explorations in toronto art.

I’ve been digging into some of my back-burner projects, as I try (but often fail) to do during periods of downtime. Right now, the project is to revisit and work on some photos I made during a trip to Iceland, more than one year ago now. I processed the film and scanned them almost as soon as I got back, but then quickly got wrapped up in something else.
Now I’m looking at them, along with other images I made around the same time, during a trip to Montreal. Most of these are just fun, sentimental pictures, but it’s kind of mind-boggling how easily I had forgotten about them.. partly due to the usual “sands-of-time” sort of reasons, but probably more due to some flaw in my workflow and image filing.

Here’s a selection of some favourites that I had forgotten about:

Sabrina and I made a trip to Montreal with Bob in May of last year, for visiting and preparing for Le Mois de la Photo. Sabrina and I bought some fancy foraged mushrooms at the farmers’ market, and this is a photo of the dinner prep (we ate them with peas and asparagus, in pasta with some cream.) We/I got cold feet on the mushrooms at the last minute, fearing their safety.. but that’s another story.

Here is a diptych of the train ride home.

Here is a terrible scan of a landscape.. but just to look at it I can’t tell where it is. Most likely Iceland or the Ottawa river.

I visited Iceland in June, but am only now really looking at the photographs I made while I was there.

Sifting through them, I’m finding a lot of examples of why I love shooting on the holga. I seem to be always drawn back to multiple, whether they are simultaneous or sequential— in other words, print or video— or both. Multiple imagery calls me to relate the multiplicity of my experience, the layers upon layers, the unoriginality of my experience; I hate to say it, but the postmodern condition.

Also, they just look so pretty.

I need to keep working on these to try to keep some art-momentum. Being so mentally wrapped up in school and work right now (despite the fact that I am really not that busy) is making it difficult for me to get in touch with what I actually want to be doing. It’s not clear what that is these days.