Vjane posting Public Art Discussion
“The obvious connection of two of Canada's most notorious heavy/industrial planet changing installations has become parsed, examined in more nuanced units. Public Art fits into these nuanced appreciations of both communities.”

I'd like to try to expand the quotation above (cited by Jim in his lengthy Blog entry) into a more parsed and nuanced examination of the conception of communty through the specific examples of experience in the BS Art Exchange.

"Installations" is a word I have used to describe parts of the two communities. As an artist I think of "installations" as work that takes a deathgrip on context and doesn't ever completely accept the consequences of the powers vested in the institution. Human agency can create installations that seem to fling the powers of the natural world aside and offer some other terrible context. I see this in both "communities" not just because of the industries but also because of the extraordinary setting where the industrial installation does its work. The Sudbury Basin, one of the earth's most spectacular meteor strikes and the Niagara Escarpment are geographic locations of planetary significance. I am attracted to both these areas because I love stone, in my artist's statement I call it "the skin of the world". The particular qualities of the world skin in both these areas stretches far... far enough to encompass all the names given to the communities around these industrial wounds.

My attitude to stone is an element of a specific beginning strategy for parsing one of the elements in both communities. The results of my parsing may have close connections to work of another group member, they may open a larger element of a community to itself in a slightly different way. This may be a small nuance that can't be appreciated in a "blanket declaration", but is a more useful tool for community identification or identity.

Communities have identities and like human identities they are always under construction and always changing.To begin to make them workable for our project I say we have to parse and build nuanced associations and interpretations. This is groundwork for the sympathetic magic mentioned in another post, and a place where public art lives as a valid intervention.

Let's not be reductive. Let's not build walls around experience. Let's not spend time defining and eliminating. Let's not separate out our little territory yet. Let's play. We are the BS Exchange!