MONDOmagazine

By Kerry Wright Zentner

Daccia Bloomfield is one of the few people still in my life whom I’ve known since I was shorter than them. When I was a wee homeschooled tot, Daccia would come over to learn me the language of French (which, as we enjoy recalling, was really just an excuse to draw comical little characters). She’s someone who I’ve admired, not only for her sense of humour, but for how she seemingly lives and breathes art, the observance of which has in no small way affected my own tempestuous relationship with art. I’ve known her to always be immersed in some artistic habit, from drawing and painting, to co-directing her gallery space Virus Arts, to her hilarious collaborative card company Good Morning Press, and her more recent exploits as a soon-to-be-published author. Her novel Dora Borealis launches next week (Wednesday, October 8 @ The Ossington).

MONDO: How did this book form, and how, specifically, did it become a ghost story?

Daccia Bloomfield: Oh man, that’s hard. Okay, chronology: I wrote a really short thing about naming conventions, and unusual names, and I started to think about odd names (like mine, and like Lamb’s) and at the time I was sort of obsessed with why people get their names, how names are chosen, how people think about names, and about all of the work (cultural, parental) that goes into that kind of designation. I was also thinking about stars, and how those acquire names, and the whole nomenclature mumbo jumbo underpinning all of that, and how those kinds of things (names, categories, etc.) create “in crowds” and families and pools of people alike in knowledge, and then I decided to get into ghosts.

The book started out as a bunch of clusters, clumped kind of thematically, but in conversation with my editors (Crissy and Michael) and through a lot of writing and writing a more linear narrative emerged, and then the challenge was not allowing that to take over too much — a lot of re-encryption went into the final draft, to save it from straight A-to-B stuff, because that bores me too much. I write just for kicks, mainly, so story building is challenging for me.

MONDO: Were there any challenges in writing for a male character, and how do you think it affected him being written by you? What made you decide to write for a male character?

DB: I didn’t set out to make a specific point about “gender” or to address the fact that for centuries men have written for women, if that’s what you mean. But I think people are going to think about all of that when they read a book like this, and that pleases me. I think gender’s a fluid thing, and that, as a way of thinking about gender, informs a lot of my choices in allowing different characters room to talk, and “air time,” in the book. The book is told from Flip’s perspective, but I think it’s really Lamb’s book, in a sense. I also think that to take up some of the emptiness and comedy and tragedy of the “Toronto artist,” I needed to be a boy, because boy painters and boy writers are still way more attached to artist myths, at least in dress, than their female counterparts, who are more used to flipping around from muse to Auteur, etc. Girl artist myths can be just as crippling, and often more, but they’re newer so they’re less unilateral. I think. It’s the one of the few worlds (art in Toronto) where the boy’s club is more of a death sentence than the henhouse.

I also wanted to play with perspective constantly, and that’s why the entire book’s an address to a particular reader: You, and that reader is a woman, to balance out the male voice.

Or maybe I’m just a giant pervert, or part of the problem, or a capitalist. Does that make any sense?

MONDO: You’re a visual artist as well as a writer. How do you find the creative process in writing compares to the creative process in visual art?

DB: This is really a book for painters. I talk a lot about the process of art making, the physical reality of making and drawing in particular, and the trouble of knowing when to start framing your work in talk. I talk about all of that because to me, it’s just a freakin’ joy to talk about that stuff. I don’t know if non-drawers will get it; but really, who doesn’t draw? I only think when I draw, and I only write characters that feel compelled to think through processes like that, because I am a giant and disgusting narcissist.

MONDO: I’ve only read an early version of the book. What measures did you take to create balance between straight fiction and poetry? How did you balance reality with a more magical reality and decide the boundaries of each?

DB: I don’t really ever think about boundaries that way. I just sort of go and then if I find something really grosses me out, I get rid of it. I mean, I don’t want to make myself out to be some lame, festering modernist, but maybe I am. I hope my sense of humour saves me from being just basic uncensored output. I think it does — humour is my major editor, that and knowing that the book has a conscience, which I invite you to look for as it’s quite submerged.

MONDO: What are your current creative plans for the future? Time off?

DB: I really want to find a job that doesn’t eat my life, and I’m writing a book of short stories called Bad metaphors, a kid’s book, and a screenplay. I’m also working on a giant installation about food called “Carbs in Public” with my friend Sarah Beatty. I also want to draw a lot more. And hang out with you, of course, you adorable munchkinface, you.

MONDO: Finally, for some writers, writing serves as a form of exorcism, therapy, or connection to another plane. I’m curious if you’re aware of why you write?

DB: All of the above. Especially connection to another plane… because I love planes. And cars. When I first read that I thought it said eroticism: that too, fo’ sho!

By Kerry Wright Zentner

MONDO: You’re an artist who has worked in many media, including textiles, painting, sculpture, drawing, writing, and installation. How do you determine which form a given inspiration will take — or does the desire to work in a particular medium come first?

Richard Preston: I tend to work in series, often with several series crossing over each other’s timelines. [...] I think most of my desire to work in many media is just a very contemporaneous zeitgeist. It seems that after centuries of market-forced monocreativity, the community of makers has finally said, “we determine our own pathways.” Some of this multifaceted approach also stems from a pathological hatred of boredom, while some more influence is just a sheer fractured sensibility from doing a lot of self-teaching.

Ultimately, this multiplicity of media reflects on my basic life-long fascination with texture, which is a response to being an immigrant and moving around a bit growing up, that in turn lent itself to some feelings of rootlessness and disconnection. Then again, variety is the spice of life.

MONDO: Your beadwork jackets are very striking. How many decades does it take to make one, and who gets to wear them?

RP: Well, the jackets are unique in that they tend to take anywhere from 350-400 hours, although the last one, The Tree of Life, took somewhere between 600-700 hours. Each one has had its own creative history. West Coast Jacket (1980), Starry Night (2001), and Moonflow (2003) were all made without interruption; Dripping (1982-1987) was brought into being in several phases — each one dramatically modifying the previous vision. Blue Jay, Flower, and Verdant were all started in the late 80s then put aside until 2001-2002, when they were completed. Ideally, I prefer to work on a piece from start to finish. There is a generally a great deal of improvisation involved in their evolution, so a high degree of presence and responsiveness to a changing form, content and sensibility is vital. But hey, life interferes a great deal. God grant me financial independence and a place in the woods.

MONDO: Some of your works — for example, the “stratigraph” textiles and the outdoor Shoreline exhibit — seem to not just represent geological and topographic forms but to emerge organically, as if you’re in collaboration with nature. As an urban artist, what do you feel your role is with regards to nature?

RP: I have spent about 10 years living in small towns and on rural roads, plus several trips thumbing across Canada, so I have had a great deal of contact with the “natural” environment. I also grew up in the late 60s and early 70s (born 1957) so I was really influenced by all of the “back to the land” stuff, and the re-emergence of textiles and natural material as an art form and process in that period of time.

Another root of the natural influence in my work comes from the recognition that all things on this planet Earth must exist within certain parameters (such as gravity, emergence/decline, motion, etc.), so if you look closely, patterns can be seen that cross over from the underside of a cockroach, lobster or scorpion to the wave marks on the shore, seabed deposits, the mammalian ribcage, and the clouds that exist in the cirrus family, just to draw a few comparisons. A third explanation of the presence of landscape elements in my work is the basic tendency of human beings to modify their environment, in various ways, to make it more conducive to their happiness; being based in the downtown of Toronto elicits a type of wish fulfillment balancing that emerges in my work. I’m actually pretty split that way — I can either live right downtown in an urban centre or right out in the woods.

In summation, my work stems from a desire for interconnectness, a love of nature, a pathological distaste for boredom, and a rebellion against limitations — externally or internally imposed.

You can view more of Richard’s work on his website.

By Kerry Wright Zentner

I’m walking along Queen because in a short time, I’m supposed to be meeting with a friend of a friend. The idea is that since we’re both weird artists, we’re supposed to get along. I was told he’s only in town for a week before he continues on his journey, with no fixed address, to Montréal. So he’s a vagabond, eh?

I’m struck immediately by his fashion style and his thoughtful composure. There’s a cerebral calmness to him which is offset and complemented by his youthful jauntiness. We talk for a long time, discovering that we have a lot of interests in common. For a while we discuss our current thoughts and our (literal) dreams. We watch the beautiful people walk by, and talk of secret emotions and lost loves, and of the difficulties and the despairs, but also of the great lusciousness and the terrible beauty.

By the end of the conversation (signified by the three-legged dog walking by), I’m highly energized and exhausted (must be the sleepless nights). I go home to occupy myself with menial chores and let my mind cool down, it having been overflowed with ideas.

The following conversation was conducted via email.

MONDO: You have an interesting background. Tell me how you got into each discipline you’re involved with. How did you decide to become an artist, and what inspired you as a child?

Aghostino Demarr: Well, I’m not sure I ever did decide to become an artist. I’m still not fully confident in that description. Both of my parents have backgrounds in science, so I really think of myself as a scientist on some level. A scientist of art, not to sound pretentious. The result of my endeavours is art, but the process itself feels very scientific; it’s about being methodical and there’s a lot of researching and dissecting and stitching back together in building these aesthetic compounds. I feel the difference between being an artist at heart and being a scientist at heart is the attitude you approach something with (although the two can be very similar). I don’t consider mine an artistic process — creative yes, but aside from that it’s more like data gathering, but through the filter of my aesthetic. I’m finding the solution for a conundrum, creating little equations.

