MONDAY ARTPOST 0102-2023

MONDAY

ARTPOST

0102-2023

ISSN1918-6991

MONDAYARTPOST.COM

Columns by Artists and Writers

Bob Black / bq / Cem Turgay /

Fiona Smyth / Gary Michael Dault

/ Kai Chan / Kamelia Pezeshki/

Shelley Savor / Tamara Chatterjee

/ Wilson Tsang / Yam Lau

+ A Sunflower Memorandum

(Gary Michael Dault)

MONDAY ARTPOST published on Mondays. Columns by Artists and Writers. All Right Reserved. Published since 2002.

An Ocean and Pounds publication. ISSN 1918-6991. email to: mail@oceanpounds.com

DOUBLE DOUBLE

City Mirage Snow

http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/cms.html

The Painter The Photographer The Alchemist

http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/ppa.html

The galloping jelly pink horse with pea green

spots

http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/phgs.html

Reality Irreality Augmented Reality

http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/rar.html

The Book The Reader The Keeper

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/09/dd202208.html

Windmills Fields and Marina

http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/07/wmf.html

Island Peninsula Cape

http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/05/blog-post.html

The Fence the Garden the Connoisseur


Donkey camera and auld lang syne

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/02/

dd202202.html

The Fountain the Shop the Rhythmic Train

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/01/

dd202201.html

Hana Picnic Stones


Terrain Little Red Riding Hood Rosetta


Terrain Little Red Riding Hood Rosetta/ DOUBLE DOUBLE March edition 2022/ Kai Chan

Lee Ka-sing

CODA (2020)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/coda.html

Diary of a Sunflower, Book Two (2022)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/ds.html

Eighty Two Photographs (2021)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/10/82p.html

Time Machine (2021)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/12/tm.html

Songs from the Acid-free Paper Box (2022)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/sa.html

Songs from the Acid-free Paper Box

Museum edition (2022)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/sab.html

“That Afternoon” on Mubi, a dialogue: Tsai

Ming Liang and Lee Kang-Sheng (2022)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/11/ta.html

The Travelogue of a Bitter Melon (2022)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/11/tbm.html

Swan House

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/swanhouse.html

Time Machine/ Lee Ka-sing

Holly Lee

Nine-Years (2020)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2020/02/ny.html

DOUBLE DOUBLE Box in a Valise a closecropped

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2020/05/ddb-cc.html

DOUBLE DOUBLE Box in a Valise on-site

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2020/05/ddb-os.html

Gary Michael Dault

Still Life Still A Book of Vessels (2022)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/09/bv.html

The Book of The Poem (2022)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/08/bp.html

The Nearby Faraway Small Paintings on

Cardboard (2022)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/09/small-paintings-on-cardboard.html

Time Machine (2021) photographs by Lee

Ka-sing, Haiku by Gary Michael Dault

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/12/tm.html

Istanbul Postcards (2021)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/07/ip.html

Swan House (2021)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/swanhouse.html

Six Poems (2022)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/11/6p.html

The Air is like a Butterfly (2021)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/07/tab.html

Still Life Still A Book of Vessels/ Gary Michael Dault

Calendar Beauty Vintage Calendar posters

from China

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2020/03/cb.html

Kai Chan

Twenty Twenty An exhibition by Kai Chan

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/09/tt.html

2K-4.0 (Kai Chan + Lee Ka-sing)

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/2k40.html

Shelley Savor

Mushrooms and Clouds but no Mushroom

Clouds

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/09/mcmc.html

Tomio Nitto

The Diary of Wonders

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/10/dw.html

Fiona Smyth

CHEEZ 456

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/05/c456.html

Libby Hague

Libby Hague Watercolours

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/11/lhw.html

The Diary of Wonders/ Tomio Nitto

Caffeine Reveries

Shelley Savor

Watching the End of the Year Drift Away

Poem a Week

Gary Michael Dault

Wet on the Snow

high in

a mountain

a crumpled

page

lies wet

on the snow

its message

dead

from the dark

in us

Travelling Palm

Snapshots

Tamara Chatterjee

USA (November, 2000) – We left Las Vegas,

spirits high with excitement looming as

we drove closer to the desertscape we had

envisioned and imagined for years. It never

occurred to me that our passage of desert

dreams would include several days of snow.

