We are distracted by reality shows
And the newest iPod or MacBook
Spell check even corrects the ipod to iPod
Materialism will be the end of our freedom
And the dependence on consumer products and imported goods
Technically, Technology is a blessing and a curse
Memories of the good ol’ days will die
Hard

Dear You,

My unknown love,  
Did you see the rain gather in puddles?
Or were you too distracted by the city life?
Watch the headlights as you run across the street
Or focus on the light turning red,

Did you see me drink that glass?
Or hear me cough

Do you like the way it turned out?
All the pieces fit perfect

Or, are you like me,
Pretending
That this is what you want

I struggle through school
I struggle through my emotions
Everyday is a challenge
I put up a jubilant front
But sometimes I get low
Grow into a ball of limbs and torso
Wrapping myself away,
Creating a shell of ifs and whens
Hot flashes and sweated dreams
Constantly spinning out of control and back again
Living for the remember, times past seem like moments better then they should
And I sit on my mattress and sheets
Circling in and out of depression

The media swings information into the air
Innocently as a child spreads a lie
In charge of their own idea of reality and knowledge
Casting glimpses and burning holes in the stories and bombs
Does anyone care?
Care
Enough to read between the periods and well rehearsed tears
Law binding, right breaking polices of how and when
Single file lines and caged boardwalks
A foot away from bar codes and eye authorization
Slowly morphing into a well oiled death toll
I could be helpless, you could be heroic

So many things to think about,
Not too many to talk about
Some things are better kept locked
In a dark foreboding too
The time misleads the hands and feet
Walking aimlessly around 100 mile town
Broken down and out of society
Away
The time misleads eyes and ears
Straining at the rainbow for the ever after
Stuck in the rain, drenched and far
Alone

Coming to the final project and final Artist Statement of my days at Emily Carr University. I am more confused about Art, and what makes Art, Art. I have tried different things, some better than others, some worse.  I have used different formats, different film sizes and different subject matters and focal points.  However, The last ideas that I have shared have not gone over as happily as I would have liked.  So, yet again, I find myself changing my project to please my peers and faculty. While doing so, I have lost why I fell in love with photography in the first place. Forgot all about my photography award in High School. Forgot about taking pictures of everything I see. I did that for me, and now it feels like Art has become some kind of popularity contest of who is more abstract and charged, something we’ve never seen before. But I feel everything is already been done, in one way or another.

With sharing this, I do not feel, I can even remotely come up with something completely new and have some philosophical subjective interpretation of whether a picture of a leaf is just a leaf, or a tiny glimpse of global warming, or a sign that fall has once again, fell.   To quote Andy Warhol, “Art is what is what you can get away with”.  Has art really become, whatever we can bull shit our way through?

I feel completely drained of any creative ideas or thoughts. So I have decided to do something for me. I have taken pictures of different places or things in my apartment.  In black and white, with 120 film on RC paper.  They are on 11x14-sized paper. I decided that photography was once a way to keep all the moments of my life kept, safe and documented. And this is what I plan to do. Document the place where I have been banging my head up and down the 4 walls of this space, trying to come up with something magical. Instead, I took a more literal route, and focused on the space I was in, trying to not create something for an institution and something for my personal archives.  I think we as artists, and as individuals can all take some wisdom from Oscar Wilde when he said, “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”  As I am my own toughest critic, I do not see myself in the art I have created over the past couple of years, therefore I don’t feel as if my practice is truly reflects my voice as an artist. Thus, I plan to create something within myself for myself.

Spare bricks for the wall that could never find a successor
Collect historical evidence, as we forgot the books we read
Seems the songs have all been sung, all the strings have snapped
Fallen battles man, fought men and children
Worms and you, filling your 2 bedrooms with another self made reality
MTV created a life of insta, what do they even contribute?

Snooki lives in a basement, and heroes in everyday rags
Hunter S. blew his brains out, where has his words scattered?

Little black books, with numbers and phrases
To choose from the moments I created
Disowned onto a 3-hole punch line

And yet my mind seems vacant with all these empty trophies reflecting…

Chained to a world our parents knew, stuck with the ideals of an old dream
Trying to find out how it all, somehow, disappeared,
Struggling to find new ways to make the pieces fit

Is there anyone home?
The piano rings the last note,
As the day breaks from another clouded illusion
"Of what is and was"

Here is the place, we once knew
Where all the colours of the rainbow,
Where they all came to die
The non-existent hues are overthrown by the contrast of past showers
As staring at an old photograph, curled and brown from light
The shadowless walls absorb the rays and consume them into a mere squint
Pushed back towards the white bricks as you struggle to balance yourself
Trying to explain but slurring speech is equivalent to my spelling
And the corner I am managed to find, is cold and bright too know, what this means

