Folk Songs of Ontario (1959)

1958 recording by Edith Fulton Fowke.

Christian Chapman Paintings - 2007-2010

Source.

5000 Geese - 2010

peeping squaw - 2007

sioux lookout - 2007

the blueberry pickers - 2007

squaw bay church - 2007

lion of loch lomand - 2008

holy fox! - 2008

\

pigs of loch lomand - 2008

kathleen saw angels -2008

RCMP triptych - 2009

cowboy - 2009

ANEMKI - 2010

the great susquatch - 2010

Custom Switch Plates: Pin Ups, Housewives, Persona, Decora and Domesticity (Mid 20th C)

From your fine purveyor of custom light switch plates, Vintage Love. (See More).

Henry Darger, The Vivian Girls and The Realms of the Unreal

At the folk art museum.
Hidden in Henry's Room: The Secret Life of a Janitor
Google Images.

"At the heart of Darger’s work is the massive tale, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Begun around 1910, In the Realms of the Unreal took Darger over twenty years to complete and provided the foundation for his art for the rest of his life. The story follows the misadventures of his seven heroines—the Vivian sisters, aged five to eight—as they fight countless battles in a war of good against evil.

Through tracing, carbon copying, and collage, Darger appropriated elements of popular culture to create the mural-sized collages and drawings that illustrated the fantastical scenes of In the Realms of the Unreal . He lifted settings, figures, flora, and fauna from children’s books, comics, newspapers, and magazines. Breathing life info the figures, he added personalized touches that divorced them from their original contexts: little girls gained penises or were given bird or butterfly wings and ram horns to form “Blengiglomeanean Spirits,” creatures who aided the Vivian girls in battle.

Darger was a fervent collector, and his one bedroom apartment was filled with his writings, art, and source materials. His complex drawings, which were stitched together to form compositions up to nine and a half feet in length, were so large that they could not be opened in the small apartment. Instead, they were stored in a stack on the artist’s bed; Darger himself slept in a chair. Yet there was an underlying order to this seemingly chaotic environment. Darger’s attention to detail can be seen in the way he handled his supplies. He attached individual labels to small paint pots to identify the colors inside. He gave whittled down pencils extending devices so that every last stub could be used. He transformed coloring books or even city phonebooks into receptacles for his collected imagery, filling every page with clippings and bundling the scrapbooks in stacks bound by twine." Source.

Taxidermy Links

The premier North American folk art for translating of non-sustenance-based trophy killings into macabre or totemistic souvenirs. Links to techniques and pictures. Now also refashioned as ironic craft.

• Crappy Taxidermy
• Demon Kitty Designs
• The black market work of an outlaw taxidermist
• The World's Most Awkward Taxidermy
• Walter Potter's Museum of Curiosities
• New and Used Taxidermy Collectibles on Ebay.
• Bad Taxidermy Pool at Flikr.
• The Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists.
• Ravishing Beast Taxidermy Lisa Black (Steam punk influence).
• Custom Creature Taxidermy Arts (Rogue taxidermy).
• Methods in the Art of Taxidermy by Oliver Davie (1900).
• Advanced Wildlife Design.
• Wikipedia article.
• Top Hat Taxidermy ("The World's Leading Realtor of Taxidermy").
• Swedish Skvader Museum.
• Man Faces Charges For Creating Strange Mutant Taxidermy (article).
• Cats away! Artist turns his dead pet into flying helicopter after it is killed by a car
• Taxidermy Mice Chess Set
• Fake Taxidermy - Robotic Hunting Trophies
• Man Arrested For Taxidermy-ing Together Mutant Animals From Illegal/Endangered Species
• c/f Extreme embalming, because what is a corpse, if not a poseable action figure?
• c/f French artist starts fortnight inside bear

Folk Art Canada

Delightful.

Shary Boyle: If I Had One Wish

Some Context:

Website

Why Feminist Art Still Matters | Hazlitt | Random House of Canada (Discussion with Shary Boyle, Vanessa Dunn, Aminah Sheikh)

Shary Boyle Represents Canada at 55th Venice Biennale

Everything under the Moon (with Christine Fellows) - A heartbreaking shadow play that achingly equates the show's illusory projections with vanishing peoples and species, the transitory symbols of art becoming the ghostly psychic debris of our terribly, evermore plausible extinction. And yet a children's story as well, a quest, a buddy movie, the story of friends around a campfire.

Canadian Artist Project (including commentary by Sholem Krishtalka).

