This is just a quick update. I'm on my way to Barcelona for a group show with "untitled" BCN - more details and photos to come at some point soon. My sister, Buffy Cram, just had a story published in what looks like a delicious Canadian read. Check out the details at Douglas and McIntyre. 

http://www.dmpibooks.com/book/darwin

There is a flea market every Sunday in Mauer Park. It is, to the newly introduced, a spectacle to behold. I've been in regular attendance since my first snow-covered introduction. As it changes from ice, to slush, to mush, to green my spending increases. Cynically, it is an overpriced treasure hunt and yet I always feel better leaving with something bejeweled. Up on the sledding hill, there is a long wall that divides the stadium from the 'play-area'. In the spring sun the metallic graffiti shines, the entirety of the wall gets a bit weightless: a wicked golden brushstroke. Up close, the ornamentation of it becomes apparent, symbiotic even, a kind of tipped-up mirror to the parallel lines of brooch-covered tables below. 

Gathering is a new kind of image. It is the product of a long physical and theoretical investigation into the relationship between painting and photography and the distillation of this kind of haughty material into a simple gestural action. It is interaction rather than creation. This kind of image can only occur after months of studious painting, and with a trained hand and the blurred vision of strained eyes.

There is a friction here, as one medium forces its way into the other, and as the subject matter collides with my intentions for it. There is also a forced unity. Gathering, is where my polka dot obsession transformed into something else.

Gathering, Inkjet Print 21" x 31" 2009

A photo is rarely enough for me. So far, the reasons for this are not exactly clear. The process of painting on photographs is one way to extend the possibilities of an image. Very simply, it increases my interest, and therefore, my obligation to create and/or interact. 

Canary is a good example of this. As stand-alone subject matter, it was not enough, this image needed to be used to communicate something more delicate than death alone. I painted with the intention to revive the imagery slightly, and position it as a site of transformation. The beauty of it comes from the simultaneous presence and absence of its photographic and painterly qualities, and the fact that it can never be a canary.

The canary was used in warfare much like it was in coal mines: they were placed in tanks as an early warning to the presence of mustard gas. Because it is a painted photograph, this image is a record of my attempt at transformation, namely, the blatant insertion of beauty into the fray of death.

Canary, Oil on Inkjet Print, 40" x 27" 2009

This summer, in Victoria, I started a new job with a house painting company. Before lunch on the first day, I was already annoyed with myself.  I'd found a dead bird in the woodpile on the less travelled side of the house and I wanted to take it home. If there's one thing I really despise, it's acting like a crazy artist, and it's worse when you're doing it on your first day at a new job, and then it's just gross when it involves dead animals. 

I obsessed about it all night, and made a move at the end of my second day when no one was watching. The mummified carcass of a pileated woodpecker was sealed in my lunch bag faster than...uh... fast food; I scanned it under lab conditions that evening. As disgusted as I was with myself, I was captivated by the process. I just sat and watched the twenty minute scans, one after the other. One rarely sees nature this well preserved, and the combination of static nature and the slow analysis of technology was an open challenge to my painterly abilities.