I wish I could write like Paul Simon,
“Time hurries on” As the days go from day to night
And the words had my head dissipates with the morning light
“Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera”
Constantly viewing things in different ways,
Books and books of my scribbled mumbles,
Only writing when I am constant, transient,
Wishing, for a cigarette, I know, Ill have to wait
Trying to bring the darkness onto paper
Trying to narrate some internal monologue between my selves
To spew out those tarnished replicas
To unleash the butterflies
While drowning the wings, with a technical solution
...The dangling conversation, reflecting the rhymes,
superficial lies,
The time of our lives
reaped with cobwebs in my mind

Bring out your dead,
All willing bodies stand your ground
This is the art of ruin,
Hold your scaffolds high
And your morals low
Bring out the monopolies and the cash crop
Raise them on a pedestal made for some kind of Greek legend
A heroic fight for what was, and an attempt to untie the knot
Brake the shackles of man made, rediscover the stream
Search for the trickster, and watch where he goes

I’m hiding my emotions,
I stare into the blank road,
Watch the people pass,
Winter winds blow
The shoes on my feet,
Wet with snow
Why I cannot have a peaceful dream
I am tainted with you,
I can only write about you,
It’s always been there,
But you ruined me,
Fucked me up,
I fucked up you too.
I miss you,
Its still only you
The stars I see, you see too

Why are my dreams haunted with the past?
Why can I not just live and let live,
Do I love misery?
Do I love being a pawn in this depression game?
Even though, I hold all the cards,
Do I not want to let the past die?
Wake up with the last I remember when?
You seem to be some kind of disease,
That flourishes when I try to be some kind of writer
Art never came from happiness, isn’t that what they say?
Do I love reflecting on the past?
Do I not want to let you go?
I don’t,
Missing something you let go makes you crumble,

The nights are few and scattered
The memories last forever
I cant seem to want to stop
Listening to your tune
Replaying it,
Over and over
Thinking if I wish it will be different
Something could from silence
But I know that’s just wishing on a lucky pair of snake eyes
I don’t gamble,
But I just cannot seem to let the object of my affection
Reach anywhere but you

I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place
I love you, this is
Undeniable
But I do not love you the way you wish me too
These fruit flies flying through the air
Make me swat the harsh times away
I have discovered that,
I cannot love the way young love does
I cannot be something you lean on
I cannot even lean my own shoulders
The future is grand, but I’m leaving you
I love you, but I cannot love you

Merry Christmas, you filthy animal
Here is a scarf to pay your rent
And some of this seasons slippers to eat
You had the world within your grip: I gave it to you
Why bother with education, you just graduated
Just so you know, I wont help you and you’ll never leave
You’ll never make it, Mary has been nothing but nice to you
You are welcome to come down and eat with us

That wont be an awkward conversation

I cant breathe
These cigarettes are making me faint
These stairs I climb to come home
Seem like a never-ending stairwell, I can never seem to conquer
I fall victim to these beers to make me some lyrical and woeful
To unleash the words that writer’s block ties from my sobriety
To show I am a somebody who can write down the things people cannot bare to tell
To let these emotions I hide and tuck away,
Have them come to the surface, break way for the futile few who never could
The colours of the wind and the true colours of our society

Flowers you have ruin my towers
My towers above chivalry and chauvinistic ideals
They push out the prohibitions of useless propaganda
For me, alcoholic toxins appeal to my lyrical woes
I think ambiguously when I feel numb and freed of obligations
And the curls of my toes,
Don’t wrinkle with the ties of man

Invisible tears streaming down my face
These tears that you can not see,
It’s almost as if they were not there to begin with
Like its some psycho-somatic reaction to something I have no longer
As if,  I might always have some kind of longing to the yesterday
How memory leads us to believe the past is some idealist future
When I find out what life has to offer, the stars that went out
We fall back in love with the light
And green grasses will pave the way to the end
And everything will fall into the place as it should, on the chessboard of life

I take your voice wherever I go,
I don’t wish too,
I wait for you, but you never waited for me, to find
Whatever I was trying to find
A heartbroken ending seems to never be the end
This t-shirt I made smells like you
And the words of Mike Rosenberg, say the things I tried too,
Accompanied metaphors I would never had thought of
Eyes are gathering droplets, and the days keep flipping by
Another year has come to a close, and still it is as if no time,
No time has past at all

Just one sip to recall the memories back into view
My liver may be constructed better than others,
It works with the ambience of the dark days
It rekindles the holes in my life, brings forward the words to express
A valiant attempt at understanding the wild ones, who beat their own hearts
A somber tune of regret and footprints never-ending
Seems the best decision is to continue on this road where the lights dim every hour
Some kind of vagabond following the stars to find something worth finding