if . . .

An ArtLab / aneco project. Rolling composter installation by Wendy Peart located on Saskatoon City Hall grounds. ... caged material for composting ... "As visual imagery, I believe the organic form can incite basal, yet complex, reactions that arouse viewers to acknowledge their relationship within the intricate ecological world," writes Peart. ( ArtsBoard ) - See: Sculpture :: note :: ... have loved this piece in all its seasons ...

Joni Mitchell: green flag song "a new body of photographic work by iconic singer/songwriter and visual artist Joni Mitchell " ( Mendel Art Gallery ). ... had read that Joni was angry ... entering the gallery room for green flag song was more oppressive than angry ... the dark grey walls with over 120 green & rose hued grainy images hung in vertical triptychs were uninviting ... hurriedly left the room forcing myself to re-enter & each time staying a little longer to digest the images ... pictures of war, terror and solitude evoked pathos ... ... on a bench lay a piece of corrugated cardboard ... the catalogue ... a beautifully crafted work of documentation ... lost myself in words, songs and photos of the artist at work ... returning gaze to the walls noticed none of the individual images were particularly arresting it was their context which provoked ... the process of broken televisions & disposable cameras heightened the sense of decay, waste & destructi...

... why my icon is king kong was thought provoking ... the web (flickr, twitter, friendfeed ad infinitum) relentlessly demands an image ... for years cast about changing icon and have settled on this black&white photo of the northern lights ( aurora borealis ) ... history ... it is a photo my father took while working in Fort Churchill Manitoba Canada ... he had till then devoted his life to plasma physics & upper atmospheric research spending nights on the lookout tower photographing the sky ... my mother found the negatives in one of the clean outs following a moment of transformation (birth/life/death) ... title ... from the beginning (2002) called my blog if & later as my presence webbed out adopted the tag ifsphere ... place & imagination ... the icon spells if ... the solid tower & wave lights ... visualizes the splendour of the night sky ... hints at the mystery of l(if)e ... "As the solar wind interacts with the edge of the earth's magnetic fi...

"Writing for the theatre is at its best an act of transgression - and as teachers of playwrights, we should encourage our students to step over the line, redraw the line, erase the line, even multiply the lines so that we sit up, step forward, strike out. I believe the job of mainstream culture and mainstream theatre is to keep the peace. Our job, as teachers, is to encourage new writers to break it, to disrupt the lie, to speak truth to power. Think seriously about the word en-courage: What are we giving our students courage to do, exactly? Not just entertain. Rarely do students of drama enter the classroom with what we might call, for lack of a better term, "original minds." Surely their originality, their agency for questioning and considering, is there, but it has been dominated and subdued by a culture that amplifies individuality over community, profit over peace, property over human need. For we live in a culture that is hostile to creativity and original thought ...