Published since 2002, an Ocean and Pounds publication
Greenwood
by Kai Chan
Drawing #4 2021 watercolour, ink on paper
Caffeine Reveries
by Shelley Savor
Water Tiger
Spar
Poem a Week
by Gary Michael Dault
TIME PASSING ON CAMERA
in certain
inescapably tender scenes
on film
flower petals
(often sunflowers
sometimes tulips)
drop
one by one
abandoning bouquets
weary with waiting
the petals are
naturally
seen to be
like tears
so are the days
that ripple by
on desk calendars
the pages flipping wildly
when the studio wind
blows on them
its breath of metaphor
real time
takes longer to pass
and is less easy
to depict:
an ankle hurts
a tooth falls out
you want to sleep
more than you ever did
before
a new photograph every day
by Lee Ka-sing
Aotearoa
by Madeleine Slavick 思樂維
..knowing the world through the body
and the body through the world...
- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust
ProTesT
by Cem Turgay
From the Notebooks (2010-2021)
by Gary Michael Dault
From the Notebooks, 2010-2021.
Number 122: Sailing to Mt. Athos (May 20, 2021).
ART LOGBOOK
by Holly Lee
1
World fountains
https://www.boredpanda.com/worlds-most-amazing-fountains/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
2
Barrio Chino Habana: an ongoing project by Sean Alexander Geraghty on the once glorious chinatown in Latin America.https://www.thestoryinstitute.com/barrio-chino
ART LOGBOOK is a new column with contributions by various authors.
Taking Notes
by Jeff Jackson
“ Two Satin Evening Dresses “, Christian Dior Exhibition, McCord Museum, Montreal, 2021.
The Photograph
coordinated by Kamelia Pezeshki
Entrance, Arcadia, Florida, 2014 by Jude Marion
Travelling Palm Snapshots
by Tamara Chatterjee
Madagascar (March, 2010) – It was a rather nice day in Ambalavao, the fresh air and billowing clouds were a welcome relief from the previous few days of muggy weather. Despite the bustle of the zebu market, I spent a few moments of reprise sitting down chatting with a small crew of farmers. Essentially seated on an old water trough; reinvented as the empty water cooler, with the official squad chatting bovine business.
Leaving Taichung Station
by Bob Black
Holly Descending the Stairs
“Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.” -Andres Neuman
She paws the door open from a forest of books, winds through the studio and dining room
a sentinel scenting the twists and dust with secrets, alert and atonce listening
squeezes through opening and breaks for light
shoeing upon clouds, pattering aside the warm, small paws still imprinted on her lap,
and counts like a cat, the steps: tap-tap-tap.
Here thoughts imaginate, rounding the streets bowed corner, where over her shoulder a window like a fishbowl
And the traffic bowls and burps and makes itself known to her
The potted plant all grown up and yet tomorrow will return to being a young adult.
You just missed your friend there on the wall's other side, still dreaming to be
a print-maker splaying up his seeing coloured fuchsia, parakeet and Cerulean.
There goes the second floor.
The landing which sags under the load of books still providing heatandcooled dreams for the gallery below: ballyhoo
a gallery abloom.
She is still descending
a constellation of poetry, a space of play and joy --
Bing Lee's drawings silent the way water flows, a soft whispering breaking,
And here comes Araki's mad maze,
while Christopher, with a chill March blow, sharpens Toronto in the fractured light,
Anothermainman's red-white-blue vase flowers the wide-widening horizon,
and Ping-kwan's poem writes our building upside down,
Luo Hui's sturdy translations dancing through the glass of the horizon’s front window:
Let's look back at the path that channels the rooms and our life:
Far a piece and yet as close as a view-finder, another’s colour-stirred landscape,
a hybrid of intelligence and bitterness, the tones of the formidable and the lowbrow.
Still, what lovely weather today,
Her poured sunshine after altitudinous rain, her hopes rich in their lighting,
a family’s almanac of joy and sorrow mixed together as if in a porcelain bowl
cracks veining the luminous afternoon.
All that light, remember?
She takes out his large-format toy camera, hand-made from wood.
Let's walk all the way east, the western fringe of Queen Street West
Toward Trinity Bellwoods Park and the home of our once cheerful neighbourhood.
You see that mythical spirit, hanging in the branches and watching the world twist
upsidedown and rightsidewrong
The Shan-Hai-Jin, a geography tracing human lines and markings,
the hums and hows of their life,
the Yuen-Oi annotation that we brought 30 years ago damped by time and distance and contrails
still speaks today a new perspective.
People recall the Sakura trees outside the library were once saplings come from the far-east
long ago, all our long agos.
