Upcoming show: The Keeper of Nothingness

My next solo show for the Afghan project opens at LE Gallery (here in Toronto) on May 10. It feels a bit early to be putting this post up, but I'm off to Scotland for 10 days!!

"The Keeper of Nothingness" is less about The War, and more invested in considering travel and liminality, of exchanging one set of norms for another and, importantly, the zones where these exchange takes place.

The title comes from a Tajik word that denotes those who tend mountain passes in the Hindu Kush, and I take it from Eric Newby's travel memoir, A Short Walk in The Hindu Kush.

Partial, and no title (a painting, that is)

Now done and with a Title (Ready State)

Maybe this piece is nearly done, but it's hard to be sure. It's def. 30"x40" 36"x48" though.

Interior of the C17, homeward leg.

It's Witches, all the way down

Ropey, old-man arms and plaid sleeves stretch out from under a tan ballistic vest as Gene offers up a cup of the care-package coffee he just brewed. Dense, wiry grey hair and supporting moustache compliment a slight southern drawl. With these features and the opaque, black coffee, Gene might have sprung from a screenwriter’s description of the chatty, avuncular guy you unintentionally sit next to at some Badlands truck stop – the halogen lights flickering at the pumps as a waitress slides your tuna melt across the laminate counter.

“Have you read any Calvino?”

“Embarrassingly, no.”

“Well, there’s a short story about children gathering around a fire. Its night-time and as Calvino tells it, flames lick up into the night, and as the story gets told both words and heat ripple across their faces. But behind them, the dark is cold and endless. And of course there’s a witch.

What’s important though, is the narrator’s lilt — his pitch and timbre; there’s pacing and tempo: all the things that make a good campfire tale. The story gets told again and again, to different groups of children. But if all the orator’s skills fall into perfect harmony, the flames will reach to his full height as he stands above the kids, seated on the ground. The flames spiral and the witch erupts from the logs and embers, taking a child into the flames and vanishing.”

Days later, looking south across Kabul’s smog-filled valley, Gene tells me another tale.

“A few months before you got here, we had a wire service photographer come out… He was AP, or maybe Reuters. He’d also been bouncing around the various camps and we did the same thing with him.”

“You made him too much coffee and stuffed him full of three-year-old Werther’s?”

“Yeah, there’s that. We also did the driving tour: Checked out the ANA, poked around in the Soviet wreckage, pointed to the CIA compound that you’re not allowed to know about. So he’s up here, walking around, swapping lens, but he’s also grumbling about something. After a while he comes over to me, acting like some sort of movie director, all worked up about the smog. “The light, the light” – he actually said this – “I can’t work with this light.” So we drive back down to Alamo and a day later he’s gone, unimpressed.”

“So, I heard this from another PA guy down near Helmand, that after the Reuters guy left Alamo, he headed down to the fighting. So he’s down with the Jarheads around Masum Ghar, trundling through the vineyards in a HumVee, and he’s complaining about how boring it all is — How this is the most boring assignment he’s been on. And that’s when they hit an IED. The Jarheads are all kinds of fucked up, and the photographer gets his leg blown off.”

“Really? Shit Gene, that’s…”

“Predictable? It’s a predictable fucking story. You just don’t complain about the quiet, especially down south. He shoulda’ known better than to complain about the quiet. You complain about the quiet and a witch will sure as shit jump out of the flames.”

For all the sadness and boredom, for all the death and waste, and beauty in this war, you can (mostly) be sure that those who live are glad to not be dead. And in that gladness, you can easily turn to humour and storytelling, and in the telling of those stories the occasional witch will arise.

This was the End

RotoZero is done. The Keeper of Nothingness opens at LE Gallery, in Toronto, on May 10.

Here are a few installation photos from RotoZero:

The birthday: This is for Craig, and all the others

Today being March the 17, and the Regimental (PPCLI) birthday, I've been thinking about a centrally important summation by Sebastian Junger, from the end of his book, "War".


"Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in."