I have always been deeply affected by beauty, however. When I was young, I was surrounded by strange things, the type of which you might expect to find in a scientific household (things in jars, bones, things in tubes), as well as a lot of nature. I was born on an island in the Azores (on Sao Miguel), which is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. My mother was working there [in Sao Miguel] as a biologist, and we used to have a lot of animal specimens around the house. I remember being scared of them, but eventually it became ordinary to have some dead thing staring at me from its jail of formaldehyde. I’d say that definitely affected me. As well as the animals, my mother collected ceramics which were made by people on the island largely as art pieces for the tourists to buy. In this era, I developed a certain kind of respect for artefacts, a sense of there being these objects which were sacred or mysterious, and precious. We had small sets of archeological material: these ornate fossils, and little dolls made of painted human bone. Our whole house was sort of a museum, but it didn’t seem strange at the time. When I was a little older, we moved to Paris; that was when I discovered real museums.

MONDO: You make visual collages as well as write poetry. Who or what inspires your current work? What does the collage process mean to you, and how do you interpret the work?

AD: Pretty much the same things that inspired me as a kid still inspire me now. Treasures and artefacts, nature, and anthropology. The museums in Paris are fantastic. I recently watched this film called La Jete, in which there’s a scene that takes place in a museum full of taxidermy animals. I’ve been there in real life and it’s amazing to contemplate these animals in their state of preservation. They led lives of growth (roaming and resting and killing), and had no idea they would end up in this silence, no concept of this kind of place where all different species of animal stand finally equalized, ending their life-long tumult. I find that state of exhibition enthralling. This singular and untouched sacred stasis that is given to certain objects.

When I left Paris to move to Canada, I really missed my house and the other museums, and I wanted to recreate that sensation of going through an exhibit. Collage gives me the interesting opportunity to combine multiple, dissimilar ideas into one single idea. This more accurately represents the sensation of viewing something at a museum, because you are usually processing a bunch of different non-visual information about a piece, such as its period, or its historical applications. So mainly I [make collages] just for personal nostalgic value. With poetry it’s the same. I’m trying to synthesize fond sensations from my childhood. My father reading children’s fables to me in English, growing up in a Portuguese community, reading from tomes of science texts; all of these things affected my sense of language. In re-creating that in my cut-up collage poems, I often use bits of translated French and Portuguese, a lot of science text, and also children’s stories.

MONDO: Tell me about your process. What methods do you employ? How does the method you use change or reflect your intentions with the content of the work?

AD: My work is largely about finding disparate elements and combining them to form a unique sensation. I’m not interested in isolating and distilling an entity or an idea, I’m interested in having different types of information absorbed simultaneously. I like to be selective about the elements, though, so I can control that sensation. I won’t combine [just] any two things, they have to be two or three specific things which appeal to me.

MONDO: You come from a scientific background, but a lot of your work has religious elements. Where does this come from and how do you personally reconcile the elements of science and religion?

AD: Well, I don’t subscribe to a particular religion, but I consider myself religious in my contemplation of “The Inconceivable.” People seem to have this idea that science and religion (or specifically, belief in God) are at war, which they aren’t. Even though their ideas about reality sometimes contradict, as practices they are not mutually exclusive. Ultimately, they are each just different perceptions of Truth. They each ask you for a degree of faith in trusting their theories and methods. We usually don’t describe it as “faith” in science, but as far as larger philosophical enquiries are concerned, that’s what it is. None of us know what’s going on here. We don’t know what experience itself is. None of us have a definition for what life is. We don’t know why there is animate matter, and why there’s inanimate matter, and what causes that central difference. We cannot conceive of the nothingness or eternity which must have preceded this universe. We cannot conceive of the nothingness or infinity which lies at the borders of this universe. We cannot explain our own sentient state of consciousness. We should be interested in philosophizing and hearing as many theories as we can. They are always going to remain theories, because many of the questions they approach are unanswerable, so there’s no point in pretending that it’s actual knowledge.

As for the images, the concepts of worship and of being religious with something do interest me. Even though my childhood was rife with scientific elements, I remember observing religious experiences. There is a dominant Roman Catholic tradition on the island, but aside from being aware of that, I was aware of a sense of sacredness in the natural world even at that young age. I remember visiting Fire Lake, which is in the crater of a sleeping volcano in the centre of Sao Miguel. We actually climbed down inside to swim there. The water is incredibly clean and pure. I swam on my back and looked up out of this volcano, imagining its history of eruption, and I discovered this intense spiritual connection to my existence. It was a really incredible experience.

So, I abide by a type of intuitive belief. I like the idea of there being something which we don’t understand and which is constantly altering the world in ways which we cannot comprehend. Life is inherently absurd, so an absurd notion will fit. I would place my definition of God as “that which is eternally inconceivable.”

MONDO: Lastly, what do you have planned for the future? Projects, events, or travel? Where do you want your art to go from here?

AD: I’m not sure where the art thing will go. I’m doing an album cover right now, which is exciting, but I can’t imagine making a living off that. I’ll always keep it as a method for cataloguing personal sensations. It’s just a mirror for me.

Obviously, I’m traveling right now, but I have no idea where I might end up or how long I’ll be there for. It’s frightening and exciting, and I’m worried that it will become the only way to live. I’m not doing it very expensively, so lacking certain conveniences becomes stressful after a while.

I regret that I’m not more political. Some people who are comfortable with their lives begin to get apathetic, especially in first-world societies, and no matter how aware they are of their negative impact, how many movies they watch about it, or how many opportunities they have, they still don’t change their lifestyles, or contribute in any positive way. I’ve decided not to be like that. I want to have no negative impact, especially environmentally. I get called an idealist a lot of the time, as if it’s a negative thing, like I’m delusional and living in an imaginary world (I think people are scared to use their imaginations). But idealism is a really good thing. People should work towards ideals. A change has to be conceived of by someone before it can come into existence. That’s basic cause and effect.

I also want to travel into outer space, but that isn’t likely to happen, and it conflicts with the whole low impact attitude, so I’ll just have to visualize it instead. Never underestimate the power of this human mind we’ve got.

By Kerry Wright Zentner

Julio Ferrer was born in Cuba in 1973. He graduated from The National School of Art in Cuba in 1992. Since then, he has won numerous prizes for his paintings as well as for his satirical art. Ferrer is also an intelligent and enthusiastic man, which I discover upon meeting him in the gallery space above This Ain’t the Rosedale Library on Church St. His work has been exhibited there for the last couple of weeks as part of an off-site exhibit presented by Spence Gallery, and today he is minding the show on its last day of display. This gives us ample time to sit down for a conversation while guests mill about the space.

Seeing the art in person, the first thing I notice is that it’s much larger than I had expected, and a few of the pieces seem to swallow you in their deep colours and surfaces. The following conversation ensues. By the end, I feel that I’ve made a new friend. It’s a shame he’s only here until December.

MONDO: Tell me about your background. What were your first introductions to art and how did you get interested in painting?

Julio Ferrer: When I was a child, my grandpa introduced me to the first knowledge I had about art history. He also taught me to draw and paint. He painted in a very graphic way, cartoon-like, using flat colours and thick black outlines to build his images. He also used to paint scenes of graphic humour on pieces of cardboard. I guess that style influenced my work a lot.

MONDO: Tell me about your images. In some pieces there seems to be a correlation between tourism and pornography. What does that imagery mean to you?

JF: As an artist, I want to tell about the moment I live in and the way I see things around me. The pieces you mentioned belong to a series of work that tells a bit about the story of prostitutes in Cuba and their desire to meet a tourist, get married, and leave the country. I’ve used aggressive images in most of the cases as it’s not my interest to create art that looks beautiful, at least for telling this story. It’s well executed but also provocative and aggressive. I try to be smart with the ideas, so the conceptual side of the work should be very strong, from my point of view. I used what are basically close ups at a huge scale, so the images can swallow the spectator into the work. I mixed the bodies and faces of these women indulging in pleasure, with the element of the plane symbolizing the male. The colours I used (the colours of the Cuban flag) are very symbolic for me too.

MONDO: What is the importance of the Hokusai wave? Also, what is the importance of some of the other objects you paint (oars, propellers, airplanes)?

JF: The Hokusai wave has been with me through years of creative activity. When I studied art I loved the piece. I always thought it was huge, but I had the chance to see the original work one day in 1997. It was in Havana at a show of Japanese art treasures, and I was amazed by the small scale of the print and by how big I had imagined it to be. By that time, I had already made my first appropriation of the wave as coming out of a glass of wine during a toast. Three years later, I could finally afford to make the piece called “90 miles,” which was just the tsunami, but all in red. The size of the piece is 260 x 386 cm and it tells about the distance in between Cuba and Florida, and how thousands of Cubans have died in those waters while trying to follow the American dream. In general, I have used the symbolism of the wave to give multiple different lectures. I have turned it into sperm, smoke, had it coming out from a washing machine, had it as the image on a Russian black and white TV, etc. It’s an image that brings out different feelings and I want to approach those feeling as well, also using the beauty of that image.

The oar, propeller, and airplane are all things people use to leave the country. People take whatever method they think they can afford in trying to do that. For me, they are important elements as, in some of my paintings, these things are the representation of the Cubans who are trying to escape. It’s more authentic to represent the media they use to escape with, rather than the people themselves. It’s more symbolic of their attempts.

MONDO: Your work is humourous as well as political. Do you feel you have specific political statements you’d like to make, or is the humour the most important attribute of your work?

JF: My work is satirical, but in a positive way. I want to show things that make people reflect on something. I don’t pretend to make fun of things in a silly way, I want that people smile or laugh, but while they are reflecting on the theme of the images. When people refer to Cuba, the word “politics” comes to their minds, as if the politics of the country are wrong. I think every country on the planet has their good and bad things in terms of their politics. We [Cuba] are not perfect but we try to be the best we can, in my opinion. I just want to represent upon the canvas, for posterity’s sake, the moment in which I live, that’s all. And through the way in which I express that moment, to make it accessible to everybody with a thoughtful laugh.

