Reflections

“Mirrors do not primarily serve as the means of self-reflection and reproduction but provide another instance of the optically created dialectic of interior and exterior: ‘The way mirrors bring the open expanse, the streets, into the café, the living room—this too, belongs to the interweaving of spaces…’”

-Tom Gunning’s essay The Exterior as Interieur

Esoteric: understood or meant for only the select few who have special knowledge or interest
Cryptic: mysterious in meaning; secret; occult
I don’t know why but I just can’t get these two words straight. Maybe it’s because what is cryptic is necessarily esoteric and what is esoteric is necessarily cryptic. It’s as if one steps in front of the mirror and sees the other.

Unica Zurn

The Lovers by Remedios Varo

The image below is “Le Salle du Illusions”, an installation at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. Its arches are multiplied to infinity through the use of mirrors as spectators awed at this spectacular yet confounding glimpse of eternity:

“Let two mirrors reflect each other; then Satan plays his favorite trick and opens here in his way (as his partner does in lovers’ gazes) the perspective on infinity.”

-Walter Benjamin

“Sartre claimed that modern life had become ‘fantastic,’ as if it were made up of a ‘labyrinth of hallways, doors and stairways that lead nowhere, innumerable signposts that dot routes and signify nothing.’”

-James Naremore, “Film Noir: The History of an Idea”

“Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.”

-Jean Baudrillard

Optical Unconscious

 

 

“All the Sun that Shines” by Peaking Lights

 

 

 

 

“Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. ‘Other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. Whereas it is commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step. We are familiar with the movement of picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, but know almost nothing of what really goes on between hand and metal, and still less how this varies with different moods. This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources of swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”

-Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”

 

Duchamp descending a staircase. Eliot Elisofon. 1952.

 

 

 

 

 

The incredible photographs below capture the ephemeral night sky of Victoria, Australia and its star-trail patterns. Photographer Lincoln Harrison takes photos over the course of 15 hours and combines these hundreds of images to wonderfully represent that which we would never be able to see with the naked eye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The colourful spirals are the result of the earth's rotation, which gives the impression the stars are hurtling across the horizon.”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2165358/Australias-big-sky-photographers-patience-lead-stunning-time-lapse-images.html#ixzz2INAzKUI6

LuckyLu of the Frontier

“De Mi Careta” by Palov & Mishkin

I adopted my cat LuckyLu from an animal shelter last March. Despite being one of the prettiest and fluffiest cats my friends have ever laid eyes on, with flowing gray and white locks of silky cat hair, I must say that Lu is no mainstream cat. One can tell from her dodgy approaches to social interaction and her affinity for unnecessary leaping that there is something more beyond those gleaming, crystal eyes and plumed tail. There are 3 reasons why the cat is out of the box:

1) Escape from the box
If I had to make a comparison, LuckyLu resists going into her carry-box with the urgency of a criminal trying to escape the grasp of a policeman about to put him in jail. To my dismay, I must use these authoritative measures to pack up and transport LuckyLu to her cat-babysitter Sophie’s house when I go out of town.
When I adopted her, the SPCA gave me a used pink box. If only they knew LuckyLu’s powerful abilities they would have given me a newer model.

On the train ride to her first vet appointment, she scratched, jerked, and rushed the door with force in attempts to escape this temporary cell. With its faulty door lock, it was only minutes before LuckyLu was able to break out of the box. I desperately looked around the crowded train for help as I struggled to shove her head back into the box, yet I mostly got looks of surprise and a certain old man who was laughing at me as he watched the chaos over the folds of his newspaper. After wrestling with the cat and my own personal embarrassment for what felt like the longest train ride of my life, I finally managed to get LuckyLu back into the box and innovatively used a hair-tie to secure the door until we got there. Disaster (somewhat) avoided.


Still too broke to buy a sturdier carry-box for Lu, the SPCA gave me a cardboard box to bring her home in. This box only lasted one trip until I found myself carrying a raging LuckyLu, frantically scratching a hole in one of the cardboard walls, trying to escape. Like prison break, I saw a furry white paw jut out of the side of the box, followed by her head tearing through the cardboard like the Hulk through a brick wall. Ditching the piece of shit box, I lurched forward to grab LuckyLu off the cold, dirty street. Once I picked her up, she relaxed in my arms and let me carry her against my chest four blocks home.

2) The Chamber of Secrets
Sometimes LuckyLu used to disappear for hours at a time. This made no sense, really, because she is a housecat, forever trapped indoors. Where oh where in this small apartment could she be?
Of course, LuckyLu, so opposed to being confined, had found an outlet for her thrill-seeking nature. Her need for mystery and adventure brought her to the Chamber of Secrets of my apartment, or, the internal labyrinth of pipes which connects the bathroom to my roommate’s closet. With a keen nose for excitement, LuckyLu discovered this passageway before we knew it existed. One morning, she appeared in my puzzled roommate’s closet and declared, “I know no boundaries, for I am LuckyLu.”

3) Subversive hair-do
LuckyLu has a dread. Since it’s always been her choice to do what she wants with her hair, and she grooms it all day, I figure that this is a purposeful addition to her appearance. Sometimes it makes me wonder—what is next? Colored fur? A tattoo of the Meow Mix logo on her lower back? However rebellious my little LuckyLu’s new look is, I’ve come to the conclusion that a little experimentation can’t do much harm, and that there are much worse things that she could be getting her whiskers into. I’ll have to keep an eye on that lower back though.

