MOVING

http://erinbusswood.tumblr.com/

field trip #2

 ...to North Bend - home of Twin Peaks!!!

recent field trips

A recent field trip was to the site of the former BC Penitentiary and Woodlands site. We were searching for the old grave site of former inmates who had been buried without names, just numbers. It was a long search, but was finally found behind a unkempt, chain link fence, behind some blackberry bushes and condo lots.

bear in a waiting room

convicts and negatives

 One of my jobs recently has been to clean and scan negatives of BC Penitentiary inmates from the 1940's (I was given access to them by Peter Murphy, a professor at Thompson Rivers University). When I'm cleaning each negative, I can't help but think about what the lives of these men were like as they stare back at me...Trying to incorporate these negatives into my own work, I'm planning on taking a little field trip to the site of the BC Pen (which for the most part, no longer stands - though there are graves marked with just inmate #'s).

I see both landscape and the archive as being a shared experience that acts as a 'bridge between the personal and the shared'. I think the term 'intersubjectivity' works really well when considering the experience of dealing with people's archives and landscape in general - as I imagine landscape to be a large scale, shared, living archive - with generations of lives marking, mapping and experiencing it continually. Here is a definition of Intersubjectivity (wikipedia): In phenomenology, intersubjectivity performs many functions. It allows empathy, which in phenomenology involves experiencing another person as a subject rather than just as an object among objects. In so doing, one experiences oneself as seen by the Other, and the world in general as a shared world instead of one only available to oneself. Intersubjectivity also helps in the constitution of objectivity: in the experience of the world as available not only to oneself, but also to the Other, there is a bridge between the personal and the shared, the self and the Others.

On another note - I have to add that in almost all of the negatives that I have cleaned so far - every single inmate is dressed well!

 

what you know about someone...

I've been thinking about what is lost when you archive. What narratives are formed, and what you learn from even the photographs you've taken yourself. I sometimes think I've photographed something that was right in front of me a million times, never noticing what later becomes totally apparent. I've been photographing my husband since we met. When I look back on some of these photographs I can see the evolution of my own feeling...it says less about his identity than it does about my own. Perhaps that's why I photograph my family so consistently...it becomes an archive of my own experience, that I'm unable to articulate in a document or a photograph of myself.

old buildings, plants, and animals.

the natural history museum in Strasbourg, France. we saw the most amazing little show of paintings here as well - i will post some of the scans from her exhibition book

looking towards the Black Forest of Germany...i didn't mind the fog...

driving the route de vin

oh i wish i owned this little store...i will put up some pictures of the beautiful fabrics she had as well...

catch up...

Ok - so part of the reason I want to do this, is to practice editing, practice writing, and to attempt to just put something out there without constantly worrying about whether i still feel that way or not and just stick to it. So if you are one of the few poor souls reading this (!) then I am going to be putting up old stuff...kind of re-visiting the year...and then using this space as an incentive to keep working. I figure if it exists, then I'll do my best to show up, and hopefully I'll learn to speak more articulately about artwork (without sounding like an asshole), and find ways to connect that to the other creative aspects of living. I'm interested in figuring out what ways i can combine all of my different interests into something that makes sense to me. I'm interested in archives - and what ends up being lost in the process, so this will be a practice at my own. Obviously this is a fairly self-absorbed endeavor...but maybe it will turn into more of a relationship with other artists, and a place where i can exchange ideas...

Drawing

I've been doing a lot of drawing lately. Partly because I've been working in a collective with Katherine Coe and Rosanne Bennet, called Beautiful Frontier. It has been this great process where I get to make things again - something I miss when I'm taking photographs. I think that's why building sets in photography appeals to me. We recently did an installation at Mountainview Cemetary. The installation was a lantern memorial for people in British Columbia's past who were on the 'outsides' of society: people who had spent time in institutions such as Woodlands, Essondale, and the BC Penitentiary.

I made Caleb into a sleepy bear for a little show out in Ontario I was part of. I ended up using sandpaper to rough it up a little, but in the end wished I hadn't. Oh well!

Caleb and Ruby learning flight patterns.

Again...I wish I hadn't messed with them. They were also kind of sparkly...so they looked like pictures inspired by galaxy exploration.

One of the drawings in my sketchbook for the Art House Co op Sketchbook project. It's quite a bit darker here than in REAL LIFE. My book's theme was 'Revenge'. Rosanne was part of this too...I'll put a link to her work once I get it.