“Blow 24 fps”, installation & animation, 2015

Panel/Frame 01 – Hemlock & spruce sign supports – The stakes from former mayor Barry Janyck’s election signs.
Panel/Frame 02 – Cedar siding – Siding from a soon to be demolished Gibsons Way in the heritage hills.
Panel/Frame 03 – Cardboard packaging on MDC – Retrieved from the Recycling Depot, this panel shows the interior cardboard packaging from a pre-assembled electric garden fire-table. It used to be that the family would sit around a rock-ringed firepit, but that was long ago. Mr and Mrs Benning hope that the grandkids will come to enjoy sitting around this new fireplace with their parents.
Panel/Frame 04 – Fir plywood – This chest of drawers sat in the mudroom as the kids grew up. It housed our winter clothes – sweaters, rain-pants, mitts, and hats. Ours is one of the oldest houses on Sargent Rd. The late Bob Nygren remembers the street from when he was a boy. The dirt road ended just past our house, where he and his friends would tease and chase the grazing cows.
Panel/Frame 05 – Composite board – Mrs. Chen at the dollar store used this pegboard – behind the screwdrivers and pliers – for only four months. Mrs. Chen likes to move her stock around till she gets just the right place and best method of displaying. Retrieved from the dump.
Panel/Frame 06 – Cedar siding – Rough hewn wooden siding, stained green. Recovered from behind Old Marvin’s wood shop up the highway. Marvin can’t remember where he originally scavenged them from, but glad he found them when he did as it finally allowed him to lock-up his shop, after he got delivery of the heavy steel table saw. Its said Marvin could fix anything.
Panel/Frame 07 – Spruce packing crate – This packing crate was found beside a dumpster in the city, in a neighbourhood alley behind small trade shops like metal works, trade sign printing, and custom lights.
Panel/Frame 08 – Plywood, various – A composite of beach-combed plywood. This panel has an “is-ness” about it, presence. Like its meant to be this way – it has a lovely abstract quality about it.
Panel/Frame 09 – Maple and oak bedside cabinet – This panel displays all the contents from a bedside cabinet – the hardware is in the drawer. “Olive always liked looking after things, from kittens in a carriage when she was a little to soldiers in the war. This panel consists of the inner workings of her night table which remained a faithful servant to her in her fading years when she was looked after by others. Her life spanned from a time when her grandfather owned the first automobile in Chilliwack to the advent of computers. She drank lots of milk. Always with vodka in it.” as told by Doug Ives
Panel/Frame 10 – Hemlock door – Purchased from an architectural salvage depot to be our new front door in our soon to be renovated/expanded workers shack. The door sat neglected in our back yard, leaning against the giant fir tree, for many years. We stripped all the paint off one side.
Panel/Frame 11 – Painted fir flooring from a Gibsons “heritage hills” house. This is likely the cabin where the Rudolph kids hung out during the summers in the sixties. Jack was an anxious type, always trying to plan the impossible. He sold real estate up and down the island. He dropped dead three weeks into retirement. Nobody saw that coming. Alice married her high school sweetheart rather abruptly. Nobody saw that coming either. She never had the interest or patience to stay home. Amazingly, she drove trucks for the longest time – her husband insisted on coming with her for the long hauls, leaving the twins with his parents. She’s still going strong, in her late eighties now – expecting to be a great grandmother shortly. Little Johnny had a wicked right arm, sometimes supplemented with a Wrist Rocket sling shot. Always in trouble, but the sweetest smile let him get away with everything but murder. He lost his leg in a motorcycle accident. Died twenty years later from cirrhosis of the liver – whether from alcohol or hepatitis nobody seems to know.
Panel/Frame 12 – Fir plywood with paper veneer – Julie bought Cap’n Rabby’s house over on Balls Lane. A nice little place where the Rabby’s lived and brought up their kids. But it was an old style layout so Julie opened it up to suit her living style. This panel was a desk that was part of the built in shelving and functioned as a sewing table, judging by the sewing paraphernalia left in the drawer beside it. The sewing desk (we’ll call it) was beside a window where Helen could glance up and keep an eye on the harbour below. When not sewing and doing other chores, Helen’s favorite spot in the house, especially as she got on in years, was the kitchen table beside the kitchen window where she could survey all the activity in the lane as well as in the harbour. This would be a natural interest since her husband, Captain Rabby, was a captain on the Black Ball ferries.
