by Steve Rockwell
I threw away my work from the fall 1970 group exhibition at 567 Queen Street West in Toronto. After ten years or so in apartment storage, it was a quick toss into the bin outside. The nineteen cardboard and paper works, variously touched up with ink and pencil, had been glued onto hand-sawed wood frames. Bundled with twine into roughly a 2 x 3 x 4 foot package made the procedure efficient.
Reading the newspaper while having a cup of coffee in the morning, had been the theme for the work – and then there were the trees on nearby Brandt Street. The trees didn’t immediately fit in with the theme, but perhaps they did. From the daily Toronto Star weather forecast to The Heart of Juliet Jones comic strip, a piece of CBC Radio promotional card featuring graphic of a cup of coffee, to the four trees, all had been sublimated through graphite and ink to paper. All can be traced to experiences of a five-year-old in transition from Espoo, Finland to Gothenburg, Sweden.
Expansive countryside flipped into restrictive, urban hotel confinement, generating a stream sensory material edging on trauma at times. Perhaps it’s another way of saying that things were memorable at that time.
