A Sure Sign of Prosperity in 2024 when Bruce Barber Photographs a Containership at Black Rock Beach, J, and V versions, 2025

A Sure Sign of Prosperity in 2024 when Bruce Barber Photographs a Containership at Black Rock Beach, two versions, J version, 20 x 38 cms, oil paint and linoleum on vintage plywood and V version, 26 x 45 cms, oil paint on plywood, framed in a hand made frame constructed from a found vintage gold leaf Egyptian frame.The works are based on a photograph of Black Rock Beach (2024) by Bruce Barber and is name checked from my, A Sure Sign of Prosperity in 1984 when the Giant Containership Atlantic Companion Calls on Halifax, 1984, private collection.

Black Rock Beach with Lightning, for Benjamin Chee Chee, 22 x 40 cms, oil paint on plywood

An evolution of the Bruce Barber/Black Rock beach set. It is in homage to the artist Benjamin Chee Chee (1944-1977) who died in despair in the cells of the old Ottawa police station, where the Ottawa Art Gallery now stands.

 

Sambro Fog Cannon, 27 x 32 cms, oil sketch on plywood in hand painted vintage frame

The Sambro fog cannon is mentioned in a 19th century navigation guide to the Nova Scotia coast.

 

Not A Still Life, Ottawa Sun, February 4, 1997

 The work on the wall is Fast New Steamer to America, collection Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

The Forks, 98/24. 2024, subscribed "The Grid", 32" x 38", mixed media work on plywood

The Forks is the final work in both the overhead view and Railway Lands sequences. The first overhead view works were done in Montreal c. 1989 and Railway Lands began when I was an artist in residence at Struts Artist Run in Sackville, New Brunswick in 1998. The picture represents the sacred place they call the Forks in Winnipeg. The place is called Niizhoziibean in Ojibwe. It means the two rivers. I chose this place for the last Railway Lands work, because a railway line runs through it. 

Ottawa Citizen July 30, 2011

 A pleasant dip into the archive, me and Blackie, doing media for a show at the Cube, here in Ottawa.

Events in the Tunnel, 2022, experimental video, 9:58, co-directed with Penny McCann

https://vimeo.com/862123490?share=copy

Life in the Tunnel

Events in the Tunnel, is an experimental representation of Canada’s relationship with its receding modernist colonial past. Based metaphorically on Gordon Lightfoot’s poetic Canadian Railroad Trilogy, Events in the Tunnel presents an absurdist retelling of Canada’s white colonial cultural history as defined, like Lightfoot’s great metaphor by a cross country train trip.

Embedded in the trope we witness familiar 19th and 20th Century paradigms of conformity and the expansion of white middle class consciousness represented by images of travel and amusement and moments that define Canadian colonial cultural history, particularly the dramatized struggles of our great 20th Century Canadian painter Tom Thomson.

Constructed from 8, Super8 and 16 mm. vintage artist films and found amateur footage, Events in the Tunnel is a post-colonial journey through colonized space and time. 

Events in the Tunnel was most recently shown at Fisura in Mexico City