my work; I want to explore memory and history without making it physical or permanent, so that it can be carried forward in the miss-[[remembering|Memory]] of others. 2. I was [[inspired|Work]] in part by the work of Shimon Attie who as a precursor, projected alternative histories into physical spaces. In my case using text is a far more allusory medium that allows vagueness and imagination to interject new histories between the lines. 3. [[Whether successful or not|Position]], my [[art|Work]] making process is a journey in undoing ingrained assumptions about society, community and nationhood. This is a long process, and for me it revolves around story telling, of repeating, obscuring, forgetting and remembering, all as a process of renewal. I want to undo my own tendency towards binary assumptions, such as moral judgements based on good or bad, strong or weak, right or wrong. Instead I’m trying to draw from the understanding that everything is interconnected and more complex than it may seem. I feel Canadian identity is drawn together around a nationalist identity that privileges the masculine. It was conceived of as a white, British paradise, that strives for “energy, strength, self-reliance, health and purity”. (Berger 1970, 129) I hope to undo that identity by drawing out the alterity and strangeness in everyday memory. It is important to acknowledge a difference in intent between my work and other landscape works, especially Canadian landscape painting. Painters such as the group of seven paint the north as an “ignoble savage”, a gendered, feminized representation of a wild, unpredictable, violent yet delicate place (Mackey 127). Though both my work and theirs tend to feature landscapes devoid of human presence, or at least identifiable bodies, I hope that mine points to the disappearances and violence in the landscape, instead of a grande colonial gesture. My scenes aren’t meant to point to a Northern Greatness, a savage expanse of vegina dentata, set to swallow colonial and imperialist frontiersman whole (Mackey 128). My panoramas aim to point to the mass of subaltern that are erased from Canadian landscapes, not to glorify, but to ask the viewer to remember and question all of our relationships to Canadian landscape and history. I don’t want to perpetuate any nationalist appropriation or misrepresentation of Indigenous histories, instead I hope by sharing the haunting of displacement and the similarities between [[places|Maps]], I can draw forward the erasures and complexity to make it visible. 4. This wouldn’t be an honest or reflective document without asking what I feel the work is missing, and what I want to push towards in the future. I want to approach the same subject matter with an even greater sensuousness and care. The work deserves intimacy and closeness, which will require even more [[Time]] and greater work. I hope this is merely the starting point towards something even greater. 5. What happens when we fall in [[Love]] with a void or an absences? Is this what grieving is? An adoration for the eerie silences and melancholic ringing at the end of a horn solo? 6. “What we are [[suffering|Dysentery]] from is not a void, but inadequate means for thinking about everything that is happening. There is an over abundance of things to be known: fundamental, terrible, wonderful, insignificant and crucial at the same Time.” - Foucault

