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| No. 7576 - 12 Nov 2010 - 12:36:10 |
11 November 2015
18 September 2015
Selected Articles From PAX Quarterly Magazine
A Family Pilgrimage*
A few years ago, while I was trying to explain my work to a friend of a friend, I was offered some unusual advice. Calling me an "ancestral scapegoat," he encouraged me to continue the visual history project I was struggling to manifest. He warned that my relatives might not always welcome the stories I would track and seek to share but that I must persist as the one of my generation who was driven to know the truth and willing to tell the tale. He urged me to nevertheless continue the search for my creative and spiritual homeland.
The yearning for a genuine and profound experience led me to formulate a pilgrimage - neither religious nor secular, but personally sacred and tied to a familial landscape I barely knew. By undertaking a quest and vowing to complete it, I am participating in a universal tradition and practice: to seek and experience the presence of God while separating from the everyday.
"The only way out is through," according to Robert Frost. Decide and the doing gets done, so I began to plan a road trip to what is essentially the middle of nowhere, drawn by a spiritual magnetism to the remarkable geographical landscape of Lake Manitoba. In its centre is an intersection between two realms, a liminality called Manitoobaa in Ojibwa - Straits of Manitou, the Great Spirit - and known by the pounding of waves and pebbles on its limestone shores, like a spirit pounding a drum.
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| Cayer Beach (internet-anonymous, 2011) |
My mother was born in the vicinity and a few of her cousins who still live in the region join me on the gravel road journey from Dauphin and Ste. Rose du Lac to Cayer Beach on Lake Manitoba. It is still several hours before summer solstice and within this liminal zone of time, place, and intention, we discuss the spiritual business of the family - from replacing the fallen gravestones of great-grandparents and finding a way to repair the church roof, to assorted graveside stories of kith and kin. For a short while the impediments of distance are suspended and the improbable is imagined. Here, in the smallest of communities and in the most remote of provinces, I find a tangible connection to my ancestors and their stories in the company of the family members who want to know.
We turn away from the edge of the beautiful lake and the church our grandfather built and named St. Jean de Brébeuf. We drive back toward the world of everyday, on the other side of an invisible threshold - but different. We convene and celebrate over a late lunch at the Chicken Chef in Ste. Rose. I commemorate these family rituals by vowing to return as I have done in four previous encounters with this meaningful place were every exploration reveals inner meaning. Perhaps I will return again for the longest day of the year in June, or come back in August when it is good for camping and swimming, or perhaps visit in January because winter is my favourite Manitoba season and this is a special place in the cold. Having a destination and making a vow to reach it fulfill the longing for a meaningful journey, a pilgrimage.
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| No. 1173 - 20 June 2013 - 13:42:52 |
* PAX: No.19 St. James' Day © 2013
04 September 2015
Final Remand
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| No. 0834 - 26 May 2015 - 20:51:12 |
I have yet to count the actual estimated number of pictures taken of this project which I named PALIMPSEST but it probably ranges between 100 and 200 thousand images that rest quietly on an external hard drive. The documentation of this public process was made possible by two DTES Small Arts Grants, generously funded by the Vancouver Foundation. In it I photographed the conversion of the Richard Henriquez design for housing prisoners at the BC Courts into the re-design, by his son Gregory, of social/market housing for residents.
The three year project was located on the St. James' Anglican bell tower's western deck and utilized various handheld cameras and digital apps. The image above was composed with an iPod camera, a landscape-stitcher with a final crop in iPhoto.
The repetitive exposure to this particular point of view led to the development of additional perspectives. The body of the edifice I perched upon became more significant, demanding inclusion in all of the images other than the standard documentary shots taken with an SLR camera at every session. My own creative connection to the architecture notwithstanding I recognized the intrinsic pull of St. James' physical impact. But it wasn't alone in affecting a view that includes the Burrard Inlet and North Shore mountains, the urban core, industry and re-development and the eternal components of wildlife, weather, seasonal flux and the sky itself.
The final piece of this project entails archiving PALIMPSEST to its own website. By now, the residents have moved in and the building lives on its own again. It now provides a positive opportunity for a neighbourhood that has too-long languished in aggressive obscurity.