MONDO: You’ve developed a wonderfully distinct graphic style. Are there specific artists or movements that have influenced you? What inspires you when you work?

JF: I might say that above all are Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Hokusai and all the Japanese erotic prints. I’m always with my muse, as well. At any time she could come by and drop me an idea, and in that single second I could be the happiest man in the world.

MONDO: How is Canada compared to Cuba for you, as far as being an artist goes? Is it easier for you to make a living as an artist in Cuba? What do you plan to do when you go back — do you have any future projects?

JF: I might say that I have been very lucky here. I’ve been getting commissions to do what I call POPtraits (portraits of children, basically in my pop-art style). Also, I have connected very fast with the art world here thanks to an invaluable friend who I’ve met with in Hamilton. But I still think I make a better living as an artist in my country, probably because I have recognition there, and here I’m only living for a few months. I sell my paintings there to tourists from all over the world. They are really into spending money on local art during their holidays. I’ll probably sell more of my paintings to Canadian tourists back in Cuba, than here. (laughs)

That is just how they differ in terms of selling art. The government in Cuba is also very supportive of arts. Galleries just want to show avant-garde art in their spaces, they don’t really care about selling; they just want to show the most experimental art. That fact allows me to show probably anything I want. I haven’t experienced that mentality here because galleries are concerned a lot with selling. This mentality even affects making the images themselves, their scale and such, because galleries depend on them being affordable to their clients. I know there are experimental spaces as well, but I haven’t had the luck of showing at them. Anyway, I prefer to do my art in my country, as I have less stress there, at least in matters of art.

In the future, I want to bring out a project based on my experiences in Canada. I’ve been working on sketches which I will develop once I go back to Cuba. I’m feeling like a sponge here, and when I go back I will turn all these emotions on to canvases. I will miss Canada, but it will last forever in my paintings.

You can contact Julio Ferrer at noesfacilcu (at) yahoo.es.

By Kerry Wright Zentner

I know what you’re thinking, “Last week he interviewed his mother, this week he’s interviewing his father, what’s he gonna do next week, interview himself?” And to that I say, “WHAT-evah, I do what I want!” And, despite your presumed skepticism, the fact remains that my parents are two of the most interesting artists I know. I just happen to be in proximity to them. Besides, there’s a small publication in Iceland that’s been clamouring to get their hands on this material for months. Sorry, Iceland, looks like we got here first.Steve Venright has been a monumental source of inspiration to me through my whole life. He infused my childhood with wonderment and awe, inventing board games, making stop-motion movies, and employing inspired word-play. He is a supreme lexiconjuror, a profound inventor, and a loving father to one and a half other human beings, and in addition is the esteemed author of Spiral Agitator, among other books of poetry. I had the honour of interviewing him this week, while he was away in his home town of Sarnia.

MONDO: Hi, Dad. Tell me a bit about your background. What prompted you to begin writing? What sorts of things inspired you as a child?

Steve Venright: I don’t remember what prompted me to begin writing; I just remember the excitement of being able to make something out of nothing seemed like magic and still does. Maybe that’s where my notion of “lexiconjury” came from. Even as a child I was fascinated by dreams and states of awareness that seemed to transcend the ordinary. Of course, an awareness of the ordinary can be transcendent too — and there’s another idea that’s figured into my work. I started self-publishing somewhere between the ages of five and seven, I think. My first publication was a saddle-stitched monograph called The Story of Elsie, Bessie and Geraldine the Cows. It was an edition of one, and may still be my bestseller. Other things that inspired me as a child were: an olive-coloured oil pencil, luxuriant easy-listening songs of the day such as Percy Faith’s rendition of the theme from A Summer Place, catching crayfish on a board in “the crick”, and every form of hockey imaginable.

MONDO: Most people know you as a writer, but you are also a “soundscapist” and an accomplished visual artist. I particularly love your Variegraphs. I remember playing with finger-paints as a child and attempting to create some myself. What process led you to begin creating them? What is the process itself like?

SV: I stumbled upon Variegraphy fortuitously. My son — you, right? — had been given some particularly vibrant finger-paints. I tried some basic decalcomania — blobbing different colours onto a glossy sheet of paper then pressing and peeling — and was impressed by the chromatic qualities and the sort of cordillera of lines that appeared. A few years later when I got a computer and started playing around with Photoshop, I began applying various filters and treatments to scans of those initial paintings. A few years after that, I began tiling samples from the digital variegraphs, producing what I called “tryptiles” (they reminded me of certain visions I’d had after ingesting tryptamine psychedlics). As for the soundscapes, the process at times is similar: mixing source materials together, applying effects, flipping the results around and re-layering, etc.

MONDO: You have an incredible pool of interests which you draw from. What are some of the things that inspire you most in your writing/visual art and/or in everyday life? Which particular artists do you admire and why?

SV: When I discovered the early writers of Surrealism at age seventeen, it was an intoxication, a liberation. I’d begun attempting to write from a sort of trance state and I must have wondered: who else was into this shit? Enter Breton and the gang, with their chance activities, sleeping fits, collaborative games, love of puns and other wordplay, mad love, black humour, exaltation of the sensual, exploration of “psychotic” states, and devotion to changing life and transforming the world. Nearly a century later, none of that sounds boring or irrelevant. MONDO has actually been covering a lot of artists whose work I love: Peter Kalyniuk, William A. Davison and Sherri Lyn Higgins, Dale Zentner, Kerry Zentner.

Canada has always produced incredibly dynamic and inventive poets. I have so many friends in the various small press communities here in Toronto, and elsewhere in the country, that I often shy away from mentioning anyone in particular, so as not to overlook the others. But here are a couple dear old friends of mine with great new books, so I’ll mention them: Stuart Ross and his I Cut My Finger (Anvil Press), and David W. McFadden and his Why Are You So Sad? (Insomniac Press).

Other inspirational forces include: the nuevo tango of Astor Piazzolla, the writings and raps of Terence McKenna and other psychedelic explorers, the long, strange trip of the Grateful Dead, the paintings of Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington, Punk and Prog, the research of Charles Fort, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Emo Phillips, the brave works of 9/11 Truth crusaders such as our own Barrie Zwicker, Claudine Longet’s version of “Golden Slumbers”… no, I’d better stop there — this could go on for pages.

MONDO: In addition to everything else, you are a marvelous inventor and have also led several successful performance-tours. What was the idea behind the TVI Reality Check? Is there documentation of it anywhere?

SV: There exists about four hours of video footage from two different sources, and I’d love to make a twelve-minute movie from it one day, or maybe a thirty-second commercial. The idea was to spend a day driving around Toronto in the TVI Mobile Reality Inspection Lab providing “reality checks” at various commercial, residential, political and academic locations. Not the most ecologically sound idea, as Tooker Gomberg (who joined us for an unscheduled examination of then-mayor Mel Lastman’s office) observed, but a much-needed service as noted by all. The online documentation is a little awkward to reach because the TVI site uses frames, but if you look around you’ll find quite a few photos of onsite operations by reality technicians such as Samuel “Samuel Andreyev” Andreyev, David Eagan, Jesse Huisken and the aforementioned William Davison, Sherri Lyn Higgins, and Kerry Zentner. You’ll also get to have a look at contraptions such as the Ontologator, the Phenomenatron, and the Ultimascope. The demand was high for continuing the service, but one day of reality was enough for me.

MONDO: Tell me again about your Hallucinatorium!

SV: The Hallucinatorium was an offshoot of Alter Sublime Neurotechnologies, which I began as a way of celebrating and selling various brain machines such as the BT5 Brain Tuner (cranial electrostimulator), and the DAVID Paradise (pulsed light and sound device). My sideshow-like set-up, which appeared at nightclubs and raves throughout the early-to-mid ’90s, featured pairs of pulsed-light goggles I’d programmed to be particularly psychedlic. For those who hadn’t used psychedelics before, it was a glimpse into “the retinal circus”. For those who were on psychedelics it was, as many of the archival photos will attest, a truly ultimascopic experience.

MONDO: I’ve used some of those devices and they are incredible. So, are you working on anything currently that you’d care to reveal? What do you have planned for the artistic future?

SV: One thing I’m excited about is a feature film that the wonderful Markham Street Films is planning to do, based on the recorded sleeptalking of Dion McGregor. Pippa Lambert and I had done some initial shooting towards an animated documentary inspired by the life and somniloquies of the world’s most renowned sleeptalker, whose astounding nocturnal transmissions can be heard on an LP from 1964 and two CDs (one of which, The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor, was released on my Torpor Vigil Industries label). We hope to be involved in some way with the production, but we’re happy it’s in the hands of MSF.

Another thing is a new book called Floors of Enduring Beauty. It’s coming out through Mansfield Press in the fall. My favourite piece in it is probably the lengthy narrative piece generated entirely by original spoonerisms. I’ve discovered three or four hundred such puns as of this time, and they keep revealing themselves, sometimes even as I sleep. The best ones are always spoken unintentionally, tips of the slung, such as the great line (if your readers don’t mind my bringing this around to the familial connection again) which your mother uttered the other day when she asked: “Do your hawks have souls in them?”

I think that’s the question we all should be asking ourselves.

You can look into Steve Venright’s work more thoroughly at www.TorporVigil.com.