The short form, the poetic turn

Last summer, at the Humber Writer's Workshop, my friend Scott (not me, another one) made the cute assertion that poets must be inferior to prose writers because they can't even fill up a page and don't have the ability to connect sentences properly.

It seems unnecessary to say this, but having learned to write through poetic construction, I'll always get behind the succinct turn of phrase over the ponderous paragraph, and so, with that in mind: Kevin Powers.

Billed as one of the first pieces of literature to come out of The Iraq War, it's definitely a novel, but with a poetic understructure that reminds me of Ondaatje or Patrick Lane's "Red Dog, Red Dog". The latter, a favourite of mine, describes and meditates on growing up violent in Vernon BC, mid 20th Century. A bit tangentially, there's a review of Red Dog on Quill and Quire, where it seems the reviewer has little appreciation for the beauty of terror, misery and pointlessness.

Power's "The Yellow Birds" is as much a cathartic endeavour for Powers and other former soldiers as it is a contemplative attempt to offer to a civilian audience some means of accessing the beauty, terror, misery and pointlessness of The Iraq War.

I made the "mistake" of reading much of the book over several sessions at bars with pints. Well, not a mistake at all, but all successful war literature (when combined with booze) makes me nostalgic for the path cut short 2 decades ago. And as such, "The Yellow Birds" kept on hitting me hard.

Recognizing that I've laid out the qualifier that I'm hardly objective about the book (not that anyone who has ever known me would see this as likely), there were a few passages that really hit hard, resonating with middle-aged, beat-up-by-living me as much as my recollections of young-asshole grunt me.

Powers:
---
"If I ever floated... out where the level of water reached my neck, and my feet lost contact with its muddy bottom, I might realize that to understand the world, one's place in it, is to always be at the risk of drowning."
---
"An embedded photographer snapped pictures of it all: a private snaking his barrel in a ditch, the dead boy, as yet uncovered, gazing thinly toward the blue sky that had cleared itself of clouds high above the orchard. I thought that he had no regard for the significance of what he saw. But now I think maybe he did. Maybe his regard was absolute."
---
"His eyes were closed. It was getting dark, but he didn't move. He waited, as if waiting for whichever last shadow would cause evening."

ROTOZERO @ YYZ Artist's Outlet

If you're in the area of Downtown Toronto from Jan.11 through Mar. 31, you can see the first (but hopefully not last) iteration of RotoZero at YYZ Artist's Outlet.
* * * * * * * * * * *

OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY 11 JANUARY 2013 – 8:00PM TO 10:00PM

SCOTT WATERS | ROTOZERO

SATURDAY 12 JANUARY 2013 – SATURDAY 30 MARCH 2013

Scott Waters: Contrails, 48″x72″, oil on canvas, 2012.

Throughout 2011 Scott Waters followed The Third Battalion of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry as they trained for and were deployed to Kabul, Afghanistan, for the start of Canada’s post-combat training mission in that country. ROTOZERO is a project created through the auspices of The Canadian Forces Artist Program, but whose central characteristic is one of contemplation.

ROTOZERO is less a document of a mission and more a consideration of how we recall and construct stories. Incorporating painting, photography, text panels, and found objects, it is an assemblage of tangible objects which act as proxy for the narrative drive — a narrative drive which, in this case, is based on the anticipation, boredom, frustration, terror, and sense of expectation that are markers of the training mission to Afghanistan.

SCOTT WATERS received his BFA from The University of Victoria, his MFA from York University, and served as an Infantry soldier in the Canadian Forces. Recent solo exhibitions include Rodman Hall, The Art Gallery of South Western Manitoba, and The Alternator Gallery. Publications include the illustrated memoir, The Hero Book (Conundrum Press), the anthology, Embedded on the Homefront (Heritage House), with features in Border Crossings, Public, and Legion Magazine. A two-time participant in the Canadian Forces Artist Program, Waters has received funding from The Ontario Arts Council and The Canada Council for the Arts. He was recently awarded The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal. Waters is represented by LE Gallery, Toronto.

