Well, darkness only exists so that the stars can shine

Witch house. Nice “Oh holy Night” vocals mixed with a hip hop beat and drowned in bass. It’s uhm, music of the future

the dark side of Mike Mitchell

See, I have a collection of dark things too. We’re not always eating ice cream and licking lollipops on this blog. Or maybe we are. I’ve never watched a horror movie in my life, maybe you can tell.

Scott Musgrove’s surreal creatures

a friend and I were talking about how we were glad for nightmares, where the worst of the worst of situations postulated by the subconscious can be played out in a mimetic reality. everyone and everything you deal with in the dream has been created by your own mind, so you should take advantage of it, and learn from what it tells you, while not having to deal with consequences. nightmares serve an important purpose. nightmares seem to warn us about the state of our subconscious and reveal us to the objects of our memory that have been brushed aside to make way for “rationality”

nightmares can turn our worst fears inside out, make us aware of something we had been blissfully ignoring for a bit too long. nightmares can be a medium for growth and re-evaluation, like when you wake up in the morning and you wonder why you spent the entire night facing a gang of malicious clowns in a school building that was also trying to kill you*?

*I don’t actually have dreams like that

you could say that a dream is a place for the conscious and the subconscious to have a cup of tea,

a little chat.

Tom French’s incredible illustrations

I like the way darkness is portrayed here-

Not as something frightening, but as an excellent medium for someone to document the flight patterns of lightning bugs.

Photos by Tsuneaki Hiramatsu

“Like balloons, we are filled with hopes and dreams. But. Over time a single sentence creeps into our lives. Don’t be stupid. It’s the crusher of possibility. It’s the worlds greatest deflator. The world is full of smart people. Doing all kind of smart things… Thats smart.
Well, we’re with stupid. Stupid is the relentless pursuit of a regret free life. Smart may have the brains…
but stupid has the balls. The smart might recognize things for how they are. The stupid see things for how they could be. Smart critiques. Stupid creates. The fact is if we didnt have stupid thoughts wed have no interesting thoughts at all. Smart may have the plans… but stupid has the stories.
Smart may have the authority but stupid has one hell of a hangover. Its not smart to take risks… Its stupid.
To be stupid is to be brave. The stupid isnt afraid to fail. The stupid know there are worse things than failure… like not even trying.
Smart had one good idea, and that idea was stupid. You can’t outsmart stupid. So don’t even try. Remember only stupid can be truly brilliant.”

( Source from Diesel )

Manifesto

Nosaj Thing’s “Aquarium”

What ever are we doing but trying to uncover the structures that govern everyday life, the structures that are embedded so deeply in tradition that we do not even realize their strong framework in our lives?
I’m not concerned with what things are, I’m concerned with how they are.
All media intends uncover these hidden ideologies by trying to capture the essence of something in a painting, song, film, sculpture, whatever. Whether it conveys a moral, tells a narrative or expresses a world view, media describes a specific society in place and time. In producing media, it appears as though we are trying to understand our world by capturing an objective representation of it, by taking our subjective perception and turning it into something we can physically watch or hold onto or show to someone else, which would somehow make our lonely passing thoughts seem more real. In the case of the Surrealists, representation could be used as a tool to reveal the unconscious structures at work in our own minds (similar to methods of psychoanalysis in Freudian theory.)
The Surrealists asked questions about the nature of the frameworks of reality by analyzing dreams and attempting to represent their spontaneous (often libidinal) desires. In doing so, the Surrealists’ art made everyday life appear strange in ways that made us viewers wonder just how it is strange, how it is different than everyday life. In painting a clock, the Surrealists ask, what is it that makes a clock a clock, and why can it not be square, and why can’t it go counterclockwise, and why do I need to paint so-called “hands” when there are other ways to point to time? How did this tradition of making clocks, and looking at clocks, come to being?

(Still Life with Old Shoe, Juan Miro, 1937)

It can be said that in our attempts to make media, we are forced to analyze the way our ideologies trap us into a certain way of looking at the world. We see how we can never truly penetrate what something is because we are only looking at it from a certain vantage point, a vantage point that does not have access to the collective mind. Thus, art becomes a dialogue between competing vantage points, a constant conversation between artists of the past and artists of the present about how something is:
“An artwork is  not a unified whole, but rather an open-ended site of contestation wherein various cultural practices from different classes and ethnic groups are temporarily combined…every visual language is not merely a tool for political struggle, but by its very nature a location of ongoing political conflict.”
Art and media indeed serve as a locus for conversation between ideologies of Self and Other. Art in this sense becomes a powerful tool in shaping our construction of reality, since it acts almost as a record book or journal of multifarious traditions, and can open us up to the ideology of the Other which we may not be able to see elsewhere. Further, seeing the ideology of the Other will make us understand the distinctions between Us and Them which ultimately uncover the structural differences at work.