My Adventures with The Scream Literary Festival

By Kerry Wright Zentner

Ironically, after a week full of amazing literary events I am finding it very difficult to find words to describe it. They have all either been exhausted or their meanings commandeered by poeticism to such a degree that they no longer function in the organization of ordinary thought. Maybe that’s okay. To describe poetry in non-poetic terms is a self-defeating exercise. That, to me, is the beauty of poetry: it’s a singular entity, the effect it has on the mind cannot be matched by any description of the effect. Description is simply inadequate. This notion was driven home to me repeatedly over the course of the last week or so. Sure, I could tell you that I sat in the abandoned Don Valley Brickworks and listened to Christopher Dewdney read A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario in its entirety while sampling some of the finest gourmet food I have ever eaten and watching the sun set, but it doesn’t do justice in conferring to you the feel of the experience itself. You might instead feel a sense of loss at not having been there yourself. Perhaps a momentary strain of second-hand beauty will awaken within you and you will remind yourself to be more observant. Yet, for whatever reason, I will now attempt to describe that which has already gone before. Maybe you will decide to join us next year.

Excerpts from The Scream Literary Festival #15, 2007:

July 6th
The Dewdney Principle: A Book-Length Dinner Reading

Crossing under the immense and beastly body of the abandoned building I approach the dining area. The sky is singing, the way it often does in actual unfiltered nature. I sit down directly across from the sun. I can see that it is tired of trying to communicate the day to us. We do not really understand what it means. The building observes us. It is listening with absurd silence to our conversations, waiting for a book to be read into its crumbling body. Eventually a man comes along to negotiate our own silence. Behind him stretches a large, murky pond. He tells us to gaze into the endless present, to watch the burnished, luminous sky whilst the birds and eventually the bats skim its transformative catacombs. The man begins to read. Immediately everything around me is relevant, everything is well placed. The ground, the brick, the insects, all vibrate with delicate and sexual necessity. I notice that every surface is ringing with sound. The alcove of the building is humming along with the man. It has been waiting to hum again since its death. I get up and climb around it. The I-beams holler inaudibly through the rubble at the crumbling frontispiece, unconcerned with their own rusted extinction. Raccoons clamber around like maggots in the great distended head of the building, the unstoppable progenitors of decay. The frogs, owls, and spiders have all allowed us to be here, to read to them in their unrestrained natural sanctum. The building now knows that, in actuality, it is teeming with life, and beyond that, it is also teeming with existence. The man finishes reading. I am back in my seat, the taste of music fresh and honey-like on my tongue.

July 7th
Poets in Their Natural Habitat: A Field Trip

The two of us stand opposite each other, reading out our poetry as a dialogue, one sentence at a time. Angela radiates beauty and energy. My father approaches, leading a group of poetically-inclined adventurers. They encircle us, listening in to what we are saying. Their laughter frightens me and I camouflage myself as a rock, tucking my head down to my knees and dropping to the ground. Simultaneously, Angela hides against a tree, implementing a leafy tree branch as concealment. My father and his safari-conducting accomplice, Nadia Halim, begin to talk excitedly about us, our habits and predilections. It is, after all, quite a thing to discover poets in their natural habitat, unconfined to the stage. And it is not often that so many of them are spotted in a single day. As the tour continues we are treated to many poet sightings, including not one, but two encounters with a William A. Davison (one of whom was poeticizing from a small aperture in the ground). We capture and tag a live Hugh Thomas, whereupon we convince him to beguile us for a short time with his writings. We see the Myna Wallin strutting her plumage at an ice cream shop, while nearby a passing Nicholas Power invokes his mating call. We observe the congenial Luciano Iacobelli elucidate his childhood from the patio of Dooney’s Café, a territory which indisputably belongs to him. So many poets are encountered and in such quick succession that it defies me to recount. The expedition comes to a close at the Victory Café, where many of the poets we have seen join us to scavenge for food. After all is said (and done), new bonds are formed amidst a cornucopia of intriguing thought. I will cry if this does not become an annual event.

July 9th
Behold What We Have Wrought: Welcome to the Laboratory

My artistic collaborators and I descend into the basement of Type Books. We are suddenly in a sarcophagus. Strange masks dangle ribbons of literature from the walls. The communist manifesto weaves, bloody and outstretched into the dead space. The lights go off and we listen to Dr. Frankenstein recount the formation of what was his highest achievement and, simultaneously, his greatest blunder. It’s a tale of scientific knowledge used for disturbing ends in the creation of a monster, which, aptly, is the very thing we have all assembled here to accomplish on this humid July evening. The term Exquisite Corpse was happened upon by the surrealists and without any direct reference to Mary Shelley’s infamous monster, though he does embody the idea (and the term) in many different ways, including literally. The idea here is for multiple participants to compose a work collaboratively, using many distinct and separate elements, placed together in an order, to form a continuous whole. In this instance we are given several tomes of science text to carve into, neatly adhering to this year’s “Science” theme at the festival. I’ve done this sort of thing before (quite often, as a matter of fact) but never with so many people. The room is soon filled with the sound of twenty-some clacking scissors and, a short time later, our monster is constructed: a three-part opus as envisioned by our evening’s host, Mark Higgins. The thing is a gnarled and ungainly scroll and reads as if a malfunctioning robot had decided to spew out its most arbitrary articles of science trivia in one long entreaty, requesting…god-knows-what. These collaborative efforts are usually a hit-or-miss endeavour, and the result of this particular experiment is surprisingly good for the amount of people involved. It serves to illustrate the interesting types of people who attend the Scream Literary Festival every year. This type of collaborative activity and exchange of ideas is a near necessity when a bunch of neat artistic people are gathered together and I’m severely glad that it has happened. I leave just as “the Squirm” begins, and stumble home like Frankenstein’s monster.

The festival is in its fifteenth year, and continues to grow in scale with each one that passes. This year’s events yielded some legendary new classics which are sure to become future staples. In addition to the three here detailed (which are but a small sampling of the activities), I attended several other events including the one that incited the whole festival: The Scream in High Park. I can now earnestly say that the Scream is easily one of Toronto’s most interesting and intelligent festivals. It stimulates, indeed activates, something within us which is too often neglected: The Poetic Mind (cue spooky, Twilight-Zone music). It has renewed in me a romantic sense of nature and exploration inside the mind and out. Moreover, it has instilled in me the importance of participating in these beautiful and unusual moments and events that make Toronto such an interesting place to occupy. Next year, you will join me.

Conversation with Kerry Wright Zentner.

Today, I sat down with my mother to talk about the fact that she sculpts tiny people and dresses them up. No, it wasn’t an intervention: she is a doll artist, and has been for the past 12 years or so. Initially, I was going to interview her, and then she suggested that she interview me on what I thought about her. Eventually, we just had a conversation that skirted the boundaries of each, and I dug up the deep, dark secrets of my family’s past.

Dale Zentner: What are your first memories about my dolls? Do you recall anything?

MONDO: I remember being afraid of them, when you were making the larger-sized ones and I was smaller at the time. It frightened me to be comparable in size to something so lifelike, yet so utterly inanimate. I guess it was reminding me of mortality, even though I wouldn’t have known that that’s what it was at the time.

DZ: I used to have to turn the dolls around so they wouldn’t face you at night.

MONDO: It’s funny because they aren’t frightening visually, they’re cute. I think the characters I draw are like a twisted nightmare parallel of yours. Somebody once commented that there’s a similarity between the faces we create. I think it’s because any artist employs some degree of self-portraiture in their own work. Since we happen to look alike (why is that again? Genetics or something?), we make similar-looking faces. Your’s aren’t as hideous or grotesque, of course.

DZ: Yeah, if my dolls looked like your creatures, they wouldn’t be selling (laughs). They could, but it would be a different audience.

MONDO: Do you ever think about doing imaginary (as opposed to representational) types of sculpture?

DZ: Sometimes. It would be a bit easier for me now. The first several years, really, of doll-making, were just perfecting a skill. Now I would like to do something a little less traditional. I don’t think I would do fantasy, but something edging out there a bit more, even just in terms of the fashions.

MONDO: Right now, they’re idealistic, wouldn’t you say?

DZ: I sculpt a lot of children, and children are sort of idealized versions of people already. There’s something appealing about sculpting something that is more beautiful and ideal, as opposed to too realistic.

MONDO: Do you feel like you make your dolls sort of as mannequins to showcase your fashions?

DZ: Yeah, for sure.

MONDO: Because you made children’s fashions before doll-making, right?

DZ: Yeah. And now because I’m also doing doll fashions for ball-jointed dolls, it’s almost literally that.

MONDO: How did you segue from children’s clothes into doll-making?

DZ: Um, I wanted to make money. (laughs) I wanted to make some object that would be considered art, or even high craft. Something one-of-a-kind. Doll-making presented itself to me as something that used a lot of my skills in needlework and design, and it seemed to fit. When I was starting out, this was back in the eighties, there were already some dolls being made as art pieces. A lot of artists were using porcelain and experimenting, and they were making them as dolls for adults (instead of as toys). So, the fact that people were designing collectable dolls, some of which were selling at very high prices, I think really appealed to me, and made it possible for me to get started. Of course, then discovering polymer clays made it more accessible because all you needed was a hunk of clay and a home oven, no moulds or anything. I remember having thought for a long time that I’d like to find something that incorporated a lot of my natural skills. So it was great. Except for the heads that blew up. (laughs)

MONDO: I remember those. It takes a lot of courage to jump into doing something that doesn’t seem immediately very lucrative as a business venture. Do you think that you kind of structured your life so that you’d end up doing something creative and forcing yourself to make money that way?

DZ: Well, I think the thing that saved me was being really poor. (laughs) I wasn’t working at the time, so I wasn’t losing anything by starting doll-making. I wasn’t giving anything up. I also was really determined that I should use the few natural skills I had. I hadn’t up until then, and I was not young anymore. I was, I think, around forty. So, in some ways, there was a lot of pressure as well. But I really wanted to be doing something that I really enjoyed because, for me, that was the real mark of success. I just decided I could do it. I decided on some spiritual level to let nothing stop me from that kind of success, and that determination helped me figure out all the little hurdles I faced on the way.