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Benjamin, Walter, and Rolf Tiedemann. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “A Short History of Photography” in One-way Street and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 2009. Print. Benjamin, Walter. "Paris, Capital of the 19th Century", New Left Review Number 48, March-April (1968): 77-88. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Print. Berger, Carl. The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1967 - 1914. Toronto: Toronto University Press. 1970. Print. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 2008. Print. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Introduction: Taboo on Nostalgia & Chapter 12 On Diasporic Intimacy. Basic Books, New York, NY. 2001. Print. Buck-Morss, Susan, and Walter Benjamin. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mas. 1989. Buck-Morss, Susan. Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered. October 62. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1992. 3-41 Debord, Guy. "Theory of the Dérive." Situationist International Online. Les Lèvres Nues #9 (November 1956) Reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958), n.d. Web. 05 Jan. 2013. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red, 1977. Web, 2016. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. The Actual and the Virtual. From Dialogues II. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Print. 148-152 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Micropolitics and Segmentarity. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1987. Print. 208-231 Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. Postcript on the Societies of Conrol. Vol. 59. MIT Press, 1992, 3-7 Derrida, Jaques. Positions. Trans. Alan Boss. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1982. Print. De Monchy, Marike Finlay. “The Horrified Position: An Ethics Grounded in the Affective Interest in the Unitary Body as Psyche/Soma”. Body & Society, London, 1995. 25-64. Evans, Dylan. “Object (petit) a” in An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, New York. 1996. Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater, London. 2016. Book. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Reprint, 1995. Book Foucault, Michel. The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954 - 1984. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York, NY: New, 2003. Print. Foucault, Michel. Fearless Speech. Semiotext(e), USA. 2001. Retrieve online: https://monoskop.org/images/b/ba/Foucault_Michel_Fearless_Speech.pdf Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. London: Penguin, 1990. Print. Frow, John. “A Pebble, A Camera, A Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole”, Critical Inquiry Vol. 28, No 1, Things. University of Chicago Journals, 2001. 270-285 Garey, Anita Ilta, Rosanna Hertz and Margaret K. Nelson (eds). 2014. Open to Disruption: Time and Craft in the Practice of Slow Sociology. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press Ginsberg, Allen. Howl. Poem. Retrieved 2018: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl Haraway, Donna Jeanne. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. From Cybercultures Reader. Routledge, New York, 2001. 292-324 Haraway, Donna. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3. (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599 Harley, J. Brian. “Maps, Knowledge and Power.” The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of past Environments. Ed. Denis E Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1988. 277-312. Print. Hartman, Yvonne and Sandy Darab. 2012. 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Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002. Print. Meno, Joe. People Are Becoming Clounds in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #18. San Francisco, McSweeney’s Press, 2005. 235-240 Morrison, Toni. Jazz. Plume: London, England. 1992. Print. Morton, Timothy. Guest Column: Queer Ecology. PMLA. 12.2. 2010. 273-282. Web. https://www.academia.edu/1-5-754/Queer_Ecology NA. “Relativity: A Hot Stove and A Pretty Girl.” Quote Investigator, 24 Nov. 2014, quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/24/hot-stove/. Proust, Marcel. The Madeleine in Carolyn Korsemeyer (ed.), The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink. Oxford and New York: Berg Press, 2005. 293-296 Salinger, J. D. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: An Introduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. New Directions Pub, 1985. Online pdf www.users.telenet.be/sterf/texts/phil/Sartre-Nausea.pdf (acc. Oct 2016) Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz. Penguin Books: London, England. 2001. Print Sebald, W. G. The Emigrants. The Harvill Press: London, England. 1996 (English). Print Schulte, Brigid. 2014. Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time. New York: Sarah Crichton Books. Schwenger, Peter. “Words and the Murder of Things” in Critical Inquiry Vol. 28, No 1, Things. University of Chicago Journals. 2001. (99-113) Schwenger, Peter. “Sculpture and the Broken Tool”/ from The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects. The University of Minnesota Press. 2006. 49-71 Shahjahan, Riyad A. 2014. Being ‘lazy’ and slowing down: Toward decolonizing Time, our body, and pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2014.880645. Shestov, Lev. The Apotheosis of Groundlessness. 1905. Web. Retrieved, 2018 http://www.angelfire.com/nb/shestov/all/all_22.html Soja, Edward W. “The Spatiality of Social Life: Towards a Transformative Retheorisation.” Social Relations and Spatial Structures. Ed. Derek Gregory and John Urry. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985. 90-127. Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1996. Print. Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2016. Print. Solnit, Rebecca, and Ana T. Fernandez. Men Explain Things to Me. , 2014. iBook. Stein, Gertrude. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Vintage Books: New York, NY. 1990. Print. Thacker, Eugene. Cosmic Pessimism. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2015. Print Thacker, Eugene. Cosmic Pessimism. Transcript, “A Special Form of Darkness -- Arika Episode II. Glasgow February 26, 2012. Print: continent 2.2(2012) 66-75 Thacker, Eugene. In The Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy vol. 1. Zero Books, 2011. Book. Weizman, Eyal. Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. Zone Book, NY. 2017 Weizman, Eyal. “Violence at the Threshold of Detectability”. E-Flux Journal #64 - April 2015. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/64/60861/violence-at-the-threshold-of-detectability/ Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality. London: Travistock Plublications, 1971. Print. Winnicott, D.W. The use of an object and relating through identifications. 1969. https://llk.media.mit.edu/courses/readings/Winnicott_ch6.pdf Woolf, Virginia. “To The Lighthouse Diary Of Virginia Woolf.” Saturday 5 September, Mojulem - Woolf Online, 2018, www.woolfonline.com/?node=content%2Fcontextual%2Ftranscriptions&project=1&parent=41&taxa=42&content=6303&pos=7.

