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Displaced Words
I spy with my little eye a billboard I don’t understand. This inscription is “AP3851,” a remnant of Palestinian artist Emily Jacir’s recent installation ex libris (2010-2012) at Alexander and Bonin in Chelsea. The 1948 Palestinian exodus, also known as al Nakba (Arabic for disaster, catastrophe, or cataclysm) ((http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/al-Nakba)) occurred when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, as a result…
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Walking Jane Jacobs’ Hood
This week, a walk around Jane Jacobs’ neighbourhood in Greenwich Village was my unfinished business and a Google maps walking tour my guide.
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The Color of Water
What a deceptively simple way to capture the colors of a seasonally changing river in an historic/site-specific installation. Not that I hadn’t walked this portion of the High Line before, it just took a fourth go to stop me in my tracks. I might have to try this at home with my own river… ************ The River That Flows Both…
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The Splendiferous Redpath Museum Montreal
A shrunken head. Mummies. Dinosaur bones. An anaconda skeleton. Shells the size of a child’s head. A life-sized origami Pterodactyl. A gorilla guarding the staircase. With nearly three million objects spanning natural history, ethnology and mineralogy, the Redpath Museum Montreal is the ultimate Victorian curio cabinet. The first purpose-built museum in Canada, it was commissioned by Peter Redpath and opened in 1882…
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Drive-By Shooting, Saskatchewan Style
Saskatchewan is ridiculously beautiful even on the rainiest of days. I am heart-broken that torrential rain is falling – and scheduled to keep doing so – for the three days we’re meant to camp in Grasslands National Park. I have saved some of the best for last, a coveted new stop before we make the final push home to…
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Impatience
Dear Guy in the Tan Sedan: What I want to know is this: Was it worth speeding down the main street in our village to catch up to the three cars who were already over the swing bridge? Was it worth ignoring the one-lane bridge protocol of stop-and-wait-then-go-and-wave to shave thirty seconds off your trip? Or…
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Literary Houses: Emily Carr
[pullquote]Emily Carr (December 13, 1871 – March 2, 1945) was a Canadian artist and writer heavily inspired by the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. ((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Carr)) [/pullquote] A moment’s quiver of homesickness for Canada strangled the Art longing in me. To ease it I began to hum, humming turned into singing, singing into that special…
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The Art & Science of Being a House Guest
There’s a fine line between persistent anxiety and enjoying time with people in their space. You will know how well you’ve tread that line when you’ve loaded up and pulled away.
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Tyndall Stone: Hidden in Plain Sight
A few weeks back I was taking my morning coffee on the expansive patio of a friend’s house in Winnipeg. My bare feet had graced this space a number of times, but I had not, until just then, grasped the obvious: I was walking on fossils – a LOT of fossils – which are 450 million years…
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The Place We Put Our People
It is the remarkable uniformity – the sameness – that slaps me in the face. Pleasant. Clean. Spacious. Orderly. Middle class. Nice. A place you walk into and believe that your dad, mom or grandpa will be safe and taken care of, that everything will be okay, that you’re doing The Right Thing. These buildings, like clusters…