Kanata Kourier: News & Community, Jun 29 2007

News & Community
St. John's opens Kanata's first labyrinth

ST. JOHN'S ANGLICAN CHURCH
The St. John's labyrinth was donated to the Anglican Parish of March by the Paryas family in memory of their son and brother, Eric Robert Henry Paryas.
It was built behind the new church hall in the summer of 2006 by Abloom Landscape Contractor and designed by Luc Ranger.
The labyrinth is modeled on the design of the Chartres labyrinth which was installed in the floor at Chartres Cathedral, France, in the 12th century. It is 13 metres in diameter and has 11 circuits.
It is constructed of two-tone pavers in buff and charcoal - the original colours at Chartres.
The labyrinth is a simple path within a circle to be walked for meditation. One walks to the centre and then back out. It is about a 500 metres in and out, and takes bout 20 minutes at a slow pace. It is a non-denominational tool for mediation and is open to all at 325 Sandhill Rd. in Briarbrook.

HISTORICAL SPACES
Labyrinths can be made of many materials and there are many examples in the United Kingdom and Europe.
The Chartres labyrinth was "discovered" by the Rev. Canon Lauren Artress of Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco while on a sabbatical leave to France in 1991. It was covered with chairs and was cleared for walking for her party of travelers. Labyrinths are ancient archetypes and the Chartres design was adapted for pilgrimage by medieval cathedrals when travel to the Holy Land was difficult or impossible.
Artress brought the concept back to the United States after consultation with professor of architecture Keith Critchlow, at Magdalen College, Oxford University, concerning its suitability as a tool for meditation.
Two labyrinths were built at Grace Cathedral and the labyrinth movement was launched in the United States.
Many labyrinths have since been built by churches, hospitals, universities and municipalities as centres for peaceful walking and mediation.
The healing properties of the labyrinth are experienced by those who walk in peace.
There is a world wide labyrinth locator on the web, and ours at St. John's will be posted soon.
Ottawa now has a few labyrinths, but St. John's is a first for Kanata.
We hope to use it for outreach and to encourage community groups to use it for various kinds of walks - solstice walks, grief walks, healing walks, simple meditation walks - whatever appeals to your group.
Our labyrinth is wheelchair accessible so we invite retirement homes and our seniors to come and walk. It is already in use by our Sunday School children and by March Academy, which is located at St. John's.
Schools are welcome to arrange a class walk as well. Children love the labyrinth and running or "playing" the labyrinth is a fine way to use it.
We hope to further publicize the St. John's Labyrinth and form a Friends of the Labyrinth group for all interested parties in the community so that we can utilize its full potential.
The St. John's labyrinth was dedicated by Rev. David Clunie on Memorial Sunday, June 24.
A Cibachrome digital labyrinth artwork, commissioned by the Paryas family from New York artist Christopher Rodrigues was also dedicated. Christopher's parents are parishioners at St. John's.
If you or your group has ideas for using the St. John's labyrinth, please contact the church at (613) 582-4747. Phyllis Paryas, Friends of the Labyrinth, may be contacted at pmparyas@hotmail.com. Labyrinth use is free of charge: walk in peace.

Waiting for the Barbarians
curated by David Hunt

RARE PLUS: David Hunt curates Waiting for the Barbarians. This nod to J.M. Coetzee’s novel of the same title features works by Fernando Mastrangelo, Tim Maxwell, Chris Rodrigues, and Nicola Verlato.

In Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, a black and white morality rules. There is a dehumanized other whose swarms of minions, the Orcs, are slain mercilessly with no emotional recompense. In RARE PLUS curator David Hunt’s Waiting for the Barbarians proposes four artists who depict extreme outsiders—from the galactic post-human, to the fantastically tweaked fairy tale. Evinced by the dehumanized Soviets of the Reagan era, or the current Bush regime’s painting of the Taliban as arch-fiendish, the good/evil morality of Jackson’s movie, albeit pragmatic, is far from accurate. The work of these four artists (Fernando Mastrangelo, Tim Maxwell, Chris Rodrigues, Nicola Verlato) exhibits a savagery worthy of the term “barbarian” (via J.M. Coetzee), and yet their works’ humanity plunges them into a very real gray area. For example, Rodrigues’ photo exhibits an otherworldly alien other invading a Magic The Gathering landscape filled with fantastical wanderers. The artist creates a monster as worthy of empathy as any human character, and proposes an emotionally persuasive dynamic via ambiguous imagery (this subtlety contrasts the black/white imagery and fear-mongering that politicians use to manipulate and coerce). It is this palpable gray that questions authority, glorifies self-exploration, and conjures the most meaningful and prolific of practices.

Relentless Proselytizers
curated by David Hunt

Jay Batlle, Ben Beaudoin, Jesse Bercowetz & Matt Bua, Ben Blatt, SunTek Chung, Gina Dawson, Adam Helms, Haavard Homstvedt, Elizabeth Huey, Matthew Day Jackson, and Chris Rodrigues
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BEHOLD the truth in art. Repent your aesthetic transgressions. Stave your misguided visual temptations. The artwork in Relentless Proselytizers dares to make you a believer. The twelve artists gathered here would like to make you a disciple of their worldviews. Their tactics are zealous and at times over the top. They realize that the divide between faith and belief is a sharp and necessarily thin one; not content with an agnostic pose, a tendency toward baroque overcompensation persists. From Jay Batlle's row of credit cards skewered with a neon rod, which draws, overdraws, or overdrafts you into his world of debt-dependency, to Matthew Day Jackson’s Viking burial ship--a sleek nautical metaphor for the interment of one’s youthful obsessions, no curious onlookers will be left behind.

