For the 2025-26 art residency offered by the CACVS, we had to submit a proposal based on the theme "Time and the Horizon".
PREPARING OUR SUBMISSION:
Monica and I felt it would be enlightening and stimulating to experience a residency together. We visited the exhibition space at the CACVS to see what might be possible there. As a complement to our installation, we also planned to exhibit work on the building's entrance gallery walls, which meant producing a lot of artwork.
I went over to Monica's house to brainstorm. After much discussion and a short walk home with my head reeling from possibilities, I found myself marching to a mantra: "The Hurricane of Time." I called her as soon as I got home and said, "What do you think of *The Hurricane of Time* as a title for our project?" She agreed, so we wrote up a proposal describing how we envisioned our roaring, nebulous creation.
Time can be cyclical, linear, spiralling, or fragmented, an endless accordion that stretches, contracts, and folds back onto itself. The horizon, where the sky meets the earth, becomes both a literal and metaphorical marker of time's passage, shifting with light, seasons, weather, and movement.
By exploring the intertwined themes of time and the horizon through a large-scale immersive installation, we aimed to create a simulated hurricane, not as a destructive force but as a storm of thought, emotion, and perception. By drawing the spiral form of a hurricane into physical space, we hoped to capture the sensation of being inside time's turbulence, a visual and spatial metaphor for collective memory, shifting perspectives, and the momentum of change.
We proposed making use of the large ground-level windows to connect the installation with the external horizon, itself in constant flux throughout the day and night. Our material palette involved raw and humble materials: canvas, cardboard, fishing line, papier mâché, mirrors, paint, and found objects.
For the community engagement component, we planned to host a workshop to create objects that would be incorporated into the hurricane's spiral structure. In this way, the installation would represent time and horizon through a collective storm of perceptions.
THE PROCESS:
The first thing we did was bring over a slew of materials including cardboard boxes, paper, wood glue, duct tape, glue guns, and more. Whatever junk we had lying around our respective studios (most artists suffer from hoarding tendencies), we hauled over to the CACVS space.
The first thing we wanted to tackle was the eye of the hurricane. It seemed like a logical starting point. We blew up a large balloon and covered it with layers of string and papier mâché.
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| The Big Balloon |
Strangely, we were still working on the eye near the end of our residency. It turned into a major project in its own right.
As we worked, we discussed world events, the environment, noise and exhaust pollution (a great deal of vehicle traffic zoomed past the windows of the space). We talked about time, how everything in life is connected, how time used to be measured, and how we measure it today. The project kept us reflecting on humankind's complicated existence and, when we weren't working at the CACVS, we continued working from home alongside our other art projects.
Artists don't usually like to watch paint or glue dry, so in order to finish on time, we had to work on many elements simultaneously. Monica created a beautiful exotic fish inspired by her frequent summers in New Brunswick and a clock based on one originally made by her great-grandfather. I went in a different direction and created a bird, a wonky ostrich-like fowl that started out modest in size but grew to life-sized proportions over the course of the residency.
The birth of Monica's fish (left ) and my bird (right).
Cardboard, masking tape, toilet paper and paper towel rolls, and papier mâché were our basic building materials. We documented our entire eight-week process with photos and notes. I have far too many images to share here, but below are a few that reveal our creative process.
THE WORKSHOP:
At one point, we had to clean up the space (a huge job) in preparation for a community engagement workshop. We had participants create oversized pocket watches, as though they belonged to giants, once again using modest materials and discarded jewellery.
Monica and I made a couple of samples to show participants. Everyone had a Polaroid photo taken with their finished watch, and the watches themselves were incorporated into the final hurricane.
I'm not great when it comes to heights, so Monica performed her circus act and hung the entire installation.
I installed photos and information about our process in the hallway.
Monica prepared displays for the opposing gallery wall showing the materials used to create our hurricane. We worked right up to the wire before the unveiling.
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| What we used for our project |
Photos of the finished installation will be shown in Part 3.
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