cauchemar, كابوس, nightmare

a little late night Du Bois

“Such degrading of men by men is as old as mankind, and the invention of no one race or people. Ever have men striven to conceive of their victims as different from the victors, endlessly different in soul and blood, strength and cunning, race and lineage. It has been left, however, to Europe and to modern days to discover the eternal world-wide mark of meanness, - COLOR.” - WEB du Bois

les policiers assassins

depuis 1987 il y a 43 personnes tués par le SPVM, les forces policières à Montréal. Chaqu´un de ces dates représentent la journée qu´une personne non armé, était tué par l´abus

d´une autorité questionnable.

remnants of an exhibition

in 2006 when art school was a whole new thing, I did an exhibit with a friend. It started out with photos he took in the Notre Dame de Neiges cemetary in Montréal. I played around with them, embellishing them. We talked of the fragility of life and the way we attempt to immortalize ourselves in death. Eventually, we filled up a room with our works, some ideas better developed than others. Looking back on a handful of the work now, maybe what we were doing was an attempt to re-integrate death into the flux of the living, to redeem it from the ultimatum of forever, and renew it with the life our hands could still lay claim to.

inspirations

they are one and many. these are only a few.

this is precisely what happens over time... people disappear

a friend lent me a book once (thank you) about a girl whose love for her grandfather was the most profound love of her life. they understood each other in such a way that, when he passed, the girl - and woman she became - could never find love like they had shared in any other relationship.

these are photos of my mother, about whom i feel much as this woman did a good part of the time.

Some patterns

the only lines on this map are rivers

A map of the world without borders, a meditation on colonialism and our visual construction of the world. I started wondering what the psychological effects of viewing political maps all the time might be having upon our world view. So here are some modest musings on looking at the world as geographic body and working ecosystem as opposed to a series of nations. To subtly question the obvious, what does our economic system do to our world view? How does the greed inherent in global trade distort our vision of what the world is worth?

corset, anyone?

I made this block print after a tree I had seen in Montes Azules, Chiapas, one day as we picked peppers and tomatoes and bananas in the milpa. I thought it looked like a woman raising her hands to the sky. That same night in the community my presence made it impossible for domestic violence to take place in the house of a friend. I don't give myself any credit for this, it simply happened that I was able to intervene.

This corset I made as a very indirect response to the issue of domestic violence, something which occurs in the physical, mental and psychological domains and occurs as a result of the rampant sexism of our country and larger world.

While this corset structure acts not to restrict a woman's stomach nor breathing, it does make her invisible from the waist up. This is illustrative of the difficulties feminism faces in making societal and systemic changes - since feminism and its intersections are up against a sexism and other -isms so embedded into societal structure, a step in one direction can end up creating new obstacles.

by the way, i think corsets are sexy. ain´t got no beef with them. my beef is with classist, racist and prude feminisms, the police, and cluster bombs. among other things.

droits face à la police

¿y las fronteras?

what are they anyway, borders? I really can´t believe we take such fluid and complex constructs as givens and forget that they exist only in our imaginations, that otherwise they are arbitrary constructs, obstructing movement. in questioning them, what do we come up with? keeping out, keeping in, maintaining security, maintaining identity, giving illegal substances a challenge, feeding corruption, making migration illegal, breaking up families, breaking up communities, murdering those on the other side, hot cold and fatally dry deserts, criminalizing crossing while providing jobs, bleeding language, opening trade of goods across borders while forbidding bodies, women traveling as commodity, guns at the points of contact, questions so many questions, suspicious, arbitrary, intimidating, detentions, silence. so many things, borders. so much more than any of this. too many painful things, certainly not a construct to be kept up, but to be torn down.