Panel/Frame 13 – Fir plywood with fir & beach clock – This broken clock was retrieved from the dump – I recognized it. The Ackers told me it was a wedding present. They said the clock told the time great till it fell off their mantle. It was during the commotion of their big Mastiff jumping up trying to get a closer look at the bunny that Old Acker brought for his grand-daughters fifth Christmas. The dog knocked the old guy into the mantle with his weight. Every year it seemed to lose more and more time. The joke was that its losing so much time that it might soon be back in sync, but they would have lost a whole year.
Panel/Frame 14 – Beach-combed spruce plywood – The mysterious stains and markings are very compelling. They seem to be residue from some sort of siding or corrugated plastic roof sheeting – Was the plywood maybe part of a boat?
Panel/Frame 15 – Spruce plywood – This was the “canvas” for an earlier assemblage piece that I made in the garden with one of our girls. I stripped it of all the “junk”, back to its bare bones blue. Crow completes it nicely.
Panel/Frame 16 – Fir floorboards – Taken from the interior of a heritage hills home, since demolished. This panel is a slice of the interior where one can see the adapted history of the floor – a pattern of hallway, closet and possibly storage area. This old fir became very hard over the years. The interior of the house was used for a scene of the Beachcombers tv series. I think it was from one of the earlier seasons, something about finding something that may have been stolen or misplaced. A radio? I can’t remember….
Panel/Frame 17 – Fir plywood – This is the basketball hoop backboard out front of 530 Sargent Rd. According to the front page of the “Coast News”, dated June 11, 1969, this house was moved from its original “position immediately adjacent to Ken’s Woodland on Gower Point Road to a lot on Sargent Road…. The whole move was done by a four man crew from Apex Building Movers in Burnaby. They started preparing the building Thursday afternoon, started the move about five a.m. Friday, and by eight a.m. had it parked in the middle of Sargent Road, where it provided a rather startling sight for those proceeding down school road to work.”
Panel/Frame 18 – A mix of hemlock & spruce siding – Part of the original siding from another older shack in lower Gibsons lovingly restored/renovated by the nowhere-near-retired-cause-they-are-having-so-much-fun owners. They have taken every piece of the awkward old house and garden apart and lovingly resembled it into the present domestic gem. The garden is a hi-light in the annual garden tours of the Sunshine Coast.
Panel/Frame 19 – Fir plywood offcuts w composite ball and various fir and sliced cedar urn elements – An assemblage made largely from an earlier assemblage, which was sited in the garden from a few years back, overlooking the back deck. It was starting to look tired. I’ve created a kind of Duchampian temporal/spatial fold with some bits from the landfill…
Panel/Frame 20 – Maple (Made in China) table – The patterns on the plywood on the underside are more intriguing than the top surface. This table was in the rec room of the Kingsets for a long time. The tv controller, and later the video game controller, could always be found amongst the ashtray, newspapers and forgotten dishes.
Panel/Frame 21 – Alder tree – Picked up from the Mahon trail on the way to Gibsons Wildlife. Considered to a “weed tree” by many foresters, its recently getting an upgrade in reputation due to its unique ability to bring nitrogen into the soil for the benefit of other less hardy plants via the symbiotic Frankia bacteria that it hosts. What would we do without Wikipedia?
Panel/Frame 22 – Fir siding – from our house on Sargent Road. A typical worker shack, cobbled together from ill fitting found and “acquired” materials – the house was the first on our street. Some of the walls studs didn’t even reach the top plate. We discovered this when we redid the last part of the original cabin’s interior. This was perfectly logical explanation as to why the top of front door pinched and never closed properly.
Panel/Frame 23 – Cedar door – This scratched up door was the side entrance to the house from the carport. Old Ralph would get anxious – or was it bored? cold? – when left too long there. Despite his advanced age and overall faltering senses, he still had a pretty good internal clock. Unless he was allowed back inside by between 5-5:30, he’d start scraping at the door. This scraping action wasn’t easy for him as he couldn’t get around very well. He’d have to maneuver himself to a kind of three-quarter position, as a result of which, most of the scrapes are sideways. He was a big dog, but you could see as he got older, his marked were made lower and lower. After Old Ralph died, the owners couldn’t bare to see the scratches as they felt so guilty for making him have to make such efforts to be beside them, so they installed a Masonite composite door with a thirty year warranty. (Whether the warranty’s fine print would accept dog scratches remains to be seen).
Panel/Frame 24 – Philippine Mahogany (Luan) deerskin – This panel is recycled from an earlier installation last year, The Ruptured Threshold. Despite rumours, it has nothing to do with Radiohead.
mtk, 2015