Outside 2
Photographs: Derek Knight (top) and Geoff Farnsworth (bottom)
Nicholas Hauck: Discovering idiosyncrasies through experimentation: a St. Catharines walk
Park’s variety. Whose park? Who’s Park? Dr. Pepper’s bright green boxer shorts. The seam wrapped in. Tobacco’s former self and striated skies and angular living, as the spire blends into building materials, backgrounding clouds, and mostly itself. Three orange, skyward orbs, hovering above caged thistle and former ice, next to a black portal, perhaps? A Z-shaped space. Something green here again. FRANK w/vines, Hi-Viz beats, yellowing among kneeling conversations.
A well-kept garden from Garden city’s bingo angles and angels. BIG BUSY BEES & everything leaning, pointing somewhere, a fork in the drain system, a third space for unintended sentences. BZEW. BFMX. Canned vs. bottled. Afternoon’s dew on LEGO plant & bush. Another Hi-Viz triangle hugging yet another faded, gentler orange. Sound drown & sumac noise caught between motor-noise. Brown spots and tufts and lumps = burrowing. TRAVEL INFO for overgrown lines. The thistle-symphony and sumac-canopies, a refuge from (or for?) asphalt speed dreams, din, shadows, lightness, breeze and small white wings. Leftovers in the grasses. Why the bright height of progress now? Black seams: white/purple/yellow. Lines & curves without contrast, or maybe just a little. The sound of sumac. The bend of sumac. The voice of sumac. The touch of sumac. The challenge of menace. Decomposition’s bridge.
These happy accidents between expenditure and destruction, between erasure and graffiti, winter coat and cut grass. Thickets moving to a restorative breeze. All slopes lead here, to a “before engineering’s arc.” A back-to-school playfulness full of limit experiences in well-worn dancing shoes. A discovery loop, they say. A back-to-front version 2.
Troy Ouellette: Division / Modes of Life. Video (1'40")
Catherine Parayre: Across the Street
I see the sunshine steal across the wild grass enclosed behind the fence, i also see Weinberger’s ruderals in their cage. It is cold today and maybe it will rain, and i hope it won’t. A large, temporary field before it becomes a parking lot brings the overgrown cage, nature left alone – aside –, to the fore, blinds us, grows above my lungs, this morning’s fever.
Winter roses in the month of September – their tiny leaves – brownish and green, a touch of red, their pinkness – three nuances. Behind, two small red roses, vine growing along a line – their extended leaves opening to us, engulfing space. The gingko tree reminds us of the wide sea, continents apart where men use fans as they walk before the leaves turn yellow, the long yellow before it snows. Invasive green that looks tender, tended. I love this place. When I am sad, I walk by and watch the gingko, the vine, the flowers below, how they float.
The sloping volumes of the field by the highway take us up to the sumac, the red cones, the flowers of September, the cicada in the so sweet underwood, how it makes waves, soft and warm, a paradise. People stand in front of the city line, the tower under construction – its orange –, the green-card office, the old textile company, the red brick hidden from us.
This is all Magritte and jaws for those who died on the bridge, over the highway and its noises, the dark green trees under the clouds that bring us rain.
We are quiet today, too quiet maybe, the trees expand, the highway so loud that the river keeps silent; we sit above the river, where it is forbidden – chain-linked. Next to me, a fisher left a bait, now slowly falling apart, its entrails. No more missing sisters #MMIW.
Copyrighted materials