Up Around the Bend

what a long strange trip it's been

Somehow it’s August? We are alive in strange and interesting times, and it’s good to remember you’re a part of the whole web of life. Perhaps this summer you’ve been able to watch a lightning storm (they have been magnificent in the BC interior), pick some berries, or lie in the grass and stare into the branches of tree from the ground up. A particularly great gift of the north is the long-lasting, golden daylight at midsummer. I had a sweet photoshoot with my old friend Matt around the solstice, in the fields near my home, and his photographs really captured how happy this light and this place make me. Here’s a rare sighting of me saying hello to you:

Photo by Matt Colley

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In the last few newsletters I’ve written about the process of working towards a solo show and developing a new series of large paintings. After much slow, bumbling, fumbling experimentation over many months, the project is taking form, and I’m so pleased to present these new works in my upcoming exhibition, Up Around the Bend, on view from August 17th to October 1st in the Rustad Galleria at Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George, BC. It’s a total dream to have my first solo show in my hometown, in a space as gorgeous as Two Rivers! I warmly invite you to join me at the opening reception inside the gallery on Thursday August 17th at 7:30 PM. If you find yourself anywhere near Lheidli T’enneh territory, I’d love to see you there for a little artist talk, and the chance to connect with friends old and new. In order to collaborate on the curatorial text and prepare to talk to the public, I’ve been doing lots of reflecting and writing about my work in the lead-up to the show, some of which I’ll share with you here.

I chose this show’s title as a nod to CCR’s classic tune of the same name. It’s a phrase that invites us to think about where we’re going, and what we might see if we dared to look closer and step around an unknown corner. It’s a song about escaping to a better place, leaving the urban behind for some sort of natural idyll at the end of the highway, “where the neons turn to wood.” My paintings live in the middle of that tune, where humanity and the wilderness intersect. The exhibition brings you on a curious road trip along Highway 16 (also famously and infamously known as the Yellowhead Highway or the Highway of Tears) in northwestern British Columbia, through a remote region where I have lived, worked and driven extensively. It’s the place I know deeply as home, layered with vivid memories. I combine fragments of these memories in my paintings: highway billboards, gas stations, and particular mountain peaks. All the details are things I have directly observed, but in my new work I’ve pieced them together in unusual road scenes, “dreamscapes” even, with decoration, pattern and repetition inspired by various folk arts.

Something clicked for me this spring when I got some large sheets of black cold press paper, and started using the textures of gouache to build things up out of the shadows. It was a clear moment of seeing my own visual language, the weird work that only I could make. Through building up layers of gouache paint on dark paper, things that might otherwise be overlooked emerge out of the shadows. While the situation may be serious, it is never entirely without light. Signs and landmarks along the way suggest options for way-finding through an uncertain space. Here are a couple of the larger works on black paper that are the backbone of the show. (Though there’s plenty of small surprises to see in the gallery once the installation is complete!)

Long Strange Trip (2023), gouache on paper, 22 x 30 inches

Goin’ Up the Country (2023), gouache on paper, 22 x 30 inches

Delicate swans flock next to gas stations as logging trucks speed by, above ditches full of wildflowers. Gas stations glow with artificial light on the edge of a dark wood, where birch trees stare back out at you with their bark eyes. It’s all alive, interdependent, and wildly complicated; it’s an imperfect patchwork, and it’s my own folk iconography of home. Whether you’ve lived your whole life in northern BC or you’ve never set foot near here, I hope these new works will show you both the dark and light, the weirdness and beauty that make this region unique.

You might have noticed above that I named some of the pieces by borrowing lyrics from songs about roads, cars, trains, highways and driving. I’ve been building this Yellowhead Road Trip playlist in conversation with my new work. Do tell me your favourite road-themed songs, and we can augment the playlist together!

Up Around the Bend is the result of my return to familiar territory to look at it deeper. I learned from my mentor Lindsay Stripling that when you begin a new project, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can revisit old interests, return to your old work and enhance it with new characters, wider perspectives, different techniques. I know that the work emerged not only from these past six months or so, but from many years before that, driving up and down Highway 16, quietly thinking about how that region shaped my adult life, and what home means to me. I've written, drawn and painted about those themes often, and I think I’ll never stop reflecting on them in some way. Learning to truly see and love your home place feels like the work of a lifetime. Below is a photo of me in front of my original “Highway 16 Dreamscape” that I painted in art school in 2018. Materially it’s quite different than the work I’m making now, but the subject matter has always stuck with me and I directly referenced the composition of this piece (and the smaller adjacent ode to the gas station!) for my new work:

That photo was taken at the opening of a group show for local emerging artists, wherein I showed my art in public for the first time (at the small but mighty Omineca Arts Centre in PG) . I can tell that I was very nervous (though red Fluevogs do help with that)! It’s fun and affirming to see how I’ve grown by steadily showing up for myself in the ensuing years. I wish the same slow but steady growth to you in whatever way you hope for.

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August miscellany:

• Like so many places, British Columbia has been on fire this summer. Not a day goes by where I’m not thinking about friends that are hard at work in the forest. Here’s Diggin’ Guard, a gouache painting I made on wood panel from 2022:

  

  There’s no better time to refer you back to Fire Season, an interdisciplinary project of sense-making about wildfire, which I am honoured to have contributed to. Creators Liz and Amory kindly published my art and writing in both of the books they’ve released so far; you can read the opening of “Work Sites,” a personal essay about my time working on a unit crew with BC Wildfire Service, here (the full piece is in the print edition of Volume 1).

• Amid the wildfires, a brutal reminder: “This, today, is as good as it will ever get within our lifetimes: every day that we step out into the uncanny weather, we experience a better and more stable climate than any we will ever experience again.” - the always brilliant Jia Tolentino on what to do with your climate emotions. Lately I’ve started my mornings by reading a small passage from Joanna Macy’s World as Lover, World as Self. It’s a timeless and timely text that makes space for feeling both ecological grief and real hope.

• Though most of my attention has been on painting recently while working towards this show, I am still practising illustration where I can, and enjoying the challenge of combining hand-painted elements with digital work. This summer I thought I’d try illustrating a recipe. Highly recommend this simple iced tea recipe that, like many good things in my life, was passed on to me by my sweet friend and neighbour Gail. This one’s great if you’re growing an excess of mint in your garden this summer:

  

  I painted the mint leaves, lemons, and parts of the lettering by hand, then scanned them and used Procreate to arrange the elements with text.

• Hanif Abdurraqib on Sinéad O’Connor (RIP). You’ll love all of Hanif’s books, essays, and poems, especially if you are any kind of music enthusiast. His conversations with musicians on the podcast Object of Sound are also great.

• Been enjoying this cool album:

• BEEF (on Netflix) is so so good - wickedly funny and dark with lots of weird art woven throughout (starting with the coolest title cards painted by David Choe and inspired in part by 16th-century Dutch paintings of meat markets).

  

  Joseph Lee as a fragile potter boy in BEEF

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Thanks so much for being a reader, and take good care. (And maybe see you on August 17th if you’re in PG!)

Emily xo