A visit to Dirt City/Dream City

It was raining this afternoon as I moved about the Quarters clutching my map of Dirt City/Dream City.  If you get the chance, rain or shine, turn a corner or go down an alley before the end of July and be surprised by a day-brightening bit — or lot — of art. Today the Quarters was alive with people quite obviously not usually there, people seeking out the art.  I understand Tix on the Square ran out of its free maps of the exhibition early in the afternoon.  I printed my own copy of  the one online.

I think I nearly found all the artworks.  Let’s see . . .

First up (on my route) is Jill Stanton’s parking lot sized painted pebble faux mosaic “You will be okay” — the title is the text — a huge statement of reassurance to a depressed and cloudy sky.  The colours are the colours of sidewalk chalk and I couldn’t help but think of “The Edmonton Remand Centre Newspaper” and Lindsay Bond’s photographic project documenting it.  “You will be okay” is a gargantuan shout of all the messages chalked each day on that nearby sidewalk it marvelous.  A marvelous and thought provoking piece of ephemeral art.

A little further west on 102A Ave is “Futile Fancy” by Jes McCoy.  From a distance I thought of the mini-golf set-up at Fort Edmonton Park.  Close up I thought of a playground but an oddly and intriguingly non-functonal and perhaps unfinished playground.  Then I realized it is an obstacle course.  Perhaps the apparent non-functionality and unfinishedness makes Futile Fancy a metaphor for the City itself.

Around the orner, beside the old Koerman Block, present home of the Hung Fung and the Alberta Kwan Ying Athletic Clubs, is Tiffany Shaw-Collinge’s “Garden Reflections”, a beautiful sudden garden of straw planters, beautifully complementing the old wall with its faded painted ads.  Despite the rain, I wanted to sit and enjoy the curve of the paths and the warmth of the soil. Having long been fascinated with Jeremy Bentham, I found the allusion to his Panopticon prison design both interesting and, in this context, thought provoking.

Up on 103A Avenue, there is a “Lonely Mountain” by Mackenzy Albright and Rachelle Bowen, although how such an inviting, stairway riven mountain could be lonely I don’t understand, especially with Jackson McConnell’s whimsical lollipop tree and cartoon city “Campsite” tent right at its foot.

At the far north of the exhibition space, on 104 Avenue, is Holly Newman’s lovely poem of loss and hope, “Crow’s Advice” on a series of banners.  As well there is a wall of tags on which to offer advice for mending a broken heart and tiny fabric hearts to take away as payment for suggestions.  “Crow’s Advice” surrounds Emily van Driesum’s “The Placebo Effect”, a grove of cut poplar saplings, literally (in a figurative sense) stitched into place, drying and fading as the days pass, a bit of a forest in the Quarters, but a placebo, not the real thing.

More than half of the large works in Dirt City/Dream City are concentrate at the corner of Jasper Avenue and 95 Street.  Nickelas Johnson’s “Ripped off and Red” is the most eye-catching, a huge, red-painted severed hand lying palm up in the green grass.  Nearby is Aaron Paquette’s beautiful “Everyone is Welcome”, an uncovered tipi frame sheltering an apple tree and surrounded by a flower garden. The whole is set on something of a medicine wheel.  The coloured cloths hanging from the tipi poles bring to mind a visit to the Rib Stones east of Edmonton, where similar but smaller bits of cloth perpetually hang from the branches of the poplar grove near to the sacred stones.  The Quarters, a very human place,  like every human space, is a sacred space.

Across Jasper is Destiny Swiderski’s monumental rope structure “Dream Catcher” completely prepared to catch some exceptionally big dreams.  I expect such dreams will come.

A number of pieces are on billboards and might too easily be ignored.  Nickelas Johnson’s “Tent City” is a beautiful, slightly abstracted design of tents in blue.  Matt Prins’ “Billboard for 91.2 FM The Mouth Hole” is a lovely parody of the many obnoxious ads for radio shows that litter every city.  As well, the billboard is a real ad for a fictional program on the real very low power radio transmitter (91.2 on your FM dial) that can be picked up in a very limited area around the Artery (9535 Jasper Ave.)

“My Heart is in Quarters” by Aaron Paquette is a truly lovely painting, an image of three peacefully sleeping figures, a family, in Paquette’s usual style of bright, solid colours, strong lines, and gold leaf.  I first encountered and was struck forcefully by Paquette’s work in the Narrative Quest show earlier this summer at the RAM.  For me, “My Heart is in Quarters” is a high point of Dirt City/Dream City.

Carly Greene’s “Simulacrum” is easy to miss:  clothes hanging from lines between buildings.  But the clothes are hung with iron pins, intended to rust and streak the clothing, marking them with history as the old buildings of the Quarters are marked with their history.  Certainly this day of rain in Edmonton will help complete Greene’s vision.

Andrew Buzschak’s “Pulse Points” are scattered throughout the Quarters, easy to miss blue signs on poles, a little like slightly shortened street signs.  But, look more closely:  Buzschak has used phrases from the City’s urban renewal boosting literature in an ironic and cautionary contrast to the current state of some areas of the Quarters.  The signs are lit in the evening by solar powered lights which will certainly make the pieces, and their message, stand out very well.

Unfortunately I didn’t see Adam Waldron Blain performing on his violin.  what a wonderful addition to the exhibition his music would be.  Together with the soundscape provided by 92.1 FM, live music makes Dirt City/Dream City an inspired moment in the history of the Quarters.