MONDO: How do you think having kids affected your creativity? Was it a source of inspiration? I remember you used to make us model our arms as reference for you when you were starting out.

DZ: Well there was inherently some degree of inspiration from having kids around. But even more important than that was that, as a parent, I wanted my kids to see that I had done something that I enjoyed doing and that that is a possibility in life. That was really important for me. And, well… I hope it worked. (laughs)

MONDO: Yeah, except for the unrealistic standards. (laughs) I remember it was inspiring to me to see you make all our Halloween costumes and little toys for us and that sort of thing. You’ve come full circle in a way, making kids clothes originally, then dolls with clothes, and more recently you’ve started making clothes for ball-jointed dolls. Do you feel, since you’ve started making just fashions again, that it’s changed your sources of inspiration?

DZ: I think it’s allowed me to try out some more interesting fashions that maybe wouldn’t have sold as part of a doll. As for inspiration, I’ve never really had trouble finding it. It’s good to surround yourself with interesting things. I have a stockpile of trim and different materials. I look at fashion magazines regularly. Even just a colour combination will sometimes inspire a certain idea or emotion.

MONDO: So you want to convey specific emotions with your work?

DZ: Well, I want to make beauty. But it’s funny because I sort of — I think of it as food in some way. Like it looks delicious to me. And I want to make it look delicious so you get the sensation of it looking like, you know, ice cream tastes or that sort of thing. Yeah, it’s often about food. (laughs) I don’t know why.

MONDO: It’s almost like you’re a synesthete or something. You feel your colours, or you taste your textures. The city must be delicious to you.

DZ: Well actually, yeah. I need a lot of activity surrounding me. That’s why, when I disappeared for that year and lived in the country in the winter; there wasn’t enough to feed me there. And see, here I’m using the word feed again. There wasn’t enough stimulation, enough visual activity.

MONDO: You didn’t eat any wild mushrooms then, I guess?

DZ: (laughs)

MONDO: You draw a lot of inspiration from your environment. Are there any specific artists that you like?

DZ: Well there’s a type of artist I like. Mark Ryden or Ray Caesar, Audrey Kawasaki. Those are all painters, but there’s a certain innocence to their work, child-like figures, and lush environments. Again, it seems edible to me. Everyone comments on the innocence of my dolls, and yes, that’s important to me.

MONDO: Do you want to talk about your own childhood and growing up? You grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan for, what, your first ten years?

DZ: Yep. Um, well, when I look back, I remember liking the stimulation of the city and the sort of lushness. My childhood was kind of stark. Everything we had to entertain ourselves kind of had to come from our imagination, we didn’t have toys. Hardly anything at all. So I was, you know, the biggest daydreamer going. I remember it was exciting when our mother would make us dresses. That was really exiting because she had to order stuff from a catalogue. We would open these packages full of fabric and we’d get to watch her make them into clothing. She taught us to sew. She always liked her daughters to look pretty, soÉ She had nine kids and the first four were girls, so she was quite busy. I remember making cardboard dolls when I was quite young and then making clothes for them. Playing with them in the chicken coop. (laughs) I used to watch my father working, fixing machinery. I liked the idea that when you designed something you had to figure out how all the parts go together. My dad was good at that.

MONDO: What is your process like? You work largely intuitively, right?

DZ: Yes. I can’t plan ahead what something will look like. Some doll artists do portraits, but I would find that very frustrating. My best work is done organically, and comes from a space that you have to find in yourself. I think all artists have that. I feel a lot of satisfaction seeing a finished work. It’s surprising to see that you’ve created something unique that hadn’t existed until recently. Doll-making for me is about little comforts like this. I think people are looking for a little bit of beauty when they buy my dolls. I’m not going to change the world with my dolls, but I can contribute to people’s individual comfort and sense of beauty. Maybe one day I’ll try to make an ugly doll, but I don’t think it would work.

MONDO: Maybe one day I’ll try to draw something that’s not hideous.

DZ: (laughs) Alright, we can switch.

MONDO: Do you have any advice for people who might like to start making dolls?

DZ: No. (laughs) If there’s something you love to do, then just do it. If you really love it, you’ll do it. My art is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Part of it was lucky timing, but you also have to put your heart and soul into it.

The Loner Show (Fringe)
Robert Gill Theatre, check local theatre listings for show times.

By Kerry Wright Zentner

How do you feel about things that have no real meaning? If they satisfy you, then you should go to The Loner Show. You should also go to it if you are one of those lucky people who enjoys absurd humour and meandering, dreamlike (or nightmarish) situations which do not consent to really resolve themselves, and which are satisfied to merely exist. This sounds harsh, but I am actually recommending the show.

The Loner Show is not really theatre in the classical sense. That is to say, it is not a play, and is not to be confused as a heartfelt and touching story of five lonely urbanites, trying to find love in the big city. Loner-holics anonymous this is not. There is no overarching plot and, although the performances are all character-based, no real development of character is employed. Although the show deals with the highly relatable themes of love and loneliness, the characters and situations stray so far into absurdity that they do not attempt to be related to reality at all, and are presented as a freak show more than anything. No revelations to the soul here, just good old-fashioned improv. In that sense, The Loner Show is really like a night at a comedy club, but sans the annoying hecklers and cheap booze.

This is how it played out on night one:

I enter the Robert Gill theatre, which is small and low. It is tucked away on the third floor of the Koffler Student Centre located at College and St. George, and it feels kind of confining. Soon the lights dim and a projector screen alights. The projects host and mastermind, Brian Barlow, takes the form of a handy man for the following video, and then appears onstage, in costume, for a short skit and to make the introductions. After the first introduction (wherein the notion of randomness will begin to take root in your mind), Michael Balazo takes the stage, bouncing around as a “Rex-kwon-do” style combat instructor who proceeds to advise us on the dangers and virtues of hand-to-hand combat (or foot-to-crotch combat) and the ways in which it has led him to love. After another introduction by the resourceful handy-man, we are treated to a video made by a disheveled, down-on-his-luck realtor (Levi McDougall) who apparently doesn’t have the interpersonal skills to give a tour of the house he is selling in person, and who, by the end, is seen lying dismally in the bathtub. Next up is Katie Crown, taking the mic as a shy first-time-reader who wants to share her story with us. Don’t let her act fool you though, she has a dangerous comedic mind that, as it turns out, is far from withholding. Following this is Kathleen Phillips’ story of finding love with a tiny, hideous man after being attacked by the voracious claws of cupid. And capping it off, Chris Locke makes an urgent appeal for the audience to help his village, regaling us with his travels thus far, which have included him receiving some abuse to his self esteem from a pair of mystical forest parrots.

The show (it clocks in at only 35-45 min.) dips midway, during the Q and A session (administered by our host), where we become aware that we are simply watching a guy filling time and trying to have a few humourous thoughts while on stage. More often than not, the answers to the audience’s questions are quick and funny, if brief and without direction. The idea of being complicit in the improvisation is appealing, but it could have gone further.

The important thing to note about The Loner Show is that it is largely improvised. The characters may be preconceived, but the whole show has an atmosphere of having been concocted on the spot, and apparently it was. This means that each and every night, an entirely different set of situations will be enacted, making no two viewings alike.

The only major let down was the fact that the six of them do not (nor any combination thereof) come together to do a final ensemble performance. It seems a major oversight to get six of Toronto’s finest comedians together and to not even have them collaborate. I felt the show could have used some cross-comedian repartee, rather than just serving to showcase each of their individual skills under the one loosely conceived theme of the loneliness and awkwardness that afflicts their six dismal characters. I would have also liked to see Levi McDougall improvising in person as opposed to on screen, although I did find his video entertaining.

Even so, I still saw some of the brightest local comedians dishing out their finest goods, and that’s why it worked. For me, the highlights of the show were firstly Katie Crown’s outrageously concocted and perfectly performed tale of redemption through explicit fetish sex in a populated shoe store, and Chris Locke’s run on sentence entreating us to help him save his wife who was kidnapped from town by villains on rollerblading evil horses, then given a sex change operation and apparently sent back to rape him (in case you can’t tell, this show is not kid-friendly). His tale played out as would a chapter from Candide had Voltaire been exposed to numerously more psychedelic drugs and eighties cartoons.

Ultimately, it was in these stream of consciousness moments when the brilliant dream logic of improvisation shone through the most. And those moments made the experience worthwhile for me, and are why it’s still reverberating around my skull.

By Kerry Wright Zentner

I hear Peter arrive, climbing the stairwell while I sit furiously jotting the last of my questions. I’ve known him since I was quite young, but even now it seems like there is a lot I want to ask him, many topics to cover, but I know it can’t be done in such a short time. Of all the people I know Peter is one of the most attuned to the artistic aspects of life, concentrating his appreciations with beguiling affect into his vast portfolio. We decide to go for a short walk into the Annex to grab some iced coffees before starting the interview. We philosophize, consolidate ideas, analyze, joke, vocalize absurdly, and return home to get down to business. But before we begin we decide we must record nine minutes of fantastic improvised music. And then business. But first, let’s have some toast, also! And more music! And then… business, right? If you want to call it that, yes.

It was as follows:

MONDO: Tell me about your background? What inspired you as a kid?

Peter Kalyniuk: My earliest inspiration to draw came roughly at the age of five. I saw my brother Gregory drawing a giant bloodshot eyeball at our dining room table and it looked fun so I tried it. Our mother used to draw pictures for us also. She was always a very creative person naturally, though she didn’t consider herself an artist, she definitely is one. She would draw to entertain us, make funny faces to scare us, talk in crazy voices that would make us laugh, and most importantly encourage us to draw simply for the fun of the activity. I think my mother was as much the source of our creativity as she was our existence. My father was too. He was also a very creative person and had good taste. He would watch horror and science fiction movies with us that would inspire our imaginations. Growing up I obsessively drew hundreds of pictures of my favorite movie characters.