Are you ready to be converted? Brought into the fold? Besides your punctual attendance and rapt attention, the requirements for novitiate status are surprisingly few. You must, however, be willing to share Gina Dawson’s enthusiasm--no, call it infatuation shading into a crush--for John Ritter. The late actor is depicted here by Dawson in a tableau with his father, the Country & Western star (and relentless proselytizer in his own right) Tex Ritter, and his trusty horse, White Flash. They are joined by Dawson herself, who sits on the Three’s Company star’s lap in dreamy-eyed supplication. Instead of Remington’s bronze, Dawson uses a faux marble finish. All the better to neo-classically memorialize a “classic” sitcom and physical comedy genius.

Need more inspiration? Gaze at the allegorical paintings of Haavard Homstvedt, whose generic figures and implied narratives show us that the everyday may be unique, that the simple may be complex, and that meaning can be found in what may at first appear to be the meaningless.

Still not ready to succumb? Perhaps SunTek Chung can be your temporary shepherd. The Korean-American photographer has outfitted himself as a cricket player in a kung-fu ready pose. He stands in front of a Pagoda altar tricked out in a pleasant Laura Ashley print, clutching his bat like a kendo sword. Worlds collide, not least the neo-colonial sport of cricket with the pop-imperialist fascination in all things Hong Kong action. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, American, Indian, and Pakistani: Chung is a nun-chak thumping photographer in high Pentecostal fever.

But alas, do we sense some wavering on your part? Perhaps you’re stuck at the crossroads between Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, nudged out on the shoulder of the road as you try to merge with the righteous rush hour traffic en route to the Rapture. Fear not. Elizabeth Huey’s avenging angels carve a safe path into a parallel dimension that is neither concrete-clad terrestrial nor floating cumulous bluff. In fact, a warm Tudor House overlooking gaseous swamps and roiling brooks awaits you on a steep hill. Mystical electronics provide surveillance. Cobbled together Wurlitzers emit an analog trance. And the signal is about as clear as two styrofoam cups and a piece of string when her argyle-clad guardians of the forest send out an intruder alert. It’s brains over brawn, though, in a world where the only helpful technology is a pigtailed sentry’s painted neuropathway--her illustrated synapse.

But even Huey’s Gothic Valkyries in flowing gowns (and knee-high socks with Manolo sling-backs) may not be enough to protect you from the snake in the grass, a shape-shifting serpent offering up a confusing smorgasbord of identity options. Mod, Punk, Preppie, illmatic Bling-King, or camo-clad embedded human sacrifice--the choice, albeit niche-marketed and product driven--is yours. But why buy the snake oil, Ben Beaudoin seems to ask, when you can have the snake itself? Beaudoin has literalized the menu of identity options by “texture-mapping” them, if you will, onto a curling, slithering abstract form. His interest? Identity blending--wallflowers, the Organization Man, the woman in the crowd, human infantry--and identity as it desperately distinguishes itself from the mainstream: replicant suicide girls doing some soul searching while searching for an actual soul, Indie-Pop nano-bots changing their footwear before the last keyboard blip and cymbal crash signals the end of the party.

Perhaps then, you will follow the lugubrious music in Chris Rodrigues’ video-dirge of a sole cellist and exotic dancer silhouetted against the pixilated sky on a shadowy mountaintop. Forget ceremonial rain dances; here, the choreographed drama spikes upwards until a frenzied climatic finish takes you into the light of the distance beyond.

Conversely, you might end up imagining yourself under the light darkly on Jesse Bercowetz’s & Matt Bua’s ghoulish examination table, aptly subtitled “The worm is the gateway slice to psychosomatic reversals, amputated histories and architectural placeboes--it's easy to get dusted in a shamanless fixer upper.” Their operational theater is the nexus between “D.I.Y. surgery and makeshift body repairs”, and “a ghost on life support of crust and gel”.

Still more visionary apparitions and painted inspirations might be found in Ben Blatt’s phantasmal garden of otherworldly distortions and delights. Hieronymous Bosch meets Baron Munchausen in celestial terrarium-like atmospheres of outer planetary rings--a kaleidoscopic celebration and metamorphic amalgamation of Blatt’s introversions and fanciful fixations that you might wish to explore.

In stark contrast are Adam Helms’ desolate environments sparsely populated by desert rabbits and mercenary soldiers of fortune. Amid the dust and rubble, attenuated figures bend to survey the wreckage, plot their coordinates, and prepare to take a bead on the irradiated beasts lurking behind the nearest windswept mound. They exist in a fictional world of drawings, but one that seems familiar--one with a political past and current conflict, one “populated with empathetic characters and the artifacts of a subcultural pathology”, and one where perhaps beliefs are long defended and ideologies continually promulgated.

JOIN US beginning July 1st for more aesthetic and artistic revelations, with the artists in Relentless Proselytizers guiding the way.
David Hunt.