New and Upcoming work.

Facebook (with art posts!).

One wishes, within the seemingly infinite crawl spaces and hobby-holes of the inter-web, that the site of a *lovvved* artist would represent all of their collected and studio work. The representative sample of Shary's work so inspires and gives voice to awkward, shapeless dodos of thought.

Below are a few of my own dodos.

- Sensitivity, skill in craft and imagination are pursued as peregrine themes in Shary Boyle's work. These three motivations are rarely pursued as separate from one another. Imagination is allowed a mischievous tentacle, transforming reality, not retreating from it.

- Sensitivity is sometimes a shying quality in the purveyor of commodities, as making commodities is a repetitive activity. In an artist, this often seems to lead to a heightened valuation of craft. The other route (not always exclusive, sometimes complimentary) is to become more machine-like. One could (arbitrarily) set up two default positions to illustrate the range of attitudes towards the art object and the commodity: the 19th Century Arts and Craft movement, at one pole, and Warhol, at the other.

- Shary's production schedule is regularly machine-like (Warhol). Each individual piece of work, however, has a great deal of particular patience and care put into it (Arts and Crafts).

- Art objects, knickknacks that demonstrate sensitivity in craft, now a rarer sight for a modern, resist the habitual quick scan of the senses. Such work is to involve one, imaginatively, sinuously, in the presented vignette. 

- Shary spends much effort digging up techniques of undervalued, outmoded (by the ever-efficient machines), excluded or forgotten artisanal practices. Among practices, thoughtfulness, sensibilities renewed in the twining, fluffy, shying-then-emboldening, leaky, leafy-lined aesthetic of Boyle's work is a generous array of stylistic preciousness.

- Here is a scrapbook note of what I imagine to be preciousness in her work: fairy tale or folklore sources; imaginative landscapes; animals and animal-people; fantastical flights of fancy; elfin and prepubescent bodies; daffy costumes; detailed depictions of cloth, material; gilt, decorative, flowery, ornate flourishes; a respect for field observation as in naturalism; brittle, dainty, breakable materials for the sculpture; delicate, complimentary colour palette for the paintings; drawer-ly pencil strokes and pencil textures for the drawings; arcane technologies (minded mostly in the service of creating wonder) for the projections (slide projectors, magic lanterns, manipulated, theatrically and moodily, in real time).

- The porcelain figurines also point to a further back historical source, in European rococo (I imagine the first originators of stylistic preciousness also sensed this continuity between the two practices, the delicate, aristocratically-refined rococo collectible on the one hand and the imaginative, industrial-democratic object of preciousness, on the other).

- No doubt the general dis-inclusion of preciousness from canonical museum art has--at least--socially patriarchal roots. Noting its remarkable influence on every nick and cranny of twentieth century creative output, glaring is the lopsided gender participation in either milieu's practitioners/members (museum=boys, preciousness=girls). Common from the Victorian era on, transmitted broadly via the pulp children's industries through the 20th then into our century, under Boyle's deft touch, preciousness has almost the appearance of a polemic; it also tests the redemptive quality of historically excluded material.

- I say "almost polemic" because so often the polemical tone in art leads to a certain brashness in presentation, broad strokes, blunted figurations, rhetorical outwardness. Again, sensitivity, the value which Boyle seems to place in preciousness, remains ice-cream-serene, supreme.

- However, Boyle's adoption of preciousness, is not in itself precious (if one is to mean by precious to be cloyingly taken with the sentimental, obsessively self-protected by the pretty and the quaint). Darkness, unsentimental frankness appears in this mythic retelling of the modern situation often, with a certain grounded literalness. And with humour.

- Darkness often comes in the form of a stylistic intrusion: the gothic, the grotesque, the violently flattened.

- Relatedly, despite the luster of pretty inherent in the materials and certain of the techniques (porcelain, ornament, floral patterning etc.), forms are often knotty, gnarled, organic in the way of old dead trees or mud.

- A lot of her illustrative qualities so reminiscent of children's picture story books, it is hard not to feel one is in the midst of a story. So, one makes up a story. Her figurines, also calling up qualities of toys (especially the off-limits-to-children toys of impeccable enchantment collected by grandparents) put one solidly over to a place of meaningful, fantastical, sentimental play.

- The stage is mythic, her girl children the heroes. Her girl children or also highly androgynous or effeminate boys; also near-hermaphrodites.