***Exiled from The Representable *** //Indexical / Mapping // //A Paper: A courteous occasion makes a paper show no such occasion and this makes readiness and eyesight and likeness and a stool.// (Stein 470) 1. A keyboard sits under a pile of books, all of which are open, marked and disordered around a desk. Nearby, a stack of photocopies are knocked over and strewn about, the words flowing from page to page. Endless piles of markers, [[signifiers|Love]], point aimlessly like withered old hands, to meanings that have become too tangled to wrench apart. 2. I came to postering from my youth spent doing graffiti, wheat-pasting and stencils. Graffiti and its sister arts are a form of urban mapping and intentioned dérive (Debord). Writers mark routes through the darkest corners of the city, rendering the space into a living map. Charting is a language of knowledge, of power expansion or ownership; creating a map is an attempt to describe and define a space, effectively putting it into language. Cartography imposes struggles in between authors and subjects, and intents and reality ([[see Harley|Bibliography]]). Graffiti becomes a set of records, whereby a city can watch the exploits of individuals unfold across the urban landscape. There is a synthesis of exploration that occurs when the overlapping of graffiti, tags, the routes of artists and marks become sites of knowledge building. What can this tell you about a city? About a place? About the people who use it? Edward Soja writes about social spaces as having an inherent social history that can be witnessed through the layers of change and decision-making within a city. It is within this context that the mapping of graffiti through a city becomes a part of the [[anthropological|Memory]] process of understanding urban space [[(Soja, The Spatiality of Social Life)|Bibliography]]. Graffiti represents the desire for rebirth, for individual voices and independence within a city. As society reaches outwards towards greater efficiencies, the internal struggles, differences and faults become more pronounced. These are the discursive regimes that are challenged by artists working to mark nodes of darkness and rebirth through graffiti. That wasn’t my intention, when, at the age of sixteen I would climb over bramble, fences and barbed wire to re-decorate a wall, but it created the intense interest in subversion and disruption that fuels my work today. From this perspective I have returned to mapping and mark making, using the semiotics of postering, to re-imagine space and time. The visual language of postering, street art and low fidelity engineering prints (ie cheap and impermanent) return in my work in order to tie the physicality of the interior surfaces outward into existing spaces. I hope this displacement and materiality evokes back alleys, billboards and forgotten spaces, privileging them over white gallery walls. 3. “[[To write|Slip]] is to struggle and resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map: 'I am a cartographer.” -Deleuze [[(Foucault 44)|Bibliography]] 4. The photographic image works as an indexical form, pointing towards a spatial/temporal place -- whether real, present or imagined. They act as an imprint, faithfully capturing the indentations of light upon a sensor. “This is why a photograph can be considered an index, in the same way that a fossil or or a ruin are indices: a fragment that comes to us from the past and permits us to dream that the totality that produced it is still here and, moreover, still belongs to us.” (Cadava 18) This is further amplified with image/mapping databases like Google Street View, which offer an illusion of accuracy and fidelity that is presented as truth. By using this tool, what I might describe as the most indexical of photographic and archival forms, and distorting it to create non-spaces, I hope to point to its failure as a knowledge source. “The index is a sign linked to mourning and melancholy, and never to truth or testimony” (Cadava 17) 5. This [[project|Work]] started by cruising Google Street View for moments of eerie familiarity that felt entangled within my [[Memory]] and history. It became a hunt for land that felt nostalgic, uncomfortable and ghostly. The process of making became a process of ghost hunting, both within myself, and globally through a digitized image space. Boym once again lays out the entanglement of romance and fear in a chapter on Diasporic Intimacy: “At first glance, it appears that the uncanny is a fear of the familiar, whereas nostalgia is a longing for it; yet for the nostalgic, the lost home and the home abroad often appear haunted” (Boym 251) It is in my wanting to get spooked, to feel a closeness to death, that I’ve journeyed around the globe trying to spot the eerie, beautiful and horrific within the landscapes of my youth, my family’s past and collective memory. This journey has had a tandem manifestation within my family and research. I have begun collecting stories, anecdotes and documents from my parents, using them as the generative source, alongside my memories, for narrative construction. Similar to the image making process, the collecting often focused on moments of dream like ambiguity and unknowability, forcing a false remembrance and rewriting of our collective history. This process has led me through family trees, through immigration documents, war records and shared [[moments|Void]]. 6. ...I fear I will have fallen into the trap; one of those “...who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull...” [[(Ginsberg - Howl)|Bibliography]]

