Left Stage, Exit Right
Free from Artifice. XLife!
Birds of a Feather Art Project
Strong Female‑Shaped Italian Coffee Pots
The Feminine Strengths in Faith, Democracy, and Nature
XLife
XLife Continued
 | ||||
Life is short doing what others say we can do, when we already know in our hearts what we can do. Artist Statement — Spending my days inside John Will’s Born in the UFO exhibition on the 3rd floor of the Art Gallery of Alberta, I found myself responding in the only way that feels honest: through doodle‑notes, fragments, and the restless alphabet that kept showing up in every other doodle. Birds of a Feather — the social‑art project I’m building in Book Three — is rooted in the same terrain John Will may have ventured into. Faith, democracy, nature, and the strange signals that flicker between them. My sketches often featured the alphabet, A to Z, scattered or boxed or crossed out. For me, the alphabet is the visual shape of distraction — the monkey brain, the static, the noise that fills the mind before meaning arrives. It’s also a nod to William S. Burroughs’ idea that language is a virus: something that infects, replicates, mutates, and spreads through culture. In my doodles, the alphabet becomes both the symptom and the cure — the viral code and the antidote. Working inside Will’s exhibition, I felt how his humour, his irreverence, and his UFO‑logic open a space where the ordinary becomes strange and the strange becomes ordinary. My sketchbook responded in kind to John Will's exhibition warning "Some Truth, More Lies, All Legend" followed with arrows, spirals, exits, and stages — a kind of internal theatre mapping how ideas move through me. These doodles are not illustrations; they’re field notes. They’re how I track the collisions between the world around me and the world inside me. Birds of a Feather continues in that spirit. It’s a manifesto built from moments — overheard conversations, public rituals, faith symbols, democratic tensions, and the natural world that frames it all. The doodles I made today are part of that ongoing record: a way of catching the viral language after it overtook me, and turning it into something playful, reflective, and alive. This is social art in motion — a practice of transforming the distractions into truthful meaning.