- Proportions or features of profiles, torsos, limbs, erogenous chassis, blemishes, blotches that lack ideal ratio or poise by corroboration of the beauty industries are studiously, lovingly attended to.

 - Departing from a gloomy Dickinsian suburbs of dingy interiors, looming, impersonal adults, coercive bullies, her heroes flee to take up residence in a savage and wonderful Never-Never Land. This land is frequently a woods or savanna-like. All of these locales possess an Edenic, private quality.

- Modern heroes, their adventures are complicated by embarrassment, awkwardness, genital compulsion, clumsiness.

- Heroes nonetheless, they are embarked upon a journey where they encounter as trials the strangeness of their bodies; evolving amorousness and/or self-pleasure; the compulsion of rituals; a battle with shyness and boldness before an implicit, all-present gaze (the gaze, in my mind, is a camera lens, the pose perhaps the remembered gesture of confinement during a vacation snapshot); a fight for equilibrium and fair footing within the catastrophes, excesses, self-sacrifice of desire; and the ever-present, lurking monsters of past trauma.

- Violence to the psyche is portrayed bodily (a severed head, a discombobulated anatomy).

- One suspects that the kaleidoscopes of fantasy start as nascent buds within the skin. Like leaves growing then falling from branches, these buds elaborate then self-shatter before the force and processes of the world. Responsible for these strange flowers and twirling vines, the literal crisis--its hard contours kept slightly off-frame-- is pictured in a transformed manner. The vignette is more bodily and remembered than based in the hard light of present perception.

 - Fate, the trans-formative point in stories, intervenes at moments of charged physicality, when a body seems in revolt against both environment and itself. The resulting, intimate metamorphoses convolute the flesh into endless, strange contusions and conjurations, often involving the return of spring-time or the appearance of animals. In these instances, the body can be like a disguise, an erratic shrub or sometimes a fountain.

- Otherworld Uprising (the title of Boyle's *really* good art book) is a designation which seems to refer to the condition of a literal spirit world. In the revolt, spirits, nature, body overlap one anothers' conventionally separate outlines.

- The just-below-the-surface, (half) presence of this Otherworld, its portals and rabbitholes located in bodily orifices, throws subjective turmoil and psychical discomfort in ribbons of stress against a semi-solid yet also fugitive, fleeing screen. This screen, made up of dreams and of shadows, often stands as a protective shield between two figures encountering one another, forestalling or warning off their first meeting. This outcome of these meetings is often either reconciliation/camaraderie or assault-dismemberment.

- I suspect the ectoplasm of this spirit world is made up of bodily juices.

- Poised together on a small pedestal of turf, possible murderers, potential companions, yet many times the figures stay half disinterested in one another, with the retiring tendency of shy but busily assessing, curious children.

- The contrast or collusion of gender roles (the same, different) is helpful in drawing out possible secretive meanings lodged in these frozen confrontations. Meaning plays out many ways: as fantasy fulfillment; as revenge; as appreciation and gauge of difference; as fetishistic worship; as friendship, fulfilling, joyful and intimate, but also brutal or conspiratorial; as wistful compensation; as jokey-making-fun; as critique; as ceremonial renewal; as violence. But, also, sometimes, inscrutably.

In the prolific stories of her art, Boyle seems attracted to rituals of visionary questing more usual to those swept aside, the misfits, the crackpots, the obsessive hobbyists, the shut ins (i.e. Blake, Darger). The import managed within each strange vacation slide or cameo often gives the sense of secrets within secrets, fleshed out in private and in locations of quiet, a remembrance of a remembrance (possibly dangerous), gaining not just velocity over time but also structure and a skeleton.

- Ever so often, with the kind of concentrated, slow pacing capable of affecting a shift in scene without hemorrhaging continuity or narrative sweep, Boyle's turbulent frame switches to almost-fulfillment and near-certitude in the sublime. The characters are alone, holding hands, with a planet to themselves, a planet worthy of the naturalistic raptures on the pages of a speculative edition of National Geographic. Within the context of Boyle's art, this is sublime in a heroic, personal sense, haunting one with the juxtaposition of the human with inhuman, and, in a sense, the unrepresentable landscape: Nature. It is not the sublime of the modern architect for whom the sublime is the habitat-equivalent of military shock and awe (Derived from Fredrick Jameson, the more habitual invocation of the word).

A Stonemason's Dictionary

Source.

A pocket dictionary of masonry terms, endearments and country expressions.

