Summer has arrived. It is the season of patriotism and I am again reminded how I am two things, Canadian by birth, American by residency. I feel like both and I feel like neither. This is something I think about often, what am I tied to? Where do my loyalties lie? I think the answer is; in the land. My loyalty is to the land I am on and to the region I am in, regardless of which side of the border I find myself on. My Canadian husband was with us at home in the U.S. on Canada day and we shot off American fireworks on my rural property. My daughter has recently obtained her Canadian citizenship so it was her first official Canada day as one of us. That was Monday. Thursday was July 4th and the fireworks were all gone. My daughter made pickled beets and I laid on the couch marveling at her. When my daughter was young she always spent the holiday with her American father so I was generally on my own. It was often just another semi-gray early summer day in the Pacific Northwest. It felt weird that we had no familiar thing to do together and that because of the crazy political climate we are in as Americans currently it's hard to to drop the knives and join our voices in song. Doing so feels so trite, all the quotes about liberty and images of waving flags on social media, not to mention the blue glitter eye shadow and color coordinated outfits. I watched this flag flapping in the breeze on my walk today. I stood under it for awhile and then made this video of it's shadow.
Some things that are inspiring me right now are:
Artist Heidi Gustafson's Almanac of Divination
T'ang Boogie is probably the first "film d'artiste" created by a modern Chinese painter with his own works. In 1973, with the help of film maker Tom Tam, T'ang Haywen gives life to the random paths of ink on paper. Netherlands artist Diana Scherer seen here on IG