MONDO: What is the process of drawing like for you? What sort of rituals do you employ? Do you listen to music, for instance?

PK: I almost always listen to music when I draw. I like to take long walks across the city and let some good music inspire me before sitting down to work. But the main ingredient for my creative process is solitude. I need to be alone for long periods of time to achieve the right state of mind. Music makes solitude more pleasant.

MONDO: How do you feel music relates to drawing? Is it important?

PK: To me it’s very important. I think music stimulates not just the sense of hearing but all the senses, and it elevates the mind to a higher realm of reality. It stimulates my visual imagination somehow. It’s one of the greatest joys in my life. So is drawing. So why not combine them? I have plans to create animations of my drawings some day. They’ll be dancing along to my own compositions.

MONDO: Are there specific artists that interest or inspire you? Where does your artistic impulse come from?

PK: My approach to art is very much influenced by surrealism, visionary art, aboriginal art, outsider/naïve art, abstract art of all sorts. I am also influenced by comic book art, film, cartoons, and, of course, music. But I would have to say that the art that inspires me the most is life itself. As a visual artist I consider myself an appreciator of all things visual. Everything I see is art to my eyes, and it all ends up filtered through my imagination and transformed into my own art.

MONDO: When talking about art that is more surreal or psychedelic rather than realistic and representational, the topic of drugs always seems to come up. How do you feel about the term psychedelic? How do you feel drugs affect the artistic process?

PK: I wouldn’t disagree with someone if they described my work as psychedelic. I think it has that quality to it. I personally wouldn’t use that word to describe my own work. As for drugs, I think drugs can be an easy way to bring out creativity that is already present, but I don’t think an artist gains creativity from using drugs. I think that anything that can be achieved with drugs can be achieved in other ways. So I don’t think it’s necessary to take drugs.

MONDO: Your recent self-publication Totems of Tato is a compilation of images that you’ve been working on for several years. Is there any specific importance to these images? What do they mean to you?

PK: Totems of Tato is my most personal and most experimental work to date. It is the first body of work I have intentionally set about to create in solitude. It began six years ago during a very difficult time in my personal and family life. The cover image is based on a vision I had of my father who died four years ago. I drew it after I found out he had cancer. “Tato” is the Ukranian word for Dad. The characters in the book are supposed to be part of a family. They loosely represent my own family as well as friends of mine, and people I knew during that period of time. Each image has a story behind it that relates to the time it was drawn and different real life experiences I was going through. With the style of the art in this book I focused more on the technical process than ever before. I have collaged elements of almost every drawing in the book using various experimental methods. These methods relate to the subject matter of family, death and disease conceptually. But the methods aren’t meant to be analyzed and it isn’t necessary for the viewer to know about them. They’re meant to contribute to the effect of the drawings subliminally.

MONDO: Are there any other publications or projects in the works? What are you looking forward to?

PK: I have several projects currently on the go. I’ll be releasing a book of comics called Stuntman William based on my pet hamster/imaginary friend from childhood. Willy was another source of inspiration for me and my brothers when we were growing up. When one of us would hold him and make his voice then the other two would listen and believe he was really talking. We would take turns and gradually his story and character would unfold. The book is actually a republishing of several smaller “zines” compiled into one that were done in the early nineties when I was a teenager. Other than that I’m planning to focus on music and painting more seriously. Eventually I’ll put out another book of drawings too. That’s about it.

If you’d like to get a closer look at some of Peter Kalyniuk’s art, his recent publication Totems of Tato is available for purchase at Pages Books & Magazines, The Beguiling, and Freedom Clothing.

By Kerry Wright Zentner

According to their website, “The Recordists are an amorphous collection of entities with no set membership” – a typically evasive bit of non-information from this Toronto-based art collective. Just who are these entities and what the heck is Recordism? Well, dear friends, that’s what MONDO is about to find out! …or not.

MONDO: Okay, so what is Recordism?

William A. Davison: Recordism can loosely be defined as an artistic ideology which is concerned with the continued development of certain forms of Fantastic Art, Literature, etc.; the investigation into and use of chance and automatic methods in current art practice; and an ongoing exploration of the connection between art and magick.

Recordism refers specifically to the act of ‘recording’ – a metaphor for the application of chance and automatism to the creative act. Recordism is both the process of ‘recording’ and the set of ideas which surround and inform that process.

Recordism is an ideospheric mutation of the meme known as Surrealism. It lives between the hairs of poet animals or in the dark folds of fabric on the masts of sunken ships.

Recordism is a loose, soft, downy mass of hair, feathers, etc.
Recordism is a length of string tied to the neck of a salamander.
Recordism is ice cream suits worn only on hot days.
Recordism is a flyspeck capable of occluding the sun.

Et cetera…

Uh, thanks…can I ask to whom I am speaking?

WD: William A. Davison and Sherri Lyn Higgins.

That seems straightforward enough. Do the two of you represent the entirety of The Recordists or are there others?

WD: There are others, though not all will admit to it. Some may not even be aware of it.

At what point did you realize you were Recordists?

WD: It was the morning of Dec. 5, 1984. I woke up and wrote the word “Recordist” in my journal, not knowing where the word came from or what it might mean. It’s taken me over 20 years to figure it out. I think I’ve almost got it.

Sherri Lyn Higgins: I’m still not sure that I am one.

The two of you have been making art together for a long time. Can you give us a quick overview of your various activities?

WD: No.

SH: William has trouble being brief.

WD+SH: The short version is that we met in small-town Nova Scotia and were part of a visual art collective there with some other misfits through much of the 80s. Then we went to art school (NSCAD) in Halifax, after which we moved to “the big smoke”. In the early 90s, we proceeded to infiltrate various Toronto art scenes starting with underground film and experimental music, later performance art and the lit scene. We got involved in Neoism, collaborated with Istvan Kantor/Monty Cantsin, and played in Neoist industrial noise band Phycus. In 1994 we started the International Bureau of Recordist Investigation and began various networking and collective activities. We created the open concept improv/noise collective U.R.G. (Urban Refuse Group), built homemade instruments, and played tons of gigs. In 2000, U.R.G. got trimmed down to six members and became Six Heads. We hosted weekly open meetings to play Surrealist and Recordist games. We exhibited/published visual art/comics here and there. William did many solo sound/performance art pieces under the name Songs of the New Erotics. Sherri did a number of ritual-based performances under her own name. We curated events for 7a*11d Performance Art Festival and Pleasure Dome film group. We met Steve Venright and collaborated with Torpor Vigil Industries. Beatriz Hausner joined the Bureau, then unjoined the Bureau but remained a friend/collaborator. William had his poetry published. Sherri did CD covers and book jackets. We went away to New York and England to meet modern-day Surrealists and play improvised music with some of them. We disbanded I.B.R.I. in 2004 but continued with most of the same activities. We became friends with surrealists from and/or living in Mexico, Enrique Lechuga, Ludwig Zeller, Susana Wald. We got involved in Toronto’s improvised music scene and then drifted towards noise, playing with Gastric Female Reflex and others. Through networking, we came into contact with San Francisco’s Oneiromantic Ambiguity Collective and worked with irr.app.(ext.) and Steve Stapleton/Nurse With Wound. Recently, we’ve been drawing a lot with a certain KWZ.

And yes, that was the short version!

It’s apparent that you both work in a variety of mediums – film, music, visual art, performance, poetry, etc. What draws you to this approach and how has it worked out for you?

SH: We are interested in freedom. Our approach is inter-disciplinary, or multi, or whatever. We don’t like to feel limited or that we have to be specialized. There’s always a pressure in the modern world to specialize. If you are an unknown artist working in a number of different mediums it’s considered dilettantism or being “unfocussed”. If you are well-known you are called a renaissance man (what are women called?) or a genius.

WD: What people often don’t understand is that we actually are specialized. We are Recordists. That’s our specialization. Our work is experimental, exploratory, and founded in a deep-seated belief that life, beyond the veneer of “civilization”, is essentially mysterious. It is, in fact, our specialization – our commitment to delving into this mysterious realm – that demands a multi-disciplinary approach and causes us to continually try new things, explore new mediums, and move across disciplinary boundaries.

How do you deal with the stigma that is attached to working in more than one medium?

WD: It can be very frustrating, but no matter what you’re doing there will always be people who will try to limit you. We just shrug it off as much as possible and get on with our work. For the most part, I think it’s surprising how well we’ve been able to do this!

I think that having a really clear idea of what we’re doing really helps us to get consistently good results, regardless of what medium we happen to be working in, even if it’s a medium or technique that’s fairly new to us. We know what we want to do and we know what works and what doesn’t. Our ideas are in place. Hopefully, if people are able to get past their bias and actually look at/listen to what we’re doing, they’ll see that we’re serious about it and are producing something worthwhile.

Those who are interested in a high degree of craft however, may never appreciate our approach, rooted as it is in experimentation. But they’re not very “punk rock”, so we don’t care about them.

You say you know what you want to do within a particular medium. Does that mean you work from pre-conceived ideas?

WD: No. When I say we know what we want to do I’m talking about our artistic work in general – our overall direction or goals.

As far as creating each individual piece goes, we almost never work from pre-conceived ideas. Each work is derived through various chance, intuitive, or automatic processes – games, improvisation, random sparks of inspiration, dreams and so on. The final result of each work should come as a surprise.

At the same time, it’s not entirely random. Our ideas and our artistic sensibilities are guiding things along in subtle ways (or not so subtle ways).