Wyvern and vine roof boss c. 1220

Grand Master Architect

• Source for the masonic rankings listed (at bottom).
• A masonic dictionary of symbolism, pertinent terms, etc.
• A mason's retelling (also some cultural history of the embellishment and recasting) of the legend of Hiram Abiff, King Solomon's martyred architect.
• And, ditto.
• Jewish Encyclopedia entry for Solomon's Temple.
• Further Reading: Matthew Barney and the Secret Knowledge. 
• c/f Artist Matthew Barney Discusses His Influences -- New York Magazine
• Official site of the Cremaster cycle. 

Freemasonry, with its lengthy list of shadowy attributions, its perverse legibility to those versed in the symbolism but also blasphemies, marginalia and apocrypha of the Judeo-Islamo-Christian tradition, yet its virtual institutional invisibility in our culture, has earned Masonism its honorary place as a magnet (or bottomless pit) for the gaudy laughter of the mainstream, and grandiloquent, speculative paranoia of the disquieted. Over a decent slog of the last several decades, her devotees have come to populate a veritable pantheon of comic, malevolent stock types, fair use for caricaturists, artists, film, TV and thriller writers. For examples, look no further than this cameo, The Stonecutters Song, during an episode of the oft-clever Simpsons. Or, here, a depiction of Mr. Burns during a spell of Howard Hughes-esque dementia.

 

Matthew Barney, above--whose relative earnestness as an artist compounded with his old-timey,Wagnerian seriousness of purpose make for a kind of complicated relationship to laughter--borrows from Freemasonry its abundant arcana and metaphor-rituals with obvious connections to the arts: The pursuit of architecture as Utopian, rites of passage as structurally, often violently complex, craftsmanship as tantamount to being, knowledge and mastery as mysterious. It is specifically his move to borrow from this cultural event (for Freemasonry is shared now, via popular culture) and take its symbolism on the level.

(From Mathew Barney, Interview in Art 21)

ART:21:

Could you explain the significance of masons and Freemasonry in the story?

BARNEY:

The story has primarily to do with the construction of the Chrysler tower. And, as the Architect is described, it starts overlapping with the mythology of the Freemasons. Hiram Abiff, the architect of Solomon's Temple, is the martyr in Freemasonry, in that he was killed by corrupt stonemasons who worked beneath him. They believed he knew the name of God and they wanted to be told the name of God. Hiram wouldn't tell them so he was killed by a plumb and a level to the temple and a maul to the forehead. So "CREMASTER 3" starts to fold into some of the mythologies of Freemasonry that way. Richard Serra's character, the Architect, becomes like Hiram at a certain point. And the Chrysler tower is actually never completed in the same way that the Temple of Solomon is never completed.

The sheer wantonly baroque detail of its backing mythology make Freemasonry a sort of site of one-stop shopping for Cremaster, an art film so visually and expensively extensive, so broadly improvised despite its hyper-conceptualization, so sprawling in structure, that certainly a symbology which could rival its own internal complexity was wanting to reign in it. Mathew Barney mines the intriguing origins story for plot-points.


As mentioned, King Solomon is central to the system of Masonic symbolism. More precisely, King Solomon's architect as master architect and King Solomon's Temple as material and architectural perfection on Earth. Inherit in this reading of the Biblical story, architecture has occult properties retrievable from the lore of a mystical past, structures are perfectible, geometry metaphysical and the material universe susceptible to mastery. One needs only delve. Each architectural component of a mythologized King Solomon's temple responds to a place-holder in the Masonic hierarchy, the route by which an initiate gradually, excruciatingly climbs to the post of creator, of wise seer. The ends of this system of occult study and hierarchical pursuit are Enlightenment, or a mystified variant thereof. The secrets of nature can be at one's command and in one's ken. Hardly Buddhist, this is a sorcerer's conceptualization of scientific advance, rooted in historical alchemy. (One needs only recall that scientific discovery, deep under the warm sleep of the European dark ages, was occasionally the accidental bi-product of lay scientists trying to discover the quickest route to transform debased metals into valuable gold). It is an optimistic retelling of the allegory of the Tower of Babel.

Tellingly, the most elevated symbol in the masonic code is simultaneously reductive and vertiginous to the point of inaccessibility. For in relearning the lost builder's arts, one must ultimately chase after the master word, the secret name of god, the ultimate simplifier of all systems' complexity. Like many secret societies, the aims being so steeply ideal, so unabashedly beyond use, immersion in the mystical symbolism itself--highly tangled, highly coy interrelations that beyond their own book-binding denote nothing--stands in for the stated pursuit. Building then becomes reading, interpretation--and also exclusion of more debased elements. Barney, being a bright graduate of the arts, has this come to mean something akin to the unachievable ends of the progress myth, the necessary incompleteness of all systems. In the heavily infrastructure-laden, labyrinth urban and suburban swells of advanced technological societies, one might detect why this yearning after code-simplification finds a resonance.

