Canada Day In The Park.

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On Canada Day we all went down to Victoria Park to enjoy the celebrations. There was a huge crowd in the park, but Victoria Park is large enough that it didn’t feel overcrowded.

The Shaw Building Fountain. An Artist’s Review.

Shaw Building building fountain.

When I was a kid the Shaw building fountain was something that really caught my attention. Maybe I liked it so much because I always wanted to jump in for a swim, or maybe it just that it was the largest fountain in town, and shot water high into the air. At night it’s many coloured lights added a gaudy atmosphere to the rather unimaginative plaza that it’s situated in. Sadly it has fallen into disrepair and has been almost forgotten.

Fountain.

The fountain is situated in a plaza that is surrounded on three sides by the Provincial government offices. The buildings are particularly ugly, and though one is finished in brick, the other two are raw concrete, and to me seem almost unfinished. If you get close to the buildings there are holes drilled in the concrete, and I wonder if they are anchor points for stone or brickwork.

With a little work this space could be a vibrant and enjoyable place, a few trees, benches, and the fountain restored would make for a vast improvement.

1967.

1967 was the centennial year for Canada. Much rejoicing for what was supposed to have been Canada’s century!

Name plaque.

The sculpture entitled Poulia is by Quebec artist Charles Daudelin.

Surveying for the future.

To me it seems the future turned out to be pretty bleak for this fountain. 1967 was a celebration year for Canada, and I suppose the intention was that this fountain and plaza would be a vibrant monument to the centennial year of Canada

Fountain sculpture.

Though I like the sculpture, I find it very typical of Canadian art of the period. Not too abstract, and with just a bit of a nod to the grand Canadian wilderness. Designed not to offend anyone, anywhere, a Canadian sculpture, and very clearly not American, and yet strangely British. I would be surprised if the basin could still hold water, and I worry that some day the fountain will be taken apart, and the sculpture scrapped.

Stolen Art! The most photographed object in town?

Dragon named Buttercup.

I picked up Charlottetown’s newspaper The Guardian to discover that the sculpture nicknamed Buttercup has been stolen. It was  taken from in front of the store Sunday evening.

Sometime when I walk around town I realize how many things I pass by every day and take for granted. This piece of Nova Scotia folk art has stood outside the Book Emporium on Queen Street for many years, and is claimed by the owners to be the most photographed object in Charlottetown. Indeed as I was talking to the store owner someone else snapped a photo of the sculpture.

Buttercup.

I’ve always liked this fun, and colourful creature, and it’s presence on the street is a pleasure to young and old alike.

The Rumour Mill

I haven’t done a lot of what you would call performance art, but my wife Jane Ledwell and I are putting together an interactive art piece for an evening and night-time art festival in our town on August 27. The event is called Art in the Open, and our piece is called The Rumour Mill. We hope people will be curious enough to take part. I have put up a new page with the news release about the event, and I will post news about how the project all goes here on the blog.

I’m building a Rauschenbergian kind of “machine” out of old pieces of wood to look something like this sketch:

A rough sketch for "The Rumour Mill" machine

And here’s what the proposal we put together said about our project:

The Rumour Mill: A Human Machine for Generating Poetry

What art, or what good, can come from the PEI rumour mill, the transformative process by which information passes from ear to ear on PEI, being distorted or destroyed along the line? Through the everyday rumour mill, intentions and original messages become more fictive: through the art piece The Rumour Mill, tourism messages will become accidental poetry.

Jane Ledwell and Stephen B. MacInnis propose a collaboration for Art in the Open to create a gossip-powered human machine for generating poetry. This interactive, interdisciplinary art project will visually incorporate elements of an old-fashioned wooden machine, including a hopper, harnesses, and a hand-cranked reel. Source material for phrases and images that will run through this machine will come from historical and contemporary PEI tourism promotions. Thematically, the artwork will play with notions about the culturally claustrophobic role of word-of-mouth on a small island, the oral and the aural in poetry writing and performance, and the relationship of tourism and culture in representations of Prince Edward Island.

For each performance of the Rumour Mill, the artists will harness volunteer participants in a line in rope harnesses. At one end, a participant will pull a phrase or an image at random from a “hopper” pre-filled with phrases and generic images selected (by the artists) from Prince Edward Island historical and contemporary tourism promotions. The participant will whisper the phrase or a brief description of the image in the ear of the next participant down the line (as in the game of “Telephone”). As the phrase passes from person to person, it will be transformed by mishearings, misunderstandings, misrememberings – and by machinations of time, environment, and random events – to become a line of “poetry.” The artists will transcribe what the last person in the line says she or he hears on a scrolling sheet of brown paper, a roll of which will be spooled on a reel with a handcrank, so fresh paper can be exposed in time for the next line of poetry the human machine generates. The structure that houses the roll of paper will be built roughly with weathered, recycled materials to recall machinery in mills that were once common across PEI.

The Rumour Mill will operate at scheduled times every 60 minutes from 4:00 p.m. until midnight, although it can also operate any time there are six or more volunteers. At least two additional performance times will be reserved for the Rumour Mill to generate lines of poetry in French. Between performances, viewers will be able to read lines of poetry that have previously been generated. Each performance will add at least three lines to the poem. Due to the need for relative quiet, our preferred installation location is Rochford Square. Following Art in the Open, the poems and documentation generated by the Rumour Mill will be published on Stephen B. MacInnis’s blog at https://sbmacinnis.wordpress.com.

Memorials. Monumental or otherwise. An Artist’s Review.

Boer War.

Recently I did a post on Charlottetown’s fountains, so I thought it would be a good idea to look at some of Charlottetown‘s monuments.

As would be expected in Canada we have our fair share of war memorials. The two most prominent memorials are located at Province House. This one is the Boer war memorial, and is probably similar to all Boer war memorials in any city or town in the British Commonwealth. It is one of those memorials most people walk past without ever noticing, it is suitable to its task, and it has an off-the-shelf quality that I kind of like. I’ll have one heroic Canadian please, and can you toss in a broken cannon?

War Memorial.

This is the Cenotaph and is the most impressive of all Charlottetown memorials. It is well placed in front of Province House and is best viewed from University Avenue. It is something that you look at when you walk past, and I think it’s a successful monument.

Owen Connolly.

In the 1800s Owen Connolly was a successful merchant in the town of Charlottetown. His bust is on the roof of a building he owned on Queen Street. For many years it was neglected, but recently it was cleaned and is now easily visible from the street. I’ve always liked it for its simple charm.

Francis Bain.

This is a strange little monument to the Island-born naturalist Francis Bain. It’s a sad little plaque attached to a rock, and the strange thing is, it was erected by the Natural History and Antiquarian Society of P.E.I. for an Island naturalist and the rock is probably from Nova Scotia and not from Prince Edward Island. Our Island rock is red sandstone.

Workers Memorial.

This is a monument to workers injured or killed on the job. I really don’t feel this is in any way a suitable monument, and something like this belongs only in a grave yard. I feel a monument for injured or killed workers deserves to be designed by an artist, and not thrown together by a committee. I don’t know if a lack of funds was the reason for this but it really does look like it was off-the-shelf, but not in a good way.

Sir John A. Macdonald.

This really isn’t a monument to Sir John A. Macdonald, but it’s the only public sculpture in Charlottetown of Canada’s first Prime Minister. It was at first a controversial sculpture mainly because the artist is an American, but lately I’ve noticed it seems to be popular with people on the street. Many people pose for photographs by sitting on the bench next to Sir John A., and a surprising number make out with him while having their photo taken. Especially late on Saturday night.