City fear to humour & we laugh along

Take a city artist & stick it in the backcountry for a week to see what comes.

A video screening from last year's Muskwa Kechika Artists Camp at Donna Kane & Wayne Sawchuk's place in Rolla last weekend revealed one possibility.

By floatplane & packhorse, artists Sally McKay & Von Bark were thrust from Toronto's College Street deep into northeast B.C., along with a number of other artists. Not the everyday transition.

But that's one of the hooks of the now annual camp: shocking artists into a foriegn environment & asking them to relate the experience.

& in this case, McKay & Bark could be cast as confused & scared. Humour, often a by-product of fear, was a main theme in the videos; they were more along the lines of B-science fiction movies & children shows than an Audubon documentary.

McKay's first of two short videos was a spoof on grizzly bear enthusiast & all-round nut Timothy Treadwell, who lived among the bears in Alaska's Katmai National Park for 13 summers.

In the style of Treadwell's raw video footage, McKay trekked through downtown Toronto to the visit the grizzlies at the Toronto Zoo. It was darkly humourous when she reached the bears' pen, where they appeared unhealthy & lethargic.

The point was clear. However, despite his death wish, the "Grizzly Man's" strength was his passion, & McKay was ignorant of that fact.

However, the trip through the concrete forest did succeed in disorientating the viewer, who may have expected something more pastoral, which set up the proper reaction for part two.

Many artists-- like her father, poet Don McKay, for instance, who was on the same trip -- try naively to understand nature (even by claiming they are not). They sit on a rock and stare into a creek, waiting for a revelation (which is incidentally pervading them at all times). But McKay's takes a refreshing short-cut.
Her second video featured a fairy nymph (an actor reminiscent of a SCTV extra) that dances through hyper-morphed camera tricks against a backdrop of Muskwa scenes. Jerky movements & scared facial expressions relay the inner-turmoil the actor faces in nature.

The nymph strides over lakes & through forests to escape a bear. The backcountry is a dreamland. But it was funny & we laughed.

Now, Bark is not a good singer, nor, apparently, a videographer. He is one of those artists that thrives on nonsense, & therein lies his merit because he makes it watchable.

The first, Blair Witch-ish video has Bark tent-bound & humming a song about having six fingers. Then he rolls over and goes to sleep.

The second video features a backdrop of cardboard mountains, which probably wasn't filmed in the Muskwa, & was soundtracked by another song of random lyrics.

Everyone enjoyed the videos -- mostly through laughter. But the artistic merit became secondary to how the two people from from Toronto dealt, through art, with being trapped in nature for a week.

While the camp produced a multitude of work in different mediums, it can on one level be seen as an experiment on how artists from different areas of the country express their natural, northeast B.C. experience.

Bark's videos seem to have no real point, but at the same time it's better than another poem that wrestles the mystery of nature to exhaustion.