You each have your own artistic work but have also collaborated with each other many times, as well as with other artists. How is collaboration significant to you?

SH: It increases the chance element, which is always important to us. Also, there is this idea that the sum can be greater than the parts. Once Genesis P Orridge came to town and he was talking about his collaborations with Brian Gysin. He mentioned that collaboration (between for example, two people) could produce a third consciousness. Gysin wrote a book about this idea called The Third Mind, which I have yet to read. This concept really interests me.

WD: Again, there is the influence of Surrealism. The Surrealists were definitely very interested in group experiments and collaborative work, mostly because of the chance thing as Sherri mentioned, and we have the same impulses. It’s just another method of circumventing rational thinking.

It’s also a lot of fun working with other people and not knowing what’s going to happen!

Of course, we’re mostly talking about certain kinds of collaboration here – ones that involve game-like strategies, improvisation, etc. There are lots of other ways to collaborate, some of which interest us more than others.

In addition to collaboration, improvisation seems to be a major mode of working for you. Is this just a music thing or does it extend into other media? What do you like about improvising and how does it compare to other, more “pre-conceived” ways of working?

WD: Well, improvisation is essentially working to produce something with what’s immediately at hand, usually working very quickly and in circumstances involving a lot of unknown variables. The end result may be pre-conceived or left entirely open, but the process itself — the way to get to the end — is a complete mystery and unfolds entirely in the moment. The artist or artists bring their knowledge and skills to the task, but obviously there is a lot of randomness, intuitive or non-rational thinking, etc. shaping the work as it develops. Chance, intuition… not hard to see why we would be interested in improvisation.

Some mediums seem to lend themselves easily to improvisational approaches. Music is the obvious one but it’s entirely possible in other art forms as well. For instance, lately we’ve been doing a lot of collective drawing where we build up individual drawings by taking turns adding bits and pieces to them. It’s amazing to see many of the exact same processes at work in collective drawing as I see in improvised music!

What are your influences, both individual and collective? What makes you guys so weird?

SH: The village in Nova Scotia where I did much of my growing up has a claim to fame in the person of Anna Swan, long-dead Victorian giantess who was born nearby and exhibited worldwide by P.T. Barnum. As a kid I used to visit the local museum to see her boot and a few other artifacts along with a stuffed two-headed calf that was the other prized item in their collection. My father’s family and others (mostly older people) believed in ghosts, premonitions etc., so I grew up influenced by Nova Scotian folklore. My mother’s family, originally from Yorkshire, were lovers of nonsense and nursery rhymes.

WD: Sherri and I share quite a number of early influences. We both have Nova Scotian fathers and did our growing up there. I was influenced by the folk culture there the same way Sherri was. We both have English mothers (mine from London) and so I’ve absorbed some of that UK thing as well.

SH: As children, William and I were both affected by strange TV culture in the 60s and early 70s. Shows like Art Clokey’s “Gumby” and Sid and Marty Krofft’s psychedelic kids’ show “H.R. Pufnstuf” had a profound impact. We also both watched “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” when we were young.

WD: I would add to the list “The Prisoner” and maybe the 1960’s “Spiderman” cartoons (especially the music!). I was more influenced by comics and cartoons than Sherri was and I had a strong interest in science fiction from an early age. I also came from a musical family, so that was obviously an influence.

There were a number of pivotal influences for me that came along in my teens and early twenties, a couple of which I’d like to mention. There was a book called The World of Marcel Duchamp that got me into fine art and introduced me to Dada and Surrealism. There was Heavy Metal magazine, which, aside from introducing me to a lot of interesting European comic artists, also got me into experimental music via Lou Stathis’ “Muzick” column (this was in the late 70s/early 80s – can’t say much about the magazine now). There was hearing Nurse With Wound for the first time. And so on…

SH: As a teen I got into the occult. I spent time in the woods exploring my imagination. I was reading a lot at the time. I read my first Tom Robbins book, Still Life with Wood Pecker. He was a big influence on me, although I may not have realized it at the time. After I moved away, I got to hear experimental/underground music from friends with record collections, saw films like David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and discovered Surrealism. Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington were important to me.

WD: Like Sherri, I discovered the occult and strange phenomena at an early age and it remains a major influence. Obviously, we both share a love of Dada and Surrealism. I’ve been most influenced by Max Ernst, Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, and probably a few others I can’t think of right now.

Sherri didn’t mention this, but punk has been a major influence on both of us – me through direct involvement and Sherri more indirectly through me. I think the idea of always questioning conventional attitudes and behavior was instilled in me well before the punk movement but punk certainly crystallized it for me and made it more a way of life. The DIY/make-your-own-culture attitude of punk also remains important to me.

Do you have a specific agenda with your work?

WD: World domination, naturally.

SH: Splunge!

Why do you like hats?

WD: They’re cute and furry and I like the way they hang upside down and suck your blood. Did you say bats?

SH: Our friend April had a pet bat that slept in an old mitten.

Do you have any current projects, forthcoming releases, etc. that you would like to talk about?

WD: Our record label Disembraining Songs is, I think, going to make the switch to being a netlabel, so that’s exciting. It will mean re-releasing much of our past catalogue and most subsequent releases as free downloads which should open up our “market” considerably and get a lot more people hearing what we do. I used to love the physical thing of making the cassette and CD packages myself, but I have a lot less time for that kind of thing these days and, to be perfectly honest, I generally suck at getting the product out to people. It was never about making money anyway, so it’s exciting to think that I can get a lot more product out and into the hands of way more people if all I have to do is upload some mp3s and jpgs and tell folks where they can download them!

As noted earlier, we’ve been doing a lot of collective drawing recently. It’s actually a project that’s been going for a few years now so we’ve built up a fair body of work. It’s getting to the point where we’re going to formalize the project with a name and start exhibiting/publishing it. So keep an eye out for that.

Always lots of music projects on the go, releases coming out on various small labels, lots of live performances, etc.

I have some illustrations appearing in the Jul/Aug issue of The Walrus.

Lots of other stuff too. We’re always very busy!

People can check up on our activities at The Organ Grinder’s Gazette.

How can people find out more about you and your work?

www.recordism.com if you can believe anything they say!

By Kerry Freek

MONDO: Good afternoon, Kerry Zentner. Thank you for meeting me here, in the email domain. I would like to ask you some questions about your fabulous artwork. Starting… now: You draw a plethora of unusual characters. What are you thinking when you draw these beings?

KWZ: This is probably the question I get asked most often, and simultaneously the one that is most difficult to answer because the process is largely intuitive. I certainly don’t set out with a defined goal. Occasionally a particular shape or concept will present itself to me, sometimes in a dream. I used to draw more abstractly as a child and, though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was building a sort of repertoire of shapes and textures, which I use to this day. Nowadays I usually try to approach a blank canvas from a blank state of mind and let my unconscious do most of the work. Once my mind is relatively empty of static, I am stripped down to a few central emotional urges which dominate and guide the imagery. Most of the creatures seem to become highly anxious and sorrowful, or else nefarious and scathing. This kind of predator/prey dynamic is highly important to me, and I feel like most of the characters I create filter down through this system of abuse and domination, whether I’m distinctly aware of it at the time or not. I aim to make the system more naturalistic, though, and not exaggerated or caricatured. The way that life plays out in the animalistic realm is definitely of interest to me. A third category also exists in addition to predator and prey, a spiritual type of creature that seems wholly satiated and unconcerned, bemused at times. This is a primal spiritual state. These creatures usually come out of hiding when the ocean of mind-static is at its most placid and all the floor-dwellers have receded into their apertures. Despite this, there is definitely a strain of existential distress behind…everything I do. And wherever that strain is diminished, absurdity seems to take over the rest.

MONDO: Collaboration is a huge part of your artistic processes. You do group drawings, exquisite corpses, and participate in comic jams. What attracts you to group efforts?

KWZ: I’m tempted to say that it’s because it allows me to shirk artistic responsibility of the art, since I am not its sole creator. This alleviates pressure and makes the whole process more enjoyable. Of course, the reason is something much more intimate and profound than that. I’ve been working with my co-conspirators, William A. Davison and Sherri Lyn Higgins, both of them with tremendous creative minds of their own, for the last four years or so. In that time we’ve done hundreds of drawings, some collaborative writing, improvised experimental music, etc. It’s just what we do when we hang out, that, and watch cartoons. I owe my interest in collaboration and a lot of my artistic motivation to them. I think that as a solo artist you stagnate and lose interest in what you’re doing at times, and you have to try to add some variables to make it interesting again. When you collaborate, those variables are thrown in effortlessly by the other participants, so you suddenly have all this material that you have to adapt to and try to make your own. You learn very well how to navigate an image, seeing which elements synthesize and which do not. It’s a process of discovering your own limits of aesthetic. Because it allows you to be so experimental, you begin to see new developments in your own style, which you definitely take and apply to your individual work. Having said that, though, I see working individually and working collaboratively as two equal modes of production. When we started drawing together it was just a kind of fun distraction, but when you work so closely with just a few other people, your styles begin to get a lot more cohesive and you admire it a bit more. We’ve even started throwing variables into the group, adding collage elements and colour, which had been largely untouched. It’s definitely getting interesting.

MONDO: What/who influences your work? Which artists do you appreciate and/or admire?

