The In Situ arts festival in late October was an extraordinary experience for me as an artist and a fun one in general.

With two large scale pieces in the main space and an entire room installation (allowing plenty of space for dancers to perform in), it was wonderful to stretch out (mentally and physically) into so much space.

The intensity required to conceive and execute so much in so little time is not sustainable for long (by me at least) but has some benefits. As I was just describing to a friend, it kept the threads of my thoughts white-hot, so every hour of work built 100% onto the previous hours, days and weeks of work – since most other distractions had been put aside... even sleep!

As well, working with the festival's fabulous lighting designer Joe Pagnan and working with light in the drawers and other components of my room installation 'Containment', has forever changed my thinking around light.

The incredible support and enthusiasm of Heather Snell, director/artistic director of the festival, and her wonderful husband Ken, was fertile ground in which to grow (thank you both!).

While I had nothing like enough time to get ready (in fact I am still trying to recover from the 24/7 preparations) but the joyful, creative and expansive experience that this was, coupled with the new work I produced for it, means I am glad and grateful for the opportunity.

And I still love that gorgeous, decrepit building!

Thanks to all who visited! For any who could not, I hope these photos will go some way toward compensating.

For the past several weeks I have been working on a new, ambitious installation for In Situ, an event I wrote about in more detail here (click to open).

What I want to focus on in this post is the relationship between artworks and their space, in a deeper sense than "does this painting go with my couch?"

I leapt at the chance to be part of In Situ even though it would cost me money I don't have, even though there was not enough time to prepare, all because of the space!

​Soaring ceilings, tiny welder's booths, classic windows, exposed pipes, industrial fixtures, peeling paint... what's not to love?

The Small Arms Building is a wonderful network of spaces in a gorgeous state of neglect, the perfect location to stage artworks (not just visual but also performance-based) that relate to this remarkable, untamed space.

As an artist working on projects in an imaginative-but-real world, I wear a number of hats. I put a couple on right away when first touring the space: the Practical Hat (the one that wants me to sleep 8 hours every night, not get up to my eyeballs in debt, see my friends and family more often and regularly, eat well and work out, you know the one) – it thinks about what work I already have that could work in this space; the Dreamer Hat looks at the vast potential of all the spaces in the building and imagines a fantastic array of mostly-impossible (for me in these circumstances at least) ways to transform them and create remarkable experiences.

I am grateful to both Hats: one for keeping me alive (more or less, depending!); the other for enticing me to stretch and attempt things that while less-than-sensible have been glorious to thinking about, to see realized, to watch people interact with and to talk with some of them about.

The photo above shows the space that will be all mine (insert evil laugh here). The room is 20ft by 50ft. A dance performance and its audience will need a pathway through it to the next room, but allowing for that I can do what I want!

At right (I hope it's that way for mobile users as well) is a shot showing a fraction of the drawers I have collected or had set aside for me so I can build my main new sculpture. I won't really know until they are in the space how many I will need, which is part of the fun (and also part of what tells me I have fully transitioned to being an artist now, as my designer self would have wanted to control every detail in advance!). 

In addition to drawers and boxes, I will be working with a lot of photo-digital image transfers, plexiglass and light. This work's roots are my 'Boxed In' figure drawings from 2010 and it will connect up to all of the 'Subject to Limitation' thematic work since.

I will be showing a few existing pieces, one reconfigured specifically for the space it will be in (not pictured here). One of the others has only been shown in BC back in 2012: "Turbulence" a 21ft long photo-digital mixed media piece comprised of six angled panels that will be hung high and look down on the people below. It should suit the main space very well!

So in answer to the question posed in the title of this post: both. I've had the idea for the drawers portion of the main sculpture piece for a few years now but other aspects of the installation that it will be part of were inspired by the context. Also the actual configuration and some of the details of the sculpture are responses to the space and particularities of the event.

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It was a busy and fun weekend in Port Credit (Mississauga) on June 18 and 19 at Art-Spread where I was one of over a dozen artists/artisans showing and demonstrating what I do. 

Lots of people I know came to visit (only one had ever seen the scrolls live before), and if you were one of them, thank you.

The final day of installation started with clean-up. Tarps came down, drapery went up, then we spent hours getting the unlinked chains up and their positioning and angles fine-tuned.

At day's end we were done; it only remained for the professional installers to light everything so you could see it properly. They did a great job! In fact the difference between how it looked when we left and after they lit it was an object lesson in the importance of properly lighting a show. I've been in shows where some of the work had half (if that) of the light it actually needed.

One major improvement that occurred with proper lighting was that the white layer of drawing on the drapery panels become visible where in low light only the black layer could be seen easily.

The Art Gallery of Mississauga's 'Walk the Talk' event is coming up and includes a tour of all three shows and informal talks from some of the artists, including me. 

I will talk about how I layered up a kind of evolution of meaning and experience while keeping things thematically tight yet physically airy in a small space. I may also talk about taking on projects that risk failure to stimulate my own growth and creativity. 

Bring your questions and observations and we'll have an interesting discussion about it.