We finally arrived in Zion; as the sky turned.

The devastating winter flakes did indeed

impede our jaunt into The Narrows, but what

we did see was rather wondrous under a

blanket of snow.

ProTesT

Cem Turgay

ART LOGBOOK

Holly Lee

1. The «Turkestan Album» in color

https://iada-art.org/hhhh/turkestan-album-in-color

2. The Conquest of Central Asia through the Turkestan Album

https://voicesoncentralasia.org/the-conquest-of-central-asia-through-the-turkestan-album/

3. «The Way» Film-portrait of the artist Askhat Akhmedyarov*, directed by Evgeny Lumpov

(video 24:53)

https://iada-art.org/hhhh/turkestan-album-in-color

*Askhat Akhmedyarov was Born in 1965 in Uralsk, West Kazakhstan.

The Photograph

coordinated by

Kamelia Pezeshki

Birdseye maple by Kamelia Pezeshki

Leaving Taichung

Station

Bob Black

All poems move deathward

so too our hearts, so too our homes

so how to ask the shadow,

the comfort of the day, the door in sprungtime,

the contrition and calm of a muscular day when the wind is a wolf

and your body, exposed to the late-in-coming December expiration, decibels and creaks,

an old boat’s plank cuttles against the barnacles of the land’s desire

your body etherized against the loss of the press once against your side, she

scribbles in the margins scrambling for breath and meaning--.

you will someday seek the comfort of these things surely:

dusk’s dawning in spades and pried wide spaces left unlocked

the chipped corners of winter’s building groped at

whose voice chips away exhausted,

a red blanket defiant and remaining, stitched up with poems

those fearless verbs and unconjugated emotions:

count all of them in your waiting and inside the questions,

do not be afraid when fire falls from the sky.

Voyage, Voyager

“by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable

and beautiful and possibly even

unsuitable —….”--Mary Oliver

“All plots tend to move deathward.”—DeLillo

“не бояться, когда с неба падают пожары”—David Dector

How to ask the shadow,

when the moon comes barking, licking up and down the walls,

the loom of the bedsheets caked up in the hip of the room’s corner

the winter that brought you back from September

that winter that brought you back from the nation’s fear

all immaterial, ungoosed breath and a wintertide tongued toward the corner light, unchained

let it all go

let lee loaned lift

let long away amid arear, a of all

the sentences we wrote upon our wrists red and blue in the dark

the clauses choked from the claustrophobia of a broken heart, grandmother once feared

all these endless alphabets, the disdained alphas and the oneiric omegas

all that mattered, once

reimagined when you picked up the frozen stick in the creek, crawfishing backward

and our life swam upstream for the first time,

the pictographs that penciled our collar bones and inked the spines,

the alphabet and algebra of the lives we voyaged from there to here,

our passages and the passengers we once were, the glowering and the gathering

the flowers picked open with our canines and the maps incisored

voyaged along the riverbank in Yilan—

lavender, orchid, plum flowers, calla lilies and the daylilies upturned and drenched

the stories speak of this life, the recipes left dry and brown in the tea tin in the red cupboard:

so too our hearts

a door in Springtime:

so too of love

so too of hearts

so too the click of selves

so too you

so to you

do not be afraid when love falls from the sky.

So now

how to ask again

the shadow to seek and share what it knew, once

of what you have seen and what has been taken away

the children who climbed the emerald mountain by the baying sea:

their conviction rang out amid the nightjars and swifts

the remains and rickshaws along the old quarter’s street--

shall we count ourselves blessed

among what remains,

the tokens in the pockets, the coins in the seat’s sleeves,

the reflections that muddied in the night of the street mirror,

grandmother’s sprouting laugh, father’s cold sandwiches left aside on Christmas in wobby bar

the stories gathered on the plates in the reservoir of the wine glasses late at night

the welkin and distant laughter

atop and amid the abiding--

neither stanza nor firmament have words for that, or for this

the fishbones plucked from the filet set out for the cat,

gawking amid winter, the light and listeners listless in their nocturnal unraveling

organs of longing thawed, the last of your vows at night and the Earth’s orbit:

so too the click of our selves

so too you

so to our hearts

so to you

do not be afraid when love fails from the sky.