The weekly, new releases that they picked up at the library
read like leaves from yesterday's branches which have become tomorrow's fruits and nuts
ripening in their fall.
Who still notices the last bloom of the flowers,
Not the pageantry of the initial outburst, but the colours being squirreled away by the grass once cut loose by the wind
a family of migration, immigrants from a yesteryear.
Today let me be your assistant and up-load the net-like film with joy and grace.
You who see through the Spring, pushing the shutter to capture the four seasons of our life,
The miraculous of the multifold into one:
our love a walk through the variation of translation
still being written on the pages of our lives,
folding.
For: Holly and Ka-sing Lee
A remark by Lee Ka-sing on his work "Holly descending the staircase from the third floor to the gallery, ready to go out to make a photograph at Trinity Bellwoods Park, a portrait"
In 2012, FUJIFILM launched the new camera X-Pro1. Anothermountainman was helping for the publicity of this event in Hong Kong. He organized an exhibition “to see : to be seen” held at the two floors of Pao Galleries in the Hong Kong Arts Centre, an exhibition of 14 artists in seven pairs, each had to produce a self-portrait as well as a portrait of his/her team member. Me and Holly were invited as a team. Both of us received a brand new X-Pro1 through DHL.
My portrait of Holly was an array of 30 pieces of small images, each mounted on a small (60mm x 60mm x 35mm) wood block. They were displayed horizontally on wall, a piece of “writing” that required audience to read it image by image, line by line. At one point, playing with time lapse, I elongate the period of time that people use to look at a piece of photo work.
In this work I did not intend to draw on the facial expression, but rather the sequential changes of phycological movements. The work comes with a long title “Holly descending the staircase from the third floor to the gallery, ready to go out to make a photograph at Trinity Bellwoods Park, a portrait”. I am a big fan of Marcel Duchamp and the title is after his “Nude Descending a Staircase”.
“Holly descending the staircase from the third floor to the gallery, ready to go out to make a photograph at Trinity Bellwoods Park, a portrait” was also later “translated” into a transcript as a Chinese poem, as part of a series of poems under the title “MOBILE POETRY LAB’. I was working on the possibilities of "translation", crossing medium from image to texts. Bob Black’s poem is another layer of transformation, from Chinese to English, or even more.
A transcription of a visual work into a text-based poem (in Chinese, 30 lines), by Lee Ka-sing.
正在下樓梯的Holly，從三樓走到地面的畫廊。她正準備外出到Trinity Bellwoods公園拍攝一張照片
穿過飯廳書櫃工作室推開三樓之門
腳裹繞著煙霞膝上抖下貓的餘溫
模仿貓的健步吞吐
樓梯叠叠
彎過窗外車行如鰂
樹在梯間成長
版畫朋友逆流而過
經過二樓
二樓負荷三樓衆多書本重量又提供地面畫廊冷暖溫度空調
畫廊花開如一室寫詩游樂塲
牆上的李炳正在呢喃細誦他的符號學
荒木經惟荒謬攝影論
杜可風忽然又再挾著風聲路過多倫多
又一山人的花瓶盛開盛載藍白平衡線
也斯來唸詩
髙聲低調羅輝翻譯繞室環迴
回望畫廊二室相連空間的通道
遠處又在眼前高力麥高道的混聲彩墨山水合唱苦澀與機智
今天天氣真好雨後陽光錯縱忙碌休閒混雜
你端出我替你簡約木料手造的大片幅便裝照相機
我們出發繞道皇后西街東向
鐘活公園的樹們曾經是鄰居親切也陌生
神話精靈倒掛在樹梢我們推手呵護
山海經注也是紋理地理學
三十年前買的袁柯注本今天竟然讀出新發見
話說圖書館外纖纖櫻花樹苗當年來自東方
每周中日港台的新贈本冊閱讀葉子昨天枝椏明日的硬果
盛放今天你看那松鼠的家族原是移居自遠年
今天就讓我當你的助手罷裝上包容吐納的膠卷
你看透春天按下快門捉住四季變幻於一身
This poem was published in "Voice & Verse" (聲韻詩刊), issue 38, October 2017
Holly descending the staircase from the third floor to the gallery, ready to go out to make a photograph at Trinity Bellwoods Park, a portrait
Hong Kong Art Centre (2012)
Holly descending the staircase from the third floor to the gallery, ready to go out to make a photograph at Trinity Bellwoods Park, a portrait
GALLERY 50, Toronto (2014)
MONDAY ARTPOST
ISSN 1918-6991
Published on Mondays, with columns by Artists and Writers
Published since 2002, an Ocean and Pounds publication
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