Lisa MacLean Artist

I had been musing about moving my mannequins around the city and photographing them, and today, being a beautiful sunny day (and who knows how many more we`ll have), was the day. First, though, I had to take my camera to the park down the street to photograph the vast white mounds of soap suds someone had generated in the fountain there, so large that they looked like icebergs swaying gently in the breeze. After snapping a few pics, I zoomed down to Stanley Park and carried my green plastic garbage bag of heads and painted sticks and my small white plastic bag of dolls down to Third Beach.

I had planned to set them up in the midst of the many small inukshuk stone sculptures that I had seen there on the weekend but when I got there, those were all gone, either knocked down by the waves or by some passerby. Instead, I pushed the sticks into the sand and photographed the heads and dolls against the backdrop of Georgia Strait and the freighters tied up there.  I enjoyed their bright colours against the deep blue of the morning sky.

My next stop was the area between Second and Third Beaches where Mr Stone Master usually has all his large inukshuk totems; here, too, although there had been many on the weekend, they were all gone except one. I arranged the painted heads and dolls in a configuration next to the stone sculpture and documented them. As I was doing this, several people riding bikes stopped to see what I was doing, apparently enjoying the vibrancy of the painted heads, calling them “Whacked“. Next stop on the head tour was English Bay, where they were arranged in a line along a low stone wall bounding the flower beds and in and around a large driftwood stump, much to the delight of local homeless folks gathered on the benches there.

The final stop on the head tour was Granville Island, where I set them up on a large metal sculpture, a metal staircase and in the Creekhouse pond. Here a passerby asked me what I`d done with the bodies and we both started cackling. Back at the ranch, I saw the Davie Duck Whisperer  in the park sans duck but with a cockatiel on her right shoulder. Just another day in the neighbourhood …

See a few pictures here.

“Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking. It bears its end in itself and unfolds it – as Hegel already saw – with ruse. In the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.” (Walter Benjamin)

The constellation: a symbol of the relationship which emerges when the historian places a number of apparently unrelated historical events in significant conjuncture. The constellation “links past events among themselves, or else links past to present; its formation stimulates a flash of recognition, a quantum leap in historical understanding.”

(http://www.wbenjamin.org/passageways.html)

20th century German critic and writer Walter Benjamin understands history as a constellation of events rather than a linear progress through unidirectional, homeostatic time. I don’t presume to think that what I’m doing represents a “quantum leap in historical understanding” … but I am exploring Benjamin’s idea of the constellation in this series of work.

“History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of humanity’s power in the world.” (Heraclitus)

This is another photographic project on which I’m currently working:

See the rest on this page.

Downtown Eastside Vancouver – see a few pictures here.

Some years ago, I acquired some mannequin heads from the University at which I teach; it has a hairdressing program and these are training models.  They have been in hiding for a while and just recently, while cleaning out the storage locker, I remembered them. I decided to amuse myself by arranging the heads on top of driftwood sticks I obtained from the beach beneath the Lion’s Gate Bridge on the Burrard Reserve and painted in various colours.

See more here.