How to ask the shadow to cut away the wafer hurt,

cut away the heart ache, the twinge left in the joint,

loves ligature where the forlorn listens and the audience audits their languor

their longing heeding lullaby and lament

so too of love

so too our hearts

so too the click of our selves

so too you

so to you, then:

how?

To tell the shadow, this

do not be afraid when all falls love from the sky,

cut away the heart ache, cut away

while a door in Springtime opens

and all the poems come scattering, all language toward the deathward

yet we remain

far through the distance left, alive and liquid

far through the distance left, alive

the moon in the hinge of our hearts,

the tree and the pen line forever loquacious in the snow.

for: David Dector, Chiwan Choi and Robert Black, my father.

so too of love

so too of hearts

TANGENTS

Wilson Tsang

Ruth’s Raindrop

Open/Endedness

bq 不清

轉彎抹角

BEAT AROUND THE BUSH

他們說你仍需為你的所作所為

投案 —— 那些錯置、胡言與

亂語和美妙的邏輯謬誤發生於

市郊這裡是為什麼陽光有其

意義。我們皆是賦予別人的文物

They say you are still wanted for the crime you

Committed — those dislocations, mumbo

Jumbos and beautiful logical fallacies that took

Place here in the suburbs are why sunshine

Means something. We are all artifacts for others.

而這個早上 , 我們又一次以惹人歡喜的

微笑溝通卻又同時相互誤解像

誠懇和順理成章的成語。置於櫃中的記憶

以我們獨有的坐姿與說話方式陳列

而其口音就只有空氣中的氦氣能夠聽懂

And this morning, we again communicated

With pleasing smiles but misled each other like

An honest eventual idiom. Cased memories are

On display in ways we sat and talked, in

Accents that only helium in the air understands.

為什麼這些除了跟你和我們也

息息相關呢 ? 河川蜿蜒如一條不持久的

蛇吞噬沿途的植物與

三文治。鬧劇與悲劇相遇的

十字路口發生了意外

我思 , 故我在 , 思考

Why does this matter to not only you but

All of us? The river meanders like an impermanent

Snake swallowing plants and sandwiches

Along its way. There is an accident at the

Intersection, where farces and tragedies meet.

I think, therefore I am, thinking.

Greenwood

Kai Chan

Study

paper, wire

… 談笑間 …

Yam Lau

圓滿光華不磨瑩 , 掛在青天是我心

- 寒山

CHEEZ

Fiona Smyth

From the Notebooks

(2010-2022)

Gary Michael Dault

From the Notebooks, 2010-2023

Number 160: An array of Recent Notebooks (with a slice of grand piano)

A Sunflower

Memorandum

Gary Michael Dault

Excerpted from DOUBLE DOUBLE

December issue 2022

A Sunflower

Memorandum

Gary Michael Dault

I was raised long ago in this earthly place,

But I do not care for my home.

I owe my very life to its bountiful moisture,

But the earth is not my sky.

----Muhammad Iqbal (translated from the Urdu by Mustansir Mir)

Here is the Sunflower or Helianthus Annuus: “helios” (sun) plus “anthos” (flower)

plus “annuus” (annual).

Diary of a Sunflower, Book Two is a piece of original work in the format of a book by Lee Ka-sing (2022),

inclusive of 176 photographs in sequence. Published by OCEAN POUNDS in 2022, 372 pages, 8x10 inch, hard

cover, and was released in both paperback and ebook editions. More information about the book visit this link -

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/ds.html

The dry, attenuated almost plaintive lyricism of the sunflower, the noble-grotty

heliotropic sunflower (in that its flower its always facing the sun), its rudimentary

petals, powdery with a light-scooping, moisture-holding, almost monastic attentiveness

required to nurture, develop and enshrine its payload of close-packed, geodesically

arranged seeds of shining jet, lends the plant a more-than-usual protective, almost

maternal quality.