26 May 2015
PALIMPSEST
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| No. 0988 - 26 May 2015 - 21:51:22 |
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| No. 0980 - 26 May 2015 - 21:30:42 |
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| No. 0978 - 26 May 2015 - 20:51:12 |
24 May 2015
20 May 2015
15 May 2015
26 April 2015
14 April 2015
11 April 2015
31 March 2015
27 March 2015
17 March 2015
23 February 2015
17 February 2015
04 February 2015
23 January 2015
20 January 2015
27 December 2014
24 December 2014
23 December 2014
Selected Articles From PAX Quarterly Magazine
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| Ghent Altarpiece (detail), Jan van Eyck, c. 1432 |
Hodie, Christus Natus Est*
"Hodie, Christus natus est" (Today, Christ is born) is derived from the monastic tradition of early Christianity and especially the Liber Usualis. Countless composers over hundreds of years used this 1,900-page book of Gregorian chants for the Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei) as well as for commonly held feast days such as the celebration of the Nativity. At this year's Christmas eve Mass, the St. James' High Mass Choir will sing a version by our own Canadian composer Healey Willan. Motet No. 10, "Hodie Christus natus est" (1935) was published in the Eleven Liturgical motets (1928-37), and it provides an opportunity to understand better the unique sound Willan brought to Anglican church music in Canada -- and beyond.
Healey Willan (1880-1968) was already an established organist, composer, and conductor at the time he left England for Canada in 1913. His orchestral and early organ music is conservative stylistically, and heavily influenced by post-Romanticism and the chromatic harmonics favoured during the nineteenth century. But it is in his liturgical works that he manipulates the earlier compositional influences of Medieval and Renaissance plainchant and polyphony. He joined the London Gregorian Association in 1910 and later co-founded the affiliate Gregorian Association of Toronto (dedicated to performing plainchant in that city), which continued its mandate until the 1980s. Nowhere is this influence more evident than in his compositional work at St. Mary Magdalene Church (SMM) in Toronto during his time there as director of liturgical music (1921-68).
Willan came from a staunch Anglo-Catholic family and SMM gave him the unique opportunity to develop plainsong propers, Mass settings, and motets in the vernacular -- to his satisfaction. Theatrical by nature, he referred to the sacramental practice of the Eucharist, the centre of church worship, as a Sacred Drama. In his own words, "Accentuation and rhythm of the words is always paramount" -- the music is a framework upon which the words are superimposed, and early music compositional methods with their single melodies were suitable to the vernacular propers of the Anglican Mass. The St. James' High Mass Choir routinely sings his Introits at the Festival Day High Masses.
It was Sir Richard R. Terry, in London, who was at the cutting edge of an Early Music revival and who most inspired Willan in his love of Renaissance choral music. It is again in his liturgical compositions that this passion is realized. His version of "Hodie, Christus natus est" is a fitting homage to his late sixteenth-century counterpart, Dutch organist, composer, and teacher, Jan Pieterzoon Sweelinck (1562-1621). In fact, the opening phrases are a direct quotation from Sweelinck's 1619 version, although the piece is overall pruned and reflects the touch of contemporary modulation. It is an example of Willan's application of historical method and ritual composition infused into contemporary Anglican liturgy.
The date of this motet also reflects the building of our own St. James' (in its third incarnation) in 1935. There would have been few opportunities to hear such music in our city other than at St. James' Anglican. This period was still only the advent of sound recording, and awareness of Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony was no doubt restricted mostly to musicians and students of that day. Today, parishioners' ears are attuned to the sounds of early music, thanks in great part to the joyful and expert liturgical work of Healey Willan.
* PAX: No. 25, Christmas © 2014
22 November 2014
PALIMPSEST
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| No. 3760 - 22 November 2014 - 18:08:56 |
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| No. 0874 - 22 November 2014 - 14:53:25 |
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| No. 0128 - 22 November 2014 - 14:53:25 |
17 November 2014
15 November 2014
10 November 2014
09 November 2014
29 October 2014
PALIMPSEST
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| No. 3195 - 28 October 2014 - 18:45:18 |
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| No. 9913 - 28 October 2014 - 18:45:10 |
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| No. 0906 - 28 October 2014 - 18:40:12 |
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| No. 9908 - 28 October 2014 - 18:35:11 |
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| No. 9906 - 28 October 2014 - 18:30:29 |
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| No. 9905 - 28 October 2014 - 18:26:30 |
14 October 2014
PALIMPSEST
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| No. 0894 - 13 October 2014 - 20:05:59 |
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| No. 9842 - 13 October 2014 - 20:05:14 |
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| No. 9810 - 13 October 2014 - 20:02:55 |
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| No. 9841 - 13 October 2014 - 08:52:02 |
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