Last night I went to Brown's Rockefeller library for the first time because I needed some images of Newfoundland, so I ended up in the section of Canadian history on level 3. It was fascinating! It was sad! There were about 20 or so books on the history of BC, and many of them were from the 1890s. They were so old, when I opened them up, red dust from the jacket was left on my pants as they were disintegrating.
And most of these books haven't been checked out since the 1960s! I guess they got most of their history books on Canada in the 19th century and haven't felt the need to add much to their collection.
There was this beautiful book on the Rocky Mountains, with photos from the 1890s of the mountains and this one of the Banff Springs Hotel: If you open them to enlarge them, you can see the dust on my pants from the books disintegrating.
I seriously felt the urge to steal these books, to bring them to Canada, to repatriate them to the proper archives where somebody would give a damn about them, because obviously if they haven't been checked out in close to 50 years, they're not being used much. It made me wonder what other books about histories were languishing in other Ivy League schools, and who knows where else? It would be a cool project to somehow copy these books so that their information could be in Canadian archives.
The book on the history of BC told of how the First Nations could not cope with contact with a superior civilization (the whites) and intellect, and so they just turned to alcohol and started to die out! This book needs to be in BC archives!
I found this book on Newfoundland written in (if I can remember correctly) the 1930s by Joey Smallwood. The caption under these fish is "a good day's work".
The Canadian history section:
3 comments:
yo denise!
that book looks so cool! maybe there are other copies of it in canadian libraries somewhere? who knows.
i also like your walk home photographs/documentation. i might just do the same.
I never really thought my work was tied to BC at all until I came here, cause it is SOOOOO different than what everyone is doing here. i think i'm going to drop the extra obvious geometric abstraction (which seems REALLY vancouver) and make it all much more subtle. The problem I had was that I don't do any art all summer and then the first painting I do is like a big explosion of colliding ideas (which i kind of think is a good thing) but it's pretty obvious that the second one is way more refined and subtle and sophosticated... so I'm happy with where it's all going.
and yeah, i am not too happy with the clouds either... but i can't figure out how to make them right. because they need to sit back, and be heavy and still chaotic but I also want to leave that area a bit unfinished. not sure how to do all that. alas. And while I do like etienne Zack's stuff, I think his work is much quieter wheras mine is really overwhelming and a big collision of highly saturated colours and ideas and imagerey that is really beautiful but also really hard to acctually look at. One of my profs said that she would look around the painting and forget it and see it again over and over because there was so much information... i kind of liked that.
acctually.. i just looked at some of Zack's stuff that i hadn't seen before (i had only seen the stuff in PAINT) and it is a lot more like my work than i thought....
that's so great, Lianne (sorry, I'm super busy, not much time to be thoughtful in reply!)
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