Friday at work was odd, I got to watch an installation of some art that was... different. It's not the first art install I've watched for my work, but it is one of the more, vivid ones to be sure...
This isn't the exact sculpture, but same concept and, more importantly colour (described as Kraft Dinner Orange). It's an assault on the eyes is what it is really, but over the 4 hours that I was there I found that I grew attached to them. Kind of like stokholm syndrome meets staring at the sun. I asked the people walking by what they thought of them and they said things like, "Well they're very detailed." or "gosh it must've taken them a long time to do!"
I began to think I was the only ones that could see the shade of radioactive orange that was going on. When I finally had someone ask about the colour, thus verifying that I was not crazy, they asked me what colour they would be painted.
Sadly it was my duty to inform him that they would always be brighter than the sun on acid. He recoiled and made a cross with his fingers...
But like I said after staring at them for 3 hours and getting some kind of brain damage, I realised two things.
1) I don't know how to talk to people about art. I could tell them my company is funding this program and that they would be here for x number of months, but when they asked what they meant to me, what they said, etc. I had nothing. I suppose I'm too pragmatic or self-conscious by nature to be able to spin a long winded explanation about some facet of the art or another. (Movies I can do, B and I watched Shutter Island on friday and while I'll post about that later, I thought it was quite good). One woman insisted that it held a deeply important significance to the native culture, both the colour orange and the number. While I'll give her the numbers thing, there is no orange in nature that could've possibly matched that colour of bear and so I'm doubtful that the First Nations people have any response to the colour except "Oh my am I having a stroke?"
2) The bears couldn't be any other colour. Really after 3 hours that was the other conclusion I had. In a kind of artistic darwinism, if the bears had been simply brown/grey/black as bears are, it would evoke, "Oh, those are nice bears." Whereas had they been painted something like blue or green (or something distinctly unbearly) you would hear "Oh, those are nice bears." The orange gives them a more dynamic response. One which ranges from vomit to confusion. I like the bears now, they mean something to me... I'm just still not sure what that is.
Saturday was also strangely fun, got to paint B's sister's new house. So naturally I was painting and cracking wise about this being one of those times where life matches 1980's television. By this I mean that halfway through painting one of us will accidentally spill paint on the other, which would cause escalating retaliation until we're throwing buckets of paint at each other. B and sisters emphatically told me no, that's not what this is. Sometimes I should just keep my inside thoughts to myself, but then I think I may explode. Afterwards we watched some Olympics (and for once I wasn't the most cynical person in the room) and Canada (sadly) missed out on a bunch of medal opportunities. Without sounding like too much of a cheerleader it's too bad that the athlete's didn't medal.
Moving on, we came home on the skytrain and were met with drunken revellers being ultra patriotic by singing O Canada. Once they had they started singing don't stop believing, or tried to anyway, they seemed confused about their gender "I'm just a small town girl... he took the midnight train going anywhere..." it didn't last long though, because mercifully they don't know journey as well as they know the national anthem. Shame.
Carry on...
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