Evidence: The Ottawa City Project is the exhibit of objects, images and art runs at the Ottawa Art Gallery from September 5 to November 16, 2008. The art covers the underside of Ottawa, not the federal capital of grand buildings and tours for tourists, but what is less ideal but salvaged into perhaps beauty – the burned out or boarded up buildings on the contemporary streetscape. There’s trashed cultural byproducts (cereal boxes) remade into a canoe and then photographed with the Ottawa icons of Native sculpture. The same idea(l) of Native is set against romance novel covers (or immitation of). The exhibit tries to captures the ephemera of what’s discarded or looked away from, like mattress fabrics remade into quilted art (pictured below), gritty black and white images of local homeless people, larger than life images of trash on plexiboard.
September 25th there was an associated reading by rob mclennan reading from (turn on sound) Ottawa City Project, the book. His view of the city, although also dealing in the specificness of local, seems considerably less stark and grounded wider and deeper in history but also the bits that are at risk of getting lost or are lost, such as lectures from a century ago and memories of buildings that have been since razed.
What do we carry forward with? What past and past lives are under the surface? What little details comprise a place? p. 43
the arts court building, ceilings
filled w/ horse hair,
peter honeywell
the days he pulled at it
p. 39 there’s
an acoustic of geography, cultural
argument
in winterlude
or bands
in confederation park
Do we have to have the embedded knowledge or the experience of the shape of surrounding trees and buildings and knowledge of typical amping or to know that it is a music festival or can we extend better from the specifics than we could from a bland elaborated sweep of explanation?
There are universals such as in by-ward market, p 59
late remains
of any day, the place where language reflects
in the shape of a coinenglish& french; french & english; a binary that ignores
the expansiveness of so much more
Past a century on, the constancy of flames yet p. 134
lesson of the fire, lebreton flats,
april 27, 1900nothing lasts; everything
connectsbridges gap & fire house
made of woodwater is no barrier
Ottawa has shifted and continually changes. In address to the city of ottawa, 1857, p. 131 Queen Victoria had just renamed the place from Bytown to Ottawa and given the new function of capital,
victoria queen laid her hand upon
listen to what the land tells,
ghost of a scattershot; listen
to the earthwhile it is still earth, muddy
on your boots
He also read (to a gallery-silent but few dozen large audience) from a special chapbook for the occasion Ottawa: A Field Guide and other texts coming out of life in the city and nearby, including a series of 7 poems for daughter Kate, house: a (tiny) memoir, a manuscript in process (including one which revisits the buddhist notion of never stepping into the same stream twice, with the side remark addition, but my sock and shoe are still wet, and in another piece, how a pregnant pause miscarries) and poems from a PF Yacht Club and a couple older collections as well.