And history is something that runs through the entire exhibition.  The history of the community that has been here, that is here today, and that will continue to be here in the future, whatever the bulldozers and builders may have in store.  Dirt City/Dream City is a gentle warning, a firm reminder, and, from what I saw today, a much visited statement that the Quarters is not terra nullius.  This is a community, a community of communities with a rich history and a vibrant present.  Both must be recognized and respected if future redevelopment is to be itself something living rather than just a dead pile of concrete, steel and polystyrene.

 

It’s summer.  Go down to the Quarters and have a walk around.  See the art.  See the communities so often ignored.  Think.  Consider.  Remember.

And know that no Dream City ever becomes real without a Dirt City to live in.

Update, July 31: it’s just been announced that Dirt City/Dream City has been extended to the end of August.

An update on “Messages To: . . .”

This evening I took a moment to stop by Latitude 53 to get a copy of Lindsey Bond’s book of her project, Messages To: The Edmonton Remand Centre Newspaper which I’ve written about before and later while enjoying the late evening sunset in the freedom of my wonderful neighbourhood I read the texts by Anne Pasek and Karen Elaine Spencer which accompany Lindsey’s photos.

I had a very difficult time holding back tears as children played and laughed around me.

The vast majority of us have no inkling of the implications of remand.  As Spencer writes “The ‘presumption of innocence’ is breached in favour of a ‘risk reduction’ strategy of containment.”  A remand centre is de facto a place of indefinite incarceration without trial.

Edmonton’s Remand Centre is in the heart of the city, in the face of City Hall as well as citizens — although few seem aware that that grey building with the little windows holds a few thousand unconvicted prisoners every year.  In 2013, the few that are aware, who chalk the messages to their loved ones on the sidewalk outside, will no longer have even this meagre unsupervised communication.  And the homeless, those unable to post bail, the down on their luck, the mentally ill, will be trucked with the career criminals, the murderers, the rapists to the outskirts of the city and dumped into a hole to await a trial or release with little programming, counselling or mental health care.

I sincerely hope that many many many Edmontonians, Albertans and Canadians go to Lindsey’s webpage for the project, messagestoerc.com , that they seek out Lindsey’s book and that they badger their elected representatives about the wrong-headedness of increased incarceration rates.

And, as Lindsey’s photos bring home painfully and beautifully: this isn’t just about those on the inside.

“Messages To: The Edmonton Remand Centre Newspaper” by Lindsey Bond

The other day after a visit to the Art Gallery of Alberta (Mistresses of the Modern is still on so get down there!) I was walking through Churchill LRT Station and saw this poster in one of the ad spaces on the wall.  “Oh,” I thought, “that’s Lindsey’s new thing.”  I have a passing acquaintance with Lindsey Bond from her time as Assistant to the Director at Visual Arts Alberta — on her typing skills I inflicted the absurdly long titles of my absurdly small paintings.  I noticed the QR code on the display and, of course, got out my phone. How interesting: I was standing in front of a piece of public art which is part of an attenuated show displayed across more than a dozen public transit stations. And the entire virtual gallery is now also in my phone.  This is good!

I thought of one day many years ago in the Mexico City subway when I noticed that at decent intervals through the station there were screens displaying brief history lessons — public education indeed.  I thought at the time it was such a good thing to be using public space for education and information rather than marketing.  Lindsey’s multi-platform photography exhibit (it will be launched as an old fashioned book at the end of March) is a wonderful marriage of good old public art and the ubiquitous smart phone.

But, I haven’t even touched on the substance of “Messages To:”

Before now I hadn’t known that illicit messages are openly passed from the outside to those held in the Edmonton Remand Centre by the ancient medium of chalk on the sidewalk.  Unlike many I’ve met in Edmonton, I know where the Remand Centre is — I find it amazing that a big building pretty much right in the heart of the city is invisible to most citizens.  If the building is invisible, those inside certainly and sadly must be as well.

But Lindsey’s photos of the chalk messages to inmates heartbreakingly shows that those inside are not ignored by at least a few outside.  Pink hearts abound in the sidewalk drawings.  Even the more concrete messages such as to “Call Ashley” take the time for endearing pet names.  While we are zipping across town in a crowd of commuters, all of us staring at our phones, there are those held in Remand, whatever their alleged crimes, who look out the narrow window for a bit of outside personal loving contact from chalk on the sidewalk, contact which will be hosed away at nightfall.  This chalk is the one tweet they’re allowed to receive for the day or the week or the month.  Lindsey’s exhibit preserves this virtually unknown communication medium and shows us a place in our society most of us don’t — or don’t want to — know about.  This is really good.

The downtown Remand Centre is going to be closed soon, replaced by an obscenely large new holding facility on the northern edge of the city.  I don’t expect the sidewalk will be as visible there, and that is a loss.

Lindsey Bond’s “”Messages To:  The Edmonton Remand Centre Newspaper” is in LRT stations and in your phone until June 7.  QR the virtual gallery and enjoy some thought provoking art — both Lindsey Bond’s photographs and the chalk messages the photos preserve  — on your way to work or school or on your way home, and text or tweet about it to your friends.  I might even think about chalking the QR code onto the sidewalk in front of my house.

The Book of the Project will be launched on May 26 at Latitude 53, 10248 – 106 Street.