Movin’ right along.

One of the main obstacles while talking to my friends about postmodernism is that no one ever has a precise enough definition for it and we all end up talking about different things. Finally, I feel as though I’ve found a fitting description:

“…one fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms: namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories and contents of that very Culture Industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the Modern…

The postmodernisms have in fact been fascinated precisely by this whole ‘degraded’ landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Readers’ Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature with its airport paperback categories of gothic and romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery and science-fiction or fantasy novel; materials they no longer simply ‘quote’, but incorporate into their very substance.”

Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson

Future Organic

Flying Lotus’ “me Yesterday//Corded” off his new album Until the Quiet Comes. I’m the luckiest to have gotten to chill with Flylo and his crew after his Montreal show this past October: it is safe to say he is a wizard.

“If we should compare a poem to the make-up of some physical object it ought not to be a wall, but to something organic like a plant.”

Introduction to Understanding Poetry, page 19.

“The lamp hummed:

‘Regard the Moon,

La lune ne garde aucune racune’

She winks a feeble eye.

She smiles into corners.

She smooths her hair of the grass.

The moon has lost her memory.”

-excerpt from “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”, TS Eliot

Clement Briend’s impressive photographs of 3D projections of gargoyles and ghostly figures onto trees and landscapes, from everyday Cambodian street corners to majestic castles in France. Almost as mystifying as Cher’s tweets from the last year.

The following are photographs of Pablo Picasso experimenting with his Light Drawings in 1949 (photographer Gjon Mili). So cool to actually see the master completely embodied in this work. What a find!

“Everything you can imagine is real”

-Pablo Picasso

The future is here. If you haven’t had a chance to check out Google’s “Project Glass”, you need to see this. What do you think would become of society with widespread use of a technology like this?

Artists featured: Jiri Kolar, Leif Podhajsky, CG Jung, Clement Briend, P. Picasso

Only Michael Jordan can stop you

Chrome Sparks.

Naturally, I feel as though the subject matter of my blog evolves with the many twists and turns of my life, i.e. growing up, living in a unique culture where language dictates the everyday realities of society, meeting characters such as those at Electric Forest who consistently expand my idea of what is normal or even possible, and reading academic discourse which, when linked together, begins to offer legitimate explanations of my far-out questions on the universe and how we’re all connected (and shit). Whereas I used to post these great questions like I was searching for a black cat in a dark room, this post is dedicated to the fact that I feel like I am starting to find answers. For example, the concept I used to vaguely describe as technicolor- a world without categories- is actually an established theory called “l’informe” coined by George Bataille. In this way, Katy’s Canvas is changing. Maybe it’s because I’m starting to not be so afraid of “the system”, order, tradition, etc. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen and experienced more diversity. Looking back at the year, here’s a summary of what I’ve learned:

• There’s no need to escape “the system”. Think of clocks, road signs, medical and academic institutions: systems are in place to make life easier to grow beyond the system. They are not meant to hold you back. Rules exist so people can be more efficient and know their own direction. So that they need not waste time on trivial matters.
• I think one should take full advantage of the system rather than rebelling against or escaping from it, for it does not control you if you can learn to control it. In other words, one needs to understand how and why the system works if one wants flexibility within the system.

• Knowledge of the system can be acquired by talking to as many people as possible, from as many vantage points as possible.

• Along these lines, knowing tradition is crucial to creating something original. As 20th century poet TS Eliot once said, “What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it”. What we make in our generation, from art, film and fashion to writing, music and other cultural trends, will always be in conversation with past, present, and future creations. What is needed is a consideration of historical context, an understanding of the meaning of one’s creation in placement after other creations, if we want our additions to enlighten the ongoing conversation in new and expansive ways.

• While we kids generally associate tradition with black and white film, argyle sweaters, cooked carrots and Shakespeare, we need to realize that tradition need not be a restriction that our parents uphold us to. Rather, we should look at tradition as an open textbook of trial and error. Of what has been done and what should never happen again. For example, our generation saw the seductive shortcomings of men in bell-bottoms in the seventies and has been better off because of it (you don’t see them anymore). Ultimately, if one intends to do anything that hasn’t been done before, which many postmodern authors, artists and creators struggle with on the daily, one must first consult the textbook of tradition to make sure one is not accidentally replicating the unfortunate equivalent of fashion trends in the Disco era. See: NY Time’s article How To Live Without Irony, The Creative Act by Marcel Duchamp
• Art is not what it looks like. It’s what it does to you.
• Whether we approach it from a physics, math or biology perspective, or a philosophical, psychological or historical perspective, I have learned that we are are all studying the same thing.
• BUT, life is an asymptote. The closer we get to objectivity, to reaching the definitive axis, the more we realize we will never quite reach it. See: Ignorance by Stuart Firestein
• And that’s why the world has so much to explore, such endless curiosity and mystery, no matter how much we would like to think we have ordered it all in objective systems. The systems of definition and order are not as rigid as I once as a teenager thought; they are malleable, subjective, and they ultimately help you if you work to improve them.

Magic surrealist paintings by Rob Gonsalves.

Make of this what you will.

^???? from David OReilly on Vimeo.