Scott Waters would like to offer a heartfelt thank you to The Third Battalion of The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, especially Maj. Kevin Barry, Maj. Quentin Innis, CSM Rich Davey and Lt. Coady Summerfield. Without the battalion ROTOZERO would not exist. Without the help of these individuals, it would have been immeasurably inferior.

The simplification of Lalage Snow's complex project.

There's a photo essay on My Modern Met of soldiers, Before, During and After combat.

There's the expected line in the blog about how we can see the shift in a person's psychology through portraiture, and specifically, through the shift in their facial features: cheeks sunken, weathered skin and small wounds.

The photographer in question, Lalage Snow, spent 4 years on and off with Brit soldiers in Afstan and Iraq and so I doubt that what she is doing subscribes to the "window to the soul" dialogue surrounding portraiture. I doubt it, because I don't think you come away from such experiences with that notion intact.

For myself, what's most interesting is that – likely – if you shift the order of the photos around, you would still read the images in order: Before, During, After. I also wonder about the role of the sitter, the soldier. In those moments before they sit in front of the camera, do they bring forward those months in the deserts of Helmand or the crumbling suburbs of Basra? Does the camera alter how your face fits together? Of course it does, and so for me, that's the worth of this series.

Everything I've typed above seems obvious, so let me add something else that's obvious: The decision of the photographer in choosing which photos to represent the soldiers. They exist in a place which seems part portrait studio, part photojournalism. The black background which creeps in around the edges is a curiosity and seems to remove them from context, from the war. By doing so we are allowed to focus only on the faces, but at the expense of the images seeming a bit too clinical, or staged.

Open-ended and off to Miami

As to the previously posted "'Terp" piece, here is the companion, seen side by side with its brother. Sometimes I worry too much about defining the purpose behind my work, but for these two I was painting them for a specific event (rather than a specific idea), that being the Aqua Art Fair in Miami this Dec.

The title of Blue and/on Green covers some of the implications of the content: i.e. fratricide and betrayal, contradictory and ambiguous relationships between NATO/ISAF and the Afghans who work with them.

If, in the very off-chance you find yourself in Miami between December 6-9, My work will be with the AWOL Gallery folk. I'll be there on the 7th and 8th (and maybe the 9th).

'Terp

Many of the 'Terps working with ISAF/NATO wear masks, bandanas to lessen the chance of attack to both themselves and their families. But not all of 'em.

I'm not gonna use a word like heroic; let's go with Ballsy. For example, this dude working with the Jarheads at CFC.

Also, I'm pretty fucking pleased with how this turned out. Puffy, shiny jackets take a bit of patience.

Morris nails it

Yesterday I was talking to the writer for my YYZ show essay. This is germane because it (sort of) signals the first time I've had to had a coherent sense of what this project has become. Sometimes "garage sale" seems the best way to describe it.

Last week, while reading Errol Morris' "Believing is Seeing", and specifically the chapter on Roger Fenton's Crimean War cannonball photo(s), I came across this gem:

"War is a peculiar thing. —Inaugurated by the whims of the few, affecting the fate of many. It is a difficult, if not impossible, thing to understand, yet we feel compelled to describe it as though it has meaning even virtue. It starts for reasons often hopelessly obscure, meanders on, then stops."

So I'm not sure if this show of mine is going to have coherence, but Morris, at least, seems to offer commonality with the idea that there's little coherence in a war zone, and that, perhaps it is a garage sale of competing ideas, images and possibilities that when taken from a distance form the kind of entity that you might pull over to the side of the road to peruse.

On Memorials

I was talking with the father of a dead soldier. I'm not such a fan of the terms "lost" or "fallen" as they both lean to heavily on a lack of intention. In the case of a volunteer army, everyone knows what they're getting themselves into. That's not to say anyone wants to die, goes looking for it and doesn't cherish their lives. Quite the opposite I suspect.

