“Orange Alert, Flying the Lake Erie Border Line”
Comments & observations from the Lake Erie north shore.
“In 2005, Carter found himself waking up in the hamlet of Wainfleet, on the north shore of Lake Erie. Outside his front door, Carter is surrounded by seasonal Americans, his new part time neighbours, who own most of the Lake Erie shoreline. From his backdoor, the American coastline looms out of the Lake Erie waters, a constant reminder, in your face. America! Too damn close!”
In this exhibition of recent work, exhibited at the Carnegie Gallery Dundas, I paid homage to Kurt Schwitters , the artist that inspired me to create visual art. Using oils & found material particularly from the local beaches I constructed paintings that reflected the world & the environment I was immersed in. What a change to move to the flatness of south Niagara and Lake Erie from the Dundas, the escarpment & Cootes Paradise and from living urban to living rural.
There are two parts to this exhibition, “Beach People” & “Too Damn Close….I Can See America From My Backdoor”. “Beach People” about the ways & means of Americans in Canada for the summer and ‘summer’ people in general. I could see the southern teir of New York state from my studio back door even though I was across the street from the beach but I could see between 2 cottages. Daily you could watch the fighter jets fly the Lake Erie border line to make sure we weren’t smuggling terrorists across the lake, who know what other survellance of the Canadian shore line was going on. Then there was the ever tightening of the border with the Yanks.
Cultural Debris 