Art Haus

Friday evening my friends Mike, Ashley, and Maggie opened up their apartments to showcase local artists and musicians in an informal and free kind of way. A truly rare event in Fredericton. 

I had a series of white-on-white screen prints, a bunch of miscellaneous drawings, and a few digital prints of some drawings (photos below). 

My new go-to sketchbook is an old hardcover novel called Ralph Raymond's Heir. Working on aged paper looks great, but there's also something quite mysterious that happens when one deliberately obscures the text with pictures...

I like drawing body parts in profusion. Lately I've been drawing a lot of teeth (I did all of the tooth art for this edition of Nonymous magazine, available here and here and probably other places too) in odd formations: crooked, missing, misshapen, or from another animal all together. 


There's something both deeply disturbing and entirely fascinating when a part of the body doens't behave the way one would expect, when there's too many of one thing for no reason. I feel compelled to reiterate the same limb, digit, or tooth, extras and missings, maybe in some vain hope I'll discover something new about my own physicality and be wholly comfortable with it, or maybe because there is a sort of pleasure in these small perversions.  


When there are too many of one thing in the body, that being is no longer as human as the rest of us. It's an anomaly, a gap in our experience, and we run our tongue over that new and foreign hole expecting it to be gone with the next pass. In that sense the anomalous entity with its billion hands and coyote teeth becomes a mystical entity. It altered the regular course of growth, added or subtracted things in ways we would never intend. It leads a life parallel to our own, and we see it, we want to touch it and test it and it makes our skin crawl with it's strangeness. 

I'll leave you with a silly drawing of Mordecai Richler to cleanse the palate.