Surreal Stick

The above picture is giving me flashbacks of how I felt after the annual family dinner yesterday... but I digress.

The Thames Art Gallery is having its annual Winter ARTcrawl on January 15, 2011 starting at 6pm. Once again, I have been entrusted to create the ceremonial baton that leads the masses down King Street from ARTspace to the William Street Cafe to the Thames Art Gallery. The theme this year is the Surreal- we are celebrating the life and times of Yves Tanguy, who died on January 15, 1955. On the right side of this page somewhere is a picture my last baton, the Croc Stick, that led the summer ARTcrawl down King Street in a New Orleans Funeral procession.

So now I need to make a surreal baton. And I'm all set. I have time over Christmas vacation. I have a pole. I have lots of plastic fruit. I have a toy train. I have a clock. Like most people, I equate surrealism with Salvador Dali, so I can't get the thought out of my head that I need to find a blowtorch and melt the clock.

At this point, you should scream. While it is true that I am a wicked gunslinger with glue bottles, puttin' a torch in my hand would require dexterity I do not possess at the moment and would put the Chatham-Kent Fire Department on high alert. It is frustrating when, as an artist, you realize that your super cool idea requires skills or equipment that you don't have. I may have to enlist the help of a friend or neighbour who won't keep asking me, "are you SURE you want me to do this?" (On that note, I'm still afraid to ask the building supervisor at work to run a Barbie doll through the circular saw so that she's in slices. People get reputations for things like that. And people talk- oh yes, they truly do. Mind you, with a sliced Barbie in a shadowbox, people would stop asking me why I put bird skulls on Barbie bodies. Actually, no they wouldn't.)

This Christmas, I'll try to make art responsibly. I will make a surreal baton that will shake the very foundations of the art world, just by slinging glue bottles. If I haven't gotten frustrated, taken matters into my own hands, found a blowtorch, and melted my own face off in the making of this surreal baton, I'll post a photo. Surreally.