But lets be clear that if you're a soldier (and this has degrees to it: An infantry soldier is not an MP is not a naval cook), especially a combat arms soldier, the draw to violence is part of your trade – is most likely one of the reasons you chose the trade in the first place.

Having talked with the father, who told me of the many portraits of his son that have been attempted and created, I've been thinking about the culture of "fallen" soldier portraits that exists within certain parts of Canadian visual art society. There are some famous folk doing them, some regionally known artists plying their trade and even more, well-meaning memorial painting collectives. Everyone has their reasons: some noble, some engaged, some mysteriously devoid of purpose.

It seems unfair to criticize such projects and endeavours, as they certainly have their place. I'll simply say that, for me, it seems worthwhile to honour the draw to violence that binds the dead. To pretend the draw doesn't exist – isn't central – lessens these lives that ended earlier than expected.

The painting below is excerpted from a live fire exercise during Ex Desert Ram. The fire base commander (that these tracers emanate from) was commanded by Mcpl. Byron Greff, who some seven months later would become the sole fatality on RotoZero of the Afghan training mission.

Force Pro(tection) complete

I'll be showing this painting up in Haliburton, at Rail's End Gallery, in October. I'd been thinking about doing this piece though it clearly falls into the category of unnecessary. The photo is good at getting the point across: Three guys who spend their days and night shuttling folk and material around Kabul pose for a photo at the request of the war artist who's about to fly home.

There's risk involved in their job— there always is, but at the same time, they know how to do it and seemed to enjoy the gig well enough.

I guess this is the sort of painting that gets done to honour the hard work and sacrifice of the troops: Something totally worthwhile and meaningful, but not really what I'm focusing on so far as my practice and this project go.

However, the curator up at Rail's End told me that some folk (maybe just one, but more than likely there's more) in town have the predictable, conservative reaction when they hear an artist from Toronto is doing a show about the military: They assume it's lefty peacenik reactionism. A loving depiction of three guys posing in gear seemed like a nice way to give the skeptics exactly what they claim to want but assume professional contemporary artists won't give.

Flying to YYC

I'm heading to Calgary for the weekend of Sept 27-30 for a couple of official events. 

Thursday evening, the 27th: 1830 at The Military Museums will be the book launch for Embedded on the Homefront. I have an essay in this anthology and will be reading an excerpt, as well as participating in a panel discussion.

Saturday the 29th, from 1000-1400 I'll be doing tours/talks at TMM as part of Calgary's first ever Doors Open.

A Brush with War continues at TMM through December. This is the last venue for this survey of official Canadian  War Art post-Korean War through Afghanistan

If you happen to be in the area, do come out.

Both events are free.

Headshots x3

Assembling a few portraits, 12"x12" ea. Very little in the world of painting production is as enjoyable as small headshots.

New work, and a bit more narrative navel gazing

Here's a few shots of recent work.

There's a sense of self-doubt that germinates in the blood memory of most every painter educated in the post-secondary system. I've bludgeoned this concern over indoctrination several times previous, but it manifests itself quite nicely in my self-doubt around "Force Pro", a painting done simply because I think the photo will translate nicely though pigment. That's why I'm painting it though, to see if I feel okay about executing and exhibiting a painting that is mostly devoid of "contemporary" concerns.

"Cautionary Tale" is a painting that seems to be unnecessary, in that the things that drew me to these images was the story that links the two moments in this diptych. Okay, unnecessary is the wrong concern. The diptych works, but it stands separate from the source, and lacks the mortal resonance of the Tale itself. Perhaps in the end (of course, there is no such thing), the painting will work more successfully than the text because it's devoid of a story... and that's sort of sad.

The two headshots, (Logie and Greenhall) also come from my new-found pontificating over narrative. Stripped of most context, my hope is that, accompanied by a written component, they will bounce off the constructed words, paragraph, plot and metaphor in an undefined but resonant way.

In short, the trouble here is not whether I can paint, but when I should paint. Fucking art school and its suspicion of craft and storytelling.

Force Pro (cropped, partially complete)

Cautionary Tale [diptych], 30"x40" ea.

