Being There

“I miss you”, in Trinity-Bellwoods park, Toronto, April 2009

Well, time flies. The MSF show was tonight (and through Sun­day) at La Petite Mort and every­thing went well. Turnout was great, and most of the peices sold — mine was snapped up pretty quick. My favorite peice is a pho­to­graph by my friend Pedro Isztin of his father and nephew. Check out the show if you’re bum­ming around Ottawa this week­end with noth­ing to do. The pho­to­graph above, “I miss you,” was my donation.

I was in Toronto last spring for a con­fer­ence. After the sec­ond day, I rode my bor­rowed bicy­cle home from the CN Tower, through Trinity-Bellwoods park, up the lit­tle hill, and along the path past the ten­nis courts toward Col­lege and Dan­forth. That is where I saw the let­ters stitched into the fence. It was spring, still wet, and although the sun was warm it was still a lit­tle cold too. I don’t know why the words were there, or what they mean. I found them com­fort­ing, in a way, like I had been let into a pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion between lovers, albeit in one direction.

It was a pho­tog­ra­phy con­fer­ence. Not want­ing to look like a big nerd (or at least a big­ger one than I already am), I brought my lit­tle Minolta pocket cam­era with me. Maybe that makes me even nerdier. What­ever. In any case, the lit­tle no-controls-all-automatic brick of hard plas­tic and metal did a great job on that trip, and I got a few great pho­tos. Great because they are impor­tant to me.

It was a heady time, those months that I spent shut­tling back and forth to the Big Smoke. I was there three times in six weeks. Each visit brought me a lit­tle closer to the pos­si­b­lity of mak­ing some­thing of pho­tog­ra­phy. Every time I went things seemed a lit­tle more real. I gained a lot of con­fi­dence. Going to Toronto gave me the push I needed to start a series of invest­ments that have resulted in some inter­est­ing, excit­ing, and reward­ing work over the past few months. This photo is a prod­uct and a sym­bol of the process of re-investent that has allowed me to grow as an artist. It was long overdue.

It’s really nice to see your work hang­ing in a gallery.