So, you may recall the Portage Ave series I was doing. That's now becoming an animation, with about 600 images facing east, and 600 west. Two animations, I guess.
My newest project is West Broadway, east and west. These shots are taken a 15-second walk down my back stairs and across a parking lot. I'm taking 10-12 shots in each direction, every day that I'm able to, so I have about 200 images for each direction already.
As you non-peggers will see (or ex-pat Peggers), it's been raining a LOT here lately.
14 comments:
I like the rainy evening pics in both directions the best.
What a contrast to the street scenes here. Ony pretty much any given hour of the day it is a busy flow of people in every direction. These pictures by comparison to what I see in Ulsan, make Winnipeg look lonely, isolated and banal.
lonely and isolated maybe but I'd hardly say Winnipeg is banal.
heh. no, no... it's just my pictures that make it *look* banal.
I've been out in some busy flows of people lately.... kinda makes me miss lonely, banal Winnipeg.
I guess another way to describe it would be cozy, quaint or intimate.
Or barren. Or a city built for cars.
Banality and sentimentality.
If banal is void of feeling(this is me without a dictionary, projecting my own definition), then what would be its opposite? Maybe cliche? Something dripping with sentiment?
help me out here people!
well, there' a lot of sentiment in these works, for sure.
i like the "barren" idea of a city built for cars. without meaning to, these projects have become endless images of sky and cars.
banal: synonym - trivial
I guess that could summarize Winnipeg pretty well: 'nothing to see here, move on'. A lot of people feel that way about the Prairies in general, and I think it takes living there a while (sometimes decades!) to truly appreciate them. They aren't in-your-face spectacular like BC, or obviously pleasing like a tropical beach, but that doesn't mean they don't have their awe-inspiring side, you just have to take the time to find it.
ba·nal (bə-nāl', bā'nəl, bə-näl') Pronunciation Key
adj. Drearily commonplace and often predictable; trite: "Blunt language cannot hide a banal conception" (James Wolcott).
I just meant commonplace originally, like everyday.
So I guess 'unique' would be its antonym. And 'cliche' might be a synonym.
Speaking of banal, Bill Pura has a show going on at the Ken Segal gallery, lots of banal landscapes. yawn. so commonplace. me likes.
Ya, I didn't think of banal as an insult. I learned the word when studying realism at school when I found Richard Estes. Check out his banality, it's awesome/boring =).
http://www.wikipov.org/attachments/PhotoRealism/estes_paris_street_scene-1.jpg
wowowo. is that a painting? that's not commonplace, that's formidably intricate and beautiful.
That it's a street scene without people and a lot of straight lines, does that make it commonplace?
I'm sure this estes guy has a lot of examples of banality, but I don't know about this one. But hey, what do I know.
When I think of banality I think of that hotdog painting by Pura.
But arguably, that's not banal either, that was a sweetly painted hotdog. I really relish that painting.(boooo!)
mmmm, relish, I love relish.
I think the SUBJECT is banal, but the paintings are spectacular. This is one of the functions of art, to show how amazing/holy something is, even that which we see everyday. When someome goes through the trouble of building this image with little brushes and goopy pigments it really makes us reconsider it. If you walked by this or a similar scene (as I am sure you have) you may not stop and admire it's beauty and say "wow, look at that window and wall, that's awesome". It is the artists' painstaking efforts that make us take that second, and all important look at the things we may otherwise take for granted.
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