Please join me:
Saturday, July 25, 2015 at 1pm
Art Gallery of Mississauga (click on name to go to their page)

P.S. The time-lapse below is a bit too fast. I'll try to improve it when I edit the whole installation process into a single video.

It was a great relief getting the face drawn in. I had made numerous efforts (not all of which were captured by my camera) and in the end I asked a member of the gallery staff Shellie Zhang to pose for a couple of photos.

I'm normally fine drawing faces without a reference but there was a problem for me doing that at this size. Working close enough to draw properly I could not see the face as a whole, which I need to while I work. With a reference though I was fine. I did not try to draw a portrait of Shellie, though she is very much embedded in this face, I used it as a structural basis from which I "riffed", like a jazz musician might with the structure of a musical piece.

Sorry I didn't capture any footage of the face being drawn, but the view from the camera probably would have been blocked by my body anyway.

It was difficult getting blacks into this drawing, whether through broad marks (I could manage relatively fine ones) or areas. The lighting in the photo is uneven so I should mention that the bicep area is not as black as it looks here. It is dark, but with lots of layered-up mark making giving it life, variety and depth.

You can see from the photo above that the upper calf muscle I managed to get black, along with a couple of other touches. It was a big improvement getting those darks (and black) in. But more changes would come in Day 4. Stay tuned!

The 'Chains Unlinked' exhibition is on at the Art Gallery of Mississauga through September 13, 2015. On Saturday July 25 at 1pm I will be giving an artist talk there.

Well, it's important to have a plan, but there is often a difference between an installation and its plan! Tuesday was a good example of that as unexpected problems arose when we followed the plan I'd so carefully worked out.

Figuring out how and how much to deviate at least tripled how long it took to hang the red chain link portions of the room.

Putting up the drapery panels went more smoothly and made the space instantly feel softer, less hard-angled. Please note, whether you see these in person or just online, all of the pattern on each panels is painstakingly hand-drawn – metres and metres of it! – in both black and white.

The discoveries we made weren't confined to problems, there were also serendipitous ones along the way.  I hadn't planned to draw on the floor of the room, but that's just what happened in effect once the light hit those hanging strands of chain link. Made me very happy. I shot the video below as soon as I realized what was happening.

I hope you can join me tomorrow (Thursday, July 2) for the opening, but if not, perhaps for my talk on July 25 or a third date I will set so some of those who missed the first two dates can visit the show while I am there to talk to and answer questions.

Meanwhile, for anyone out of town who cannot make it, I will continue to post images/updates, just not on a daily basis!

Thanks so much everyone for your messages and interest. I am very much buoyed up by your support.

UPDATE:
The highlight of yesterday (Monday) was completing this opus of a drawing! There is a point in a drawing (or painting) when you look over every portion of it and realize there is nothing more that needs to be added or removed and that every part of it has a kind of life, even areas where it just whispers to you.

Yesterday Kal and Michael got up on tall ladders and installed all the infrastructure for the sculpture pieces, including the cables from which everything hangs, and steel grids for one installation. That meant we could just about start right in on putting that work up when we arrived this morning (Tuesday).

Talking with Mandy Salter, the AGM's new director|curator, when she stopped in for a look yesterday, she shared something I found interesting: she said that so much of the work that gets shown in a gallery arrives made and just needs to be installed; by contrast she really enjoyed seeing the process of my drawing being made over the past few days. 

I remarked that while drawing this large has been really challenging, it's also been so satisfying that I think I'll have to send out more proposals that involve large, on-site drawing. 

Show opens this Thursday July 2!
Reception: 6 to 8pm
Runs through September 13 at the 
Art Gallery of Mississauga

Well, a lot can change in a day, and not a moment too soon! The big wall drawing, I'm delighted to say, is close to being finished. On Monday I will re-work one hand and make some adjustments as needed, (based on having fresh and rested eyes), and that will be it.

This morning Kal picked up my chain links from the powder coater and while I've only seen portions of the results peeking out from their protective wrappings, I think it's safe to say that they look gorgeous!

Discussed installation for the sculpture pieces with Michael, the wonderful installer they use at the Art Gallery of Mississauga. Installing is his business, he does it for all kinds of galleries/museums including big ones, and based on this week I would hire him too. So calm and friendly, full of quiet competence and great can-do attitude. Just what you need in the stress of installing a show.

No actual installation happened today for my chain link sculpture as we figured out that we need to exchange one hardware item for the next size up to make things easier. So Monday morning that will get started, then I'll finish the drawing, then – after some clean-up – the sculpture pieces can be fully installed.

Somehow it's hard to believe we're at that point already; if all goes well my whole show will be up by the end of Monday. Failing that we still have Tuesday. The show will be open to the public on July 1 since Celebration Square in Mississauga will have throngs of people then.

In the meantime there is still the final drawing layer to do on 4 of 6 of the drapery panels. A friend is coming on the weekend to help out with that, bless her :-)

I'm looking forward to a long sleep tonight and a weekend of not being as dirty as a coal miner! Hope you have a lovely weekend too, even if it rains as they are predicting here.

If you missed my earlier reports on this installation:

Day One (click here)
Day Two (click here)