Greenhall, 12"x12"

Logie, 12"x12"

Nobody Says it Better

I was gonna put up some new paintings, but I left the SD card in the studio, so it'll have to wait a day or so.

However, this is better: Let's me talk about the military memoir canon. Like any good canon, there are holes, and one of mine was (but not no more) Michael Herr's Dispatches. It really does sit at, or very fucking near, the top of the genre, so why I waited all this time to read it is a mystery. Herr spent a year or so as a correspondent for Esquire. Not just any year either, but the pivotal and ultra-violent period that included the "siege" of Khe Sanh and the Battle for Hue.

As my own work has progressed, I've become less and less interested in reading military history. Sometimes this is because of the awful writing [allow me to digress and mention The Lions of Kandahar, as a book I was really looking forward to read, but after a few pages of pot boiler phrasing, had to put down.

What I really care about is the memoir, because what I really care about is how war infuses, destroys, liberates and crystallizes the human experience. Herr: "remembering compulsively, telling war stories. But then, there's nothing wrong with that. War stories aren't really anything more than stories about people anyway." And if I might also paraphrase Tim O'Brien, "And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war.... It's about love and memory." (The Things They Carried)

Another fun thing to do when reading Dispatches, is pick out lines that you've heard in various Vietnam war movies. Herr was hired to do much of the narration dialogue for Apocalypse Now, and there are a number of lines in the book that are inserted directly into Full Metal jacket.

I'm almost finished now and will be sad to leave behind Herr, Sean Flynn (son of Errol) and Tim Page. I didn't realize the attachment was strong until I came to the sections where Herr starts to discuss his and other war correspondents attempts to claim lives for themselves after Vietnam.

Scanned and placed below is one of those "when we got home" sections, where Tim Page has had a piece of Shrapnel removed from his brain and, subsequently, a British publishers asks his to do a book that will take the glamour off war. Start from the cerulean arrow if you like.

The N Word

Yep, Narrative.

Last week I was immensely lucky to spend a week in a writing workshop run by my literary hero, Tim O'Brien. It stands to reason that any chance to work with someone who means so much to ones (my) professional practice can be a real disaster. What are the chances that the week can actually live up to the hopes of a swooning literary heart?

As it turns out: 100%. A totally stellar week that fortunately was populated by 6 other great folk. No megalomaniacal navel-gazers, no weepy rhyming poets and no goths. Just a good, broad group of folks who wanted to talk about and focus on story-telling.

Such a funny thing, to spend time in an environment where people don't feel the need to balance (or subjugate) narrative concerns to material and formal issues. 

And so I come out of the workshop (with a sign that reads "Reserved for Tim O'Brien) and realize the thing that I've known all along: Writing matters more for what I'm trying to do than painting.

Painting:  first and foremost, it's about the inherent qualities of the medium, so any response via painting is based on how the artist responds to paint, not the world and not their own lives. Sure you can start with those latter concerns, but rest assured you're painting in the ghetto.

Writing: First and foremost, it comes from language and, more specifically, the alphabet. The alphabet is structured to tell stories (True). If you assemble those letters into some combinations, you get stories; other combinations will thwart or – if we're being generous – challenge our assumptions about language.

Somehow, somewhere, literature emerged from its modernist rapture (that's a pretty big assertion to put into one sentence, but so be it). Arguably, painting never did. Sure, there are many great examples of successful narrative artists, but often enough, within the dialogue of those artist's practice, narrative is contextualized with concerns for the medium. Do we do this because we really care about the material more than the constructed content, or do we accept that speaking about materiality will put in greater favour with the curatorial powers that be? Take a look at this year's RBC shortlist with that question in mind. Take a look at every year of the RBC comp. with that question in mind.

I guess then what I came out of the writing workshop with is this: Why would I spend so much of my energy and enthusiasm for telling stories in a culture which doesn't trust story telling, or sees it as secondary to materiality? Answer: I wouldn't.

