These questions were posed by my friend Julia Pileski, and answered during our many interesting conversations and email exchanges. I met Julia during an artist-residency I did at the Oxygen Arts Centre. Julia is a Nelson based Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner.
What is your perspective on life? How did you develop this perspective?
I would describe myself as an absurdist that is interested in the possibility of presence.
I think the how’s of this development were many and varied. For example, starting as a boy of 15, I have experienced a comparatively large volume of deaths in my life. By the time I was 23, three of the eight or nine kids from our core group that had shared classes since we were six or seven, were dead. I asked, in many different voices from different psychic places, what is our explanation for death? of course, providing an explanation of ones continued validity/relevance even in death forms the basis of all religious belief systems.
What do you intend to communicate in your work?
A playful sense of the absurd. To be human is to be aware of our absurd condition – to have human consciousness is to be cognizant of our mortality.
Presence. Remembering to be present. Live in the now – not in the past or the future.
Becoming aware and easeful of the nothing.
Allow and embrace randomness, accidents, chance, serendipity.
How would you describe yourself and your style as an artist?
I would describe myself as: I am of average brain, average health, average disposition, average looks, average creativity, average humour, average tolerance – above average curiosity and determination.
I describe myself as an artist/architect/film-maker/exhibition designer.
or
a spatial & temporal mixed media artist.
or
a conjurer/trickster/fool.
What drew you towards these art forms?
I feel there is a direct link from the varied things I do to my interest and training in architecture. I was never convinced about being a professional architect, i was most attracted to the training of an architect. In pursuing an architectural education I understood the training as the most well rounded education available. During my training, I began to recalibrate my interests away from the design of architecture. For example, I began to recognize the folly of an individual being asked to design complex architectures like a modern Carnegie library, interpretive centre or redesigning a city of millions, as architecture is the most collaborative of art forms. I became less interested in the formality of arriving at specific architectural designs – which when unbuilt might be dismissed as mere graphic lines or “paper architecture” – and more interested in the effects of time and movement through space. As well, I became more interested in the narratives surrounding impractical and informal architectures. So, less focussed on the pre-concluded program and predictable rational planning of architecture and more about various unpredictable choreographies. This temporal, spatial and choreographic interest remains a recurring theme in my works. Another draw during my university was being re-exposed to and starting to experiment with chance processes, found images and collage/assemblage techniques.
What or who has been the main influence in the development of your practice?
I think the main influences have changed over the course of my life.
When I was a young boy, I had a very influential public school teacher, Dorothy Elkington, for grades 1, 2 and 6. She encouraged us to explore learning through drawing and story-writing. She also taught us to meditate. From these foundational years, Dorothy remained a life-long friend and mentor until she died a few years ago.
One influence that comes to mind is that my mom had a number of friends that were architects and, though he wasn’t around during my formative high school years, I knew my dad was trained as an architect. There seemed to be a sophistication, intelligence, compassion, and humour in the worldview of each of these five men and one woman that really struck me and one commonality was that they were all trained as architects.
Before I decided to study architecture, I worked with a young architect/artist/professor (Dereck Revington) who was influential in articulating to me the benefits of an architectural education. He remains a good friend and mentor.
One profound moment I recall happened when my English artist grandfather visited our home in Toronto when I was ten. He was a superlative drawer. I remember being spellbound sitting beside him watching him draw, conjuring birds and creatures. This is my only memory of him, he returned to England and died within six months.
As I got older and after my father died, in addition to this grandfather, I really began to explore the reality that this grandfathers father, father-in-law, and grandfather were professional artist painters. In this sense, I began to understand being artistic is a large part of my ancestral inheritance.
Please describe the top 3 most influential personal growth moments/psycho-emotional breakthrough moments of your life. In what way did they influence your life perspective and artistic expression?
- The car accident
- Cranio-sacral healing sessions with Mia Kalef after the car accident.
- Kissing the forehead of my dead father
- Doing ayahuasca in the early ’90s
- Going to my Irish cousin Diurmuid’s funeral with my Mom
The second part of this question is kind of answered below. But here goes
- I learned to be present. Though i don’t believe in God, the result of the accident was like a big fist came down on top of my head that slammed me into the present tense. a command from on high: “dont worry about the past that we can do nothing about, nor worry about the future that may never arrive, the continually unfolding present is all we have.” the present is our only true reality. and the one known truth about the present is that its continually changing. This bashing into presence was complicated and compounded by the fact that i still can’t remember the car accident. i can remember the lovely moments before and the collateral damage after, but nothing reliable about the 15+ minutes either side of the event. this was very problematic until I accepted the responsibility of the accident. though it was truly an accident, i was still responsible. consequential accidents are no different from inconsequential ones, accept for their outcomes. each are accidents, random alignments of specific events. concluding its an accident and accepting responsibility for something that I have no conscious awareness of, that I have no visible injury from, where I relied on others to relate to me their version of events was a major challenge. pretty absurd, pretty Kafka-esque.
- Mia was such a benevolent source of healing. I was introduced to her at just the right moment, earlier i wouldn’t have been convinced i needed help and later I might have been beyond redemption. when i shadowed her door, i was ready to work! she supported me in reassembling myself after i admitted i was pretty fucked up from the accident. I describe crania-sacral work as a combination of super slow motion chiropractic adjustments and crossing the river styx by hand propelled boat blindfolded, where your unconscious body leads and she follows and supports. its uncanny, the way my body knew what it needed to do to heal, attended by Mia in such a concentrated and generous way. i loved that Mia agreed to work with me for consecutive six plus hour days, the unusually compressed timeframe allowed me to become a new man – a newly integrated man – in a very short while.
- I was in Ireland making my first film when my dad died, in his flat’s kitchen, in Gibsons. I include this psycho-emotional moment not because I felt guilty being away from him in his last moments, although there was a flicker of that. it was more about experiencing the finality of his death. despite arriving only 36 hrs after he died, the cold remoteness of the kiss, the complete absence of life in his skin, sticks with me to this day. Though i had brushed up against death many times before his death, for a son, the death of ones father is especially profound. Despite being quite different in personality, in physique, in temperament, never-the-less, I was his mini-me. The aftermath, of clearing out his apartment was also important. For a life-long creative man, the lack of much tangible material output to “hang on to”, was very instructive for me. As a result, I redoubled my efforts to keep my house come hell or high water. As well, to leave at least one thing for my children that was reflective of my particular passions and interests, something I carefully and lovingly created against many odds… This in turn, became a very large impetus for my first film, Blind Man’s Eye. I would love to have shown him this film….
- What can I say? ayahuasca stopped me in my tracks ! it confirmed my previous intuitions that space and time are not linear, that i had gleaned through meditation and “dabbling” with various other drugs. after doing ayahuasca once – I feel like I understood this powerful medicine in a deep way – I didn’t feel any inclination to do other hallucinogenic drugs for twenty years.
- My Irish cousin Diurmuid was killed in an early morning raid by a London swat team that was told to expect a firefight ‘cause they were confronting “Irish terrorists”. The situation was so fucked up in so many ways – socially, politically, emotionally – and its consequences were pretty devastating for the Irish side of my family. With me by her side, into this chaotic scene steps my mom, the matriarch & queen of our family, to bless and hold the family together. She showed me how to get all medieval – she introduced me to and demonstrated to me the powerful Celtic ancestral ways which could not be held back or down by the newer and more foreign Christian ways. Despite the enormous press and police presence, the numerous out of town attendants, the days before, after and the funeral itself played out like a medieval drama. I still feel like this profound time literally rearranged my cells – clearly calling me back to the olde sod to drink up these ways, like a salmon to its spawning ground.