KWZ: The Surrealists will have to enter into this at some point, as I was practically raised under the Surrealist Manifesto, collaborative art being a foundation for much of their activity. Max Ernst in particular interests me. Though I only acquired it recently, Une Semaine de Bonte , a book of his collage work, has been inspiring. I adore Edward Gorey, Marcel Dzama, Jim Woodring, Richard A. Kirk. I could talk about each of these artists at length. A list of my influences isn’t complete without the work of Dr. Seuss, William Steig, and Bill Peet, all of whom had profound effects on me as a child. My mother’s dolls (she’s a doll artist) used to frighten me, I think that affected me. Lately, I’ve been really enjoying Mat Brinkman and Marc Bell comics. The list goes on, but the visual art only accounts for so much of the total inspiration. Essentially I’m influenced by whatever I’m immersed in at the moment, whether that’s literature, films, nature itself, etc. In that sense, inspiration is more of a lifestyle than anything. I’m always conscious of balancing my input and output frequencies.

MONDO: You are both a writer and a visual artist. What attracts you to each discipline? Do you have a preference?

KWZ: I would call myself a writer only very modestly. I’ve been lucky enough to come from a strong artistic community involved in a diverse range of disciplines, so I’ve never felt limited to any one type of creativity. If I find an author, say, that is particularly inspiring, I might get motivated to write. And then I’ll write for a week and forget about drawing and music. It’s a huge problem, because there’s a constant orgy of art in my head. It sounds great but it isn’t always conducive to good working habits, because each interest is trying to dominate the others. It’s a competitive orgy. There’s some crosspollination between interests, though. For instance, sometimes a passage in a book will inspire me to play guitar, or music will inspire me to draw, and I’ll just put on a Sigur Ros or Leonard Cohen album and it’s like going into a highly productive coma for a while. Those purely concentrated moments are rare, though. A lot of the time I’m clinging to the inspiration and trying to sustain it, rather than actually being creative.

MONDO: Last week we went to the Small Press Book Fair and you knew a number of the tablers. Through your own connections, and, in a position unique to most, you grew up surrounded by influential players in the Toronto experimental literary scene. Do you ever feel pressure to produce great things?

KWZ: I was surrounded with such a wealth of interesting activity, as a child, and such a lush artistic backdrop, that more than anything I think I was just inspired. There were a lot of people doing interesting things around me. Being the youngest in the poetry community and having a beloved poet for a father, as well as a brother who is a writer, added some pressure in the context of that scene, but it was great because it challenged me and gave me something to try and work towards, I wouldn’t trade that for anything, they’re both amazing writers and I love their work. Of course there’s always some pressure in a community to gain acceptance from your peers. I remember wanting to write an absurdist novel when I was twelve. I got about ninety pages in before I lost the train of thought, though I had already abandoned it on page one. Looking back at it, it’s a deranged and vomitory piece of writing with a few very eloquent bits at its heart. I’ve never shown it to anybody and I don’t intend to. I think I had become too concerned with audience and less with the drive to authenticity, which is one of the most important things to discover as an artist.

Now that I’m considerably older, I understand the ways in which one specializes and forms their own sensibilities, their own pockets, their own jewels, and I’m less concerned with being liked or understood by a lot of people. My impulse now is usually not to produce ‘great’ things, but horrendous things, things of a specific type of beauty which is at once disconcerting and luminous. In other words, I’ve specialized aesthetically. Being that I was partly home-schooled, I had a lot of time to discover my own interests, and I feel grateful to have been in close proximity to people who had really eclectic tastes which were influencing me (my father used to read Finnegans Wake to me before bed). Pressure is not a bad thing if you also have support. One drives you while the other allows you to find authenticity. Each is functionless without the other, and would breed apathy. I’ve been lucky to have very little needless pressure put upon me.

MONDO: Last question aside (sorry for the psychological pressure), do you have plans for future artistic endeavours?

KWZ: Today I put jam on a banana and ate it, that was kind of an artistic endeavour. I think I might do that again.

Fancy Action Now

May 17th – June 17th, 2007
Magic Pony Shop & Gallery

By Kerry Zentner

It is only fitting that I observed one of the most colourful sunsets I have ever seen while walking through Trinity-Bellwoods Park on my way to the Team Macho show opening at Magic Pony Gallery. The way that the pinks and oranges bled into the cooler colours of the clouds, which finally let go by way of barnacle-like ridges into the whites of the sky, gave the impression of a rainbow running along the length of the horizon, disappearing on one side into the forest and into the cityscape on the other. Indeed, here it seemed like I was already inside a Team Macho painting, so it’s no wonder that Toronto has spawned this vibrant art collective.

As far as art collectives go, Team Macho crops up somewhere between The Royal Art Lodge and Paper Rad: not quite as cryptic as the former, and not quite as psychedelic as the latter, but claiming their own strong ground in the middle. Composed of five former art-school misfits from Sheridan and OCAD (where I believe a few of them are now TAs), Team Macho has managed to fuse a number of disparate styles, media, and personal interests under one umbrella. Living and working together in the same house, they’ve managed to produce large quantities of art and have amassed a loyal group of enthusiasts. Their physical exteriors (as reported by the flyer for their show, their book cover, indeed their own art) are coiffed, predominantly bespectacled, highly mustachioed, and often obscured by a sweater. Of course, that is to say little of their internal existence. Is it just as mustachioed as their external one? I went to this event in hopes of gleaning some shard of illumination into the phenomenon of their art.

The hype for this show was quite high. Of the friends I call on to accompany me, ALL of them are already planning to go. Yet even with that awareness in mind, I was not prepared for the sheer volume of clientele. I don’t think I have ever previously seen Magic Pony as full as it is on this night. Art school kids, a designation to which I belong, spill forth from the poor overstuffed shop’s little glass mouth and into the cooler, though more fetid grounds of garbage night on Queen St. Cardboard cutout mobiles of Team Macho’s five beaming heads dangle in the window display, surrounded by hundreds of luminously painted ping-pong balls (an homage to their favourite sport). After a period of adjustment, my friends and I weave our way in through the living parade of colours that seem to flaunt themselves at every Magic Pony event. The chaotic vibrancy of the crowd also mirrors the aesthetic of the art, and for at least one moment, this Technicolor conglomeration of urbanites, with their various oddities, including a binocular-shaped juice box, is reminiscent of an episode of the British TV comedy Nathan Barley, though with a far more likeable demeanor. (For the initiated: I half expected to observe a ‘Geek Pie’ hairdo.) Such is the art world. I finally fight my way through and make it to the art.

If consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative, then it would seem that inconsistency is also a refuge of the highly imaginative. The art adorns the walls with as much deliberate incongruity as the subject matter it contains. Nearly every piece is utterly different from the ones surrounding it, where small pieces of lined scrap paper are roommates to large resin-covered woodblock paintings. Some of the art has even ended up on the ceiling, and the overall effect is devastating to the optical system, not to mention the feng shui. But then, that is the precise ingenuity behind the show. Team Macho seem to have taken the more formidable art-school crimes (namely, having multiple graphical styles in concert and not sticking to a preferred medium, forget about subject matter and composition) and turned them to their advantage by way of employing them in excess. They are so consistent in their inconsistencies that they have formed a wholly new and uniform creature out of them, a web-work that traps your subconscious at its least-organized.

The art is a vortex to a master dimension where each and every creature is spawned from an entirely different species of existence. No consistent natural laws prevail. A lumberjack drinks from a pinkly glowing robot boot while nearby a helicopter sits aside a large cooked chicken with a halo of light around its head. Above this, the sky turns into a lake, bleeding upwards into a canoe upon which sits a man and an owl whose antlers are filled with a dozen laser-shooting light bulbs firing off in all directions, hitting an enormous penguin bust in the back of the head. Amazingly, this collage of elements makes up less than an eighth of the entire image.

Not all the pieces are this frenzied. In one, a distinguished man at a table sits nervously colouring in the black spaces of a giant crossword puzzle. In another, a tennis player readies to swing for his ball, seemingly normal until you notice that according to his shadow, he is several feet in the air. These are generally the work of fewer members of Team Macho. The pieces that will define the five of them as a collective are the ones in which they’ve each gotten their hands dirty, and these are the most expressive ones, and given to horrendous and inconceivable chaos, as if a black hole had itself been torn, releasing all its multifarious novelties upon the world. Team Macho has succeeded in making static imagery for the ADD generation. It never quite feels cohesive to me, but there is a method to the madness. Or in this case, the madness rather seems to be the method, and vice versa.

I come out of my art coma and back into the shifting tonalities of the gallery space. Steve and Kristin, the super-friendly proprietors, are being suctioned around by various competing social factions and I get only three words in edgewise, “Hey, Steve. I…” before he’s whisked into posing for some local paparazzo. The Space channel is filming in one corner and camera flashes are going off intermittently. I don’t even attempt to speak to Team Macho itself. My own artistic collaborators and I leave, feeling mildly affronted cranially by all the activity, and ready to turn off our minds.

When I return a few days later to get a better look at some of the art and pick up a copy of the book, the gallery is nearly empty and seems an entirely healthier creature. By this time, nearly all the artwork has been sold. Steve mentions that I missed the unveiling and demolition of the cake which they had fashioned for the event, the cake itself being an ingredient of the central painting on the far wall, reading, “Team Macho Rulez”. Though I recognize such self-adulation as a joke, I have to wonder how far one can take that joke (when you have a cardboard cutout of your own head as introduction to your art) before it becomes actual egotism. It’s all in good fun though, and that’s the Team Macho vibe. In a way, the joke sort of was being played on us, from the collective’s inception. It all began with the Atrocity Bible, a book conceived solely to house their most degenerate imagery. In talking about their origins, Team Macho have said, “it started out with a focus on drawing the stuff we knew could never pass for actual drawing, and then as we moved into it more seriously…we got better at it.”

Team Macho teaches us that, whatever tension exists between seemingly disparate components, we can still work together to support an interesting and active artistic community in Toronto. After my friends and I left that night, we didn’t end up going home to our beds, we sat around and drew. Because that’s what it’s about.