(Olympia, Edouard Manet, 1863)

Consequently, art becomes a political meeting place, a place where the most influential infrastructure of all— the government— is actively questioned and re-evaluated. Art in fact becomes dangerous in its ability to reveal the trappings of the structure of the government and leads artists to become subversive members of society and their art to become avant-garde, to try to break free. In fact, during the Red Scare and McCarthyism, strong censorship was placed on modern US artists because their extremely abstract work resembled the work of European art movements (Dadaism, Futurism, Expressionism, Social Realism) and therefore must have promoted Communist ideals:

”In an eloquent public lecture of 1944, Robert Motherwell correlated the role of avant-garde art with all of democratic socialism and expressed deep alienation from the dominant economic system as well as its concomitant ideological values.”
Art, here, is seen by the government as so loaded with ideological potency that it needed to be hushed in order for the American public to believe in Capitalism without doubt. Art that was made by socialists or resembled socialist works being made in Europe at the time was seen as degenerate and was pulled from shows. The American government’s intense concern with the media’s reflection on their culture shows both the strong ethnocentricity of America and the power of art, in many dimensions, to show how a culture operates.

(Jackson Pollock 1948)

Since the conditions of our reality is often enforced by structures much bigger and more complex than one can understand, like censorship by the government or even one’s own subconscious, I suggest that we cannot let the "givens” in life go unquestioned. We cannot let the values deeply, deeply embedded in us trap us into looking at the world from a single vantage point. It is for this reason that producing and consuming art and media should be regarded with utmost importance in daily life. Especially in times of such fast globalization, art and media can help us understand the global community (and ourselves) in more depth, and therefore help us to adapt more gracefully to the series of shocks that modern life entails. I insist that when we explore the ideologies that govern the way we view the world, we are readier for the curveballs that it might throw at us. As Barnett Newman explains:
“It’s the establishment that makes people predatory…Only those are free who are free from the values of the Establishment.”



(quotes from David Craven’s “Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Approach to American Art. Also pictured is Andre Breton’s “Slipper Spoon,” an idea that came from a dream.)

Grow

Kuhn’s Slime Beach…don’t be fooled by the title. Absolutely beautiful.

“The world is but a canvas to the imagination” was my senior quote in my high school yearbook. I think it structures a lot of the way I think, for it is not only about creating one’s own future but about the power of the mind to change our experience. It’s along the lines of “life’s what you make of it,” with a dash of “anything is possible”

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/01/yayoi-kusama-obiliteration-room/?src=footer

One of my favorite parts about this blog is looking at the artists that I posted about a year or two ago, then looking at their more contemporary works and seeing how far they’ve come since then. A lot of them have developed their personal styles and are beginning to make names for themselves.

Here are some stunning illustrations by Olaf Hajek.

Here are some photos of the Luminarie de Cagna at Belgium’s annual light show. This incredible work of art is made up with 55,000 LED lights and is a shocking 84 feet high!

Recently I was introduced to moss graffiti..



It’s not that hard to make. It only requires a few ingredients.

Project for the summer? I think so!

I love our city:

http://montreal-photos.tumblr.com/

A Simple Merci

 

This post is to commemorate the 8,000th pageview of Katy’s Canvas!

Surprisingly, in only 3 years, Katy’s Canvas is viewed all over the world.

I have readers not only in the United States and Canada,

but also in the United Kingdom,

Russia,

Germany,

Australia,

the Netherlands,

France,

India,

and Mexico!

Just this week, there have been 7 pageviews from Chile and 15 from Israel.

Thank you to my readers, who encourage me to pursue the optimism and creativity in writing and art that Katy’s Canvas is all about.

Characters

 

oh, the characters I see in Montreal

 

Young Montana’s “Sacre Cool”

 

just yesterday, I saw an old man with a top hat gaily riding his pink bicycle through the park, puffing on a cigar that hung from his mouth

 

 

I saw three adolescent boys blasting their boombox, dancing like idiots on some random stranger’s front stoop, basking in the strange looks given by people walking past

 

 

on that same trip, there was a man in a wheelchair, stopped on the sidewalk, looking forward, not moving. not even his eyes. I didn’t know what to say or do so I just walked past

 

 

it got dark out, and there was that tall hairless asian woman in the park, shrouded in black, walking around herself in small circles.. the same woman who mysteriously swooshed in and out of the blue dog motel that one night..

 

 

then on my way to class early this morning there was a kid in the sun with slicked back hair and he was whistling and smiling with a new box of converse in his arms and when I looked down he surely did have ragged shoes

 

 

right now, on the street corner that this café window gives me direct spying access to, there is this man refusing to stop kissing his girlfriend goodbye

 

 

all these characters, all this expression, everywhere I look-

I was on my way back from the supermarché and I was holding a 16 pack of blueberry waffles, nacho cheese dip, two PBRs and a new can of coffee…I was whistling, I almost tripped over my small feet…and when I looked up there was a guy walking his dog and he was smiling at me,

which makes me think, maybe I’m a character too

 

 

 

“Freud through Benjamin is contending that the external world is constantly threatening to over-stimulate us and that, instead of requiring more means of accessing the world, the body needs protectors, shields, to help block it out. The principle shield is consciousness, which protects the subconscious from suffering the after-effects of shock. Much of this language recalls Marshall McLuhan's definition of media as "extensions of man" (3). Here the extension, consciousness, is most decidedly a shield, and not a spear.”

(Theories of Media: Shock)

 

 

(featured artist Mike Mitchell)