Richard Serra stars as The Architect

Barney is about the most respectful of contemporary borrowers. For many, Freemasonry is of the last auk's egg of the antiquarian bourgeoisie: with its secret, honorary societies (bureaucracy as religious order), belief in alchemy as synonymous to scientific pursuit (magical acquisitiveness), a loose connection to gnosticism akin to new agers' or hippies' annoyingly demode spiritual dabbling, their hard-rationalist, anti-clerical strain confounded by a cartoon-like mysticism of individual Will, ludicrous titles meant to convey a dubious exceptionalism, funny hats, funny costumes, secret handshakes. Clearly here I am conflating the popular conception with the actual thing, Masonry as it is currently practiced, the exact nuanced workings of which I am more or less ignorant of plus uninterested in. For those of us who are blissfully uninitiated in its esoteric rites, its tortured passages, and to remain so, the popular conception is often hilariously more than enough to derive a social meaning. Similar to both Mensa and Scientology, this is a private club exaggerated to the solemn heights of Platonic Ideal.

And so the satirist's sense of it. For if one were inclined to portray bourgeoisie rank, cliques and honours as the occasional or often relapse into magical thinking, below would be our culture in the funny mirror. And despite my inability to see my subject totally clear from a jocular, diminishing lens, one certainly can sense by Masonic nomenclature the mythological inwrought-ness of the creature; its poetic charms. Still, one would need a heart of stone not to find it all a little funny. I am no doubt siding with the untutored borrowing from it; I am certainly recommending it for further study to the anthropologist from Mars. And herein, for you young seeker, lies your path to the top of Burger World. 

Enjoy!

Blue Lodge (Craft Lodge or Symbolic Lodge) 

This is starting point for all men who wish to become Masons. The Blue (Craft or Symbolic) Lodge confers the following degrees: 

1. Entered Apprentice

2. Fellow Craft

3. Master Mason 

The 3rd Degree, that of the Master Mason, is the "highest" degree the can be given in all of Freemasonry. 

Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite - Northern  

Lodge of Perfection

4° - Master Traveler

5° - Perfect Master

6° - Intimate Secretary

7° - Provost and Judge

8° - Intendant of the Building

9° - Master Elect of the Nine - North

10° - Master Elect  - North

11° - Sublime Master Elected - North

12° - Grand Master Architect

13° - Master of the Ninth Arch

14° - Grand Elect Mason

Council of Princes of Jerusalem

15° - Knight of the East or Sword

16° - Prince of Jerusalem

Chapter of Rose Croix

17° - Knight of the East and West

18° - Knight of the Rose Croix

Consistory

19° - Grand Pontiff

20° - Master ad Vitam

21° - Patriarch Noachite

22° - Prince of Libanus

23° - Chief of the Tabernacle

24° - Prince of the Tabernacle

25° - Knight of the Brazen Serpent

26° - Friend and Brother Eternal

27° - Commander of the Temple

28° - Knight of the Sun

29° - Knight of St. Andrew

30° - Grand Inspector

31° - Knight Aspirant

32° - Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret

33° - Sovereign Grand Inspector General

An honorary 33rd° is conferred annually to certain 32nd° masons who have exemplified, in their daily lives, the true meaning of the Brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God. The recipient must be at least 33 years of age and may not apply for the degree.

War Rugs from Afghanistan

War rugs from Afghanistan exhibit at the Toronto textile museum.

Repetitive, pixelated, simplified design elements, the iconic medallions of traditional textile-weaving--and strangely reminiscent of low resolution video games--eerily emboss these rugs, reflecting on the terrors of modern global policing.

Mark Grief, Walt Disney

Tinkering, from the London Review of Books.

Ostensibly a book review of three recent Walt Disney biographies, Mark Grief's essay is a fascinating survey of the psychological and cultural factors making up this uniquely 20th century entertainment industry giant. Herein, Disney is described as something of an old-fashioned, crafts-oriented artist, a hard-headed capitalist, a disappointed socialist, a daffy technical innovator, a theme park impresario, a futurist, and the prototypical American entrepreneur.