June, 1998 She could see it all from her perch high in the cedar tree. She is above a small fork in the river, where two torrents converge to form a raging whirl. A low mist lifts from the valley floor to reveal a small white Westfalia van parked on a spit of gravel. There is a young boy out fishing, awkwardly casting his long line into the violent waters. He fights to reel against the confluence, battling for strength with his little hands. From above she sees the look of shock and surprise on the young child’s face, as a large coho salmon comes flying out of the water, fighting against the shock cord, desperate to escape. The child is stunned still. The father, in an attempt to be helpful, runs over, encouraging the child to pull against the line and land the fish. In the struggle the father gets excited, and being unsure what to do, he bludgeons the fish. The child bursts into tears -- the salmon sits slowly losing rich magenta [[blood|Haunted]] which dyes the smooth grey rocks red. [[Time]] passes, and her young are hungry. She’s bound to the nest in order to protect and care for her recently hatched chicks. Their nest is immense, worked on for consecutive summers, constantly built safer and more secure. The old cedar tree is strong, and she has grown to love their view up and down the misty valley. Below, the father is consoling his son, the young daughter is tucked away keeping busy, trying not to be involved. To her amazement the family clambers out to a large rock in the middle of the converging streams, and ceremoniously lays the salmon across the rock. She knows exactly what they are doing; they are [[burying|Loss]] the salmon. They are offering the poor creature back to nature. She dives out of her nest, her strong brown wings thrown open. She glides down, talons outstretched, and grabs the fish between her razor sharp claws. Vigorously beating her enormous wings, she climbs back to the nest to feed her young this unexpected treat.

You've been eaten by the (link: "Yeti.")[Yeti. Game over. [[Glitsh]]]

You've died of (link: "dysentery.")[dysentery. Game over. [[Glitsh]]]

You've fallen into the deepest darkest (link: "void.")[void. Game over. [[Glitsh]]]

You've been eaten by a (link: "velociraptor.")[velociraptor. Game over. [[Glitsh]]]

You've fallen victim to existential (link: "dread.")[dread. Game over. [[Glitsh]]]

You've been (link: "haunted.")[haunted. Game over. [[Glitsh]]]

Who you gonna call. (link: "Ghostbusters!")[Yet still, game over. [[Glitsh]]]

↶

↷

Glitsh

presented

and

written

in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People. This territory is covered by the “Treaties of Peace and Friendship” which Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) Peoples first signed with the British Crown in 1725. The treaties did not deal with surrender of lands and resources but in fact recognized Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) title and established the rules for what was to be an ongoing relationship between nations.

My narratives span a number of complex territories and spaces I wish to acknowledge. In no particular order, these stories span: the traditional territory of the

Kwanlin Dun First Nation and the Ta’an Kwach’an Council of the Yukon Territory

;

the former Soviet Czech Republic

, the Hul'qumi'num on Galiano Island;

occupied Poland under Nazi Germany

;

the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (TsleilWaututh), Kwantlen, Semiahmoo, Tsawwassen, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, and Qayqayt of greater Vancouver

; unified Germany;

the traditional territory of seven First Nations in northwest British Columbia

Haida, Tsimshian, Nisga'a, Haisla, Gitxsan, Wet'suwet'en, and Tahltan

;

the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Israel

;

the traditional territory of the Wendat, the Anishnaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Métis, Huron and the Mississaugas of the Scugog, Hiawatga, and Alderville First Nation in and around Toronto

; and

the Robinson-Huron Treaty territory, the traditional territory of the Atikameksheng Anishnaabeg in northern Ontario