The plant’s relentlessly tall, rather rough-hewn stalk and its hairy, primordial leaves

seem unceasingly dedicated to the focused production and protection of this glistening

seed-bed core at the heart of each flower (called the plant’s “chapter”), its powerful

engine of perpetuity.

What of the sunflower’s look? Is the sunflower’s vigorous roughness and raggedness

the result of its three-metre quest for extraordinary height—in its search for ever

more light and ever more air? Is the plant coarsened by a weariness earned in the

fulfilment of its elaborate botanical program (fecund all the time)? Does a sunflower

ultimately begrudge its own skyscraper growth? Does it inevitably grow leggy and

emptied in the course of carefully generating the florets on its flattened central

receptacle and is it poignantly post-partum in the demanding production of its throng

of shiny black seeds—which are actually small dry fruits, apparently referred to as

“pipes”? Certainly, much is expected of the sunflower.

The sunflower keeps working hours. It is, for example, diurnal. That is to say,

it springs to vigorous botanical life during the day and, exhausted, grows gratefully

somnolent at night. Just like the rest of us.

Lee Ka-sing’s book, Diary of a Sunflower, Book Two, is beautiful and relentless,

attributes not often found together. The book is not a taxonomy, nor a life-cycle, nor

a mere progression of images. Ka-sing describes the book simply as “176 photos in

sequence.” But a sequence is not (or need not be) a narrative, not a life-story.

For me, Diary of a Sunflower is virtuoso work of photo-conceptualism, a protracted

stutter of still lifes that claims meaning—eloquent meaning—from repetition and

accumulation and, in the course of that amassing, repeatedly offer, from photo to photo,

subtle differences, tonal variants, the rustle of sub-events and nudging revelations.

The book is an essay, in the original sense of “essayer,” to try, to attempt.

Like many works of tireless, insinuating anatomization of a subject, nothing much

really seems to happen—at least not quickly or obviously: in the beginning there is

the flower, with its ragged, upstart petals. Sometimes the blossom hangs down, like

a sigh (p.16). Occasionally, the blossom is partly cradled in (and semi-occluded by)

a shrouding, protective leaf (p.52). Some of the photographs (p.58) are All Leaf and

nothing else. Page 144 offers a view of the sunflower in a sort of swoon or dying fall,

whereas, in contrast, p.158 gives the giant blossom the sudden, incoming power of a

fiery asteroid hurtling to earth. By p.220, there are serpentine stems and bulky leaves

weaving together into a bulwark of fortress growth, while suddenly, on p. 252, there a

momentary, inexplicable blackout—in which the mighty flower now hangs down into

the photograph as a silhouette—as if someone had pulled a plug.

But then a suite of brisk, steadfast blossoms follows (p.253ff), ending the book:

all passion spent, all faith restored, the seed-entrenched blooms baked, crisped,

windswept, the sunflower’s essential, eternalizing story.

In William Blake’s famous poem, “Ah! Sun-flower” (from his Songs of Experience,

1794), the rather Christ-like, sacrificial plant is “weary of time” and “countest the

steps of the sun,” its whole wracked being seeking “that sweet golden clime” where

“the traveler’s journey” comes finally to its end and finds fulfilment.

The other great sunflower poem is Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” from 1955.

In Ginsberg’s poem, the sunflower is a wreck: “…corolla of bleary spikes pushed

down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-betoothless

mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire

spiderweb, leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust

root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear, Unholy

battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!....”

This is unforgettable writing, but Ginsberg’s betrayed, industrially-compromised

sunflower remains as remote from Lee Ka-sing’s as Blake’s touchingly martyred plant

is.

The sunflower of Ka-sing’s Diary of a Sunflower is neither protagonist nor victim.

Therein lies its majesty. The plant’s meaning comes in the fullness of time—like

breathing.

Gary Michael Dault

December 30, 2022

Under the management of Ocean and Pounds

Since 2008, INDEXG B&B have served curators, artists,

art-admirers, collectors and professionals from different

cities visiting and working in Toronto.

INDEXG B&B

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MONDAY ARTPOST 0102-2023

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