It Ain't Always a Wallow

I should preface this post by saying that I think I'm not supposed to do this. Or more correctly, the shy part of me says "don't do it."

However, what I wanted to poke around is the confluence of War Art and Canada. Like nuts and gum perhaps. While this country has one of the longest and most distinguished histories of the genre, if you operate (or try to operate) in the realm of contemporary art, there is an unspoken... and sometimes spoken sentiment that the only good war art is no war art. Or war art that's overtly critical of war.

So while I'm committed to doing what I do, there is an understanding that while public and commercial galleries are more than happy to offer their viewing audience repeated interpretations of contemporary Cdn. landscape or the intersections of digital and traditional media, very little slack is offered to war art.

I'm well aware that making such statements will incur the wrath of some readers (this, of course, assumes there are readers), but the truth is that being a "war artist" in Canada means you are operating in the ghetto.

Odds are I've typed that before. But on this occasion I wanted to offer that, as per the title, It's not always anonymous wallowing. When I wrote that I'm not supposed to "do this" I don't mean slagging painterly landscape practices, I mean, acting proud of being recognized.

Proud, because yesterday I was awarded a medal for my contributions in documenting and contextualizing Cdn. history. "The Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal" was awarded to me by the Governor General's office via nomination by The Historica-Dominion Institute. I'm certainly not the only person awarded this. Many Canadians across the country have also been awarded the medal and in some ways what makes it important is that a war art practice is sitting side by side with community activists and medical volunteers.

Odds are I wouldn't have received a medal if The Canadian Forces Artist Program hadn't seen fit to have me as a two-time participant, or if the battalions (3PPCLI, 2RCR) I was embedded with hadn't been so generous with me.

And as to galleries that do give war art a repeated chance, Wil Kucey at LE Gallery has certainly had faith in my practice over the last five years, and both Laura Brandon at The Canadian War Museum and Rory Cory at The Military Museums (in Calgary) continue to show support for my practice. Rail's End Gallery (Haliburton) and YYZ Artists Outlet (Toronto) are next on the exhibition schedule.

When I type it, it doesn't really seem like wallowing... and it ain't.

Nonetheless, it's really great to have my efforts rewarded in ways other than sales, shows and grants.

Thanks to The Queen also!

 

Zones of Exclusion

I just finished reading Ryan Flavelle's "The Patrol". Over the years I've read any number of military memoirs, as I'm sure Ryan has. Also over the years, they start to meld together (though that might be mostly due to my aging sieve of a  brain). As much as I enjoyed Siegfried Sassoon's "Memoir of an Infantry Officer", the only passage that still stands out is where Sassoon is given a concoction by the MD that solidifies his diarrhea, making his bowels stable enough for open warfare.

But what I wanted to say is this, "The Patrol' stands out for me due to its emphasis on the stratification within military culture. Specifically, how Flavelle fits into the world of the grunt even though he's a lowly signaler (at least he wasn't in the navy).

For a visual artist, author, journalist, poet or any other cultural producer, without some level of acceptance, any military project will have a barrier in its way. And while the same can be said for any socially centred project, the military, the army, the combat arms and the infantry (in that order) are some of the hardest sub-cultures to break into. Like not being born in Prince Edward County or Cape Cod, if you weren't born there, haven't shared suffering, you'll always be an outsider. But then, even if you're a grunt and from a different reg. (Chicken Fucker, Picklie etc.) or come from the reserves (as Flavelle did) there's another barrier that has to be worked away at.

Flavelle's openness with the reader about his desire to be accepted by the "Hard as fuck" guys from 2VP, and more importantly "meet himself" is what gives the book its agency. And for myself, that acceptance hangs around my neck when I'm back with the Battalion as well as in the studio. "Once a Patricia, Always a Patricia" may be true, but it don't mean you can just walk back in the door.

Meeting your true self, the one that only surfaces under the extremes of duress, is a need that asserts itself only in some people. And, amongst many qualities both good and bad, it's one you'll find in soldiers who have chosen combat.