Landon MacKenzie Interview
Excerpt Four
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And feeling like in all Saskatchewan things I really hadn’t dealt with winter and snow and Tim Long had shown me a really interesting quote by Sheldon Engliss (**phonetic) …
(a male interjects, but it’s too hard to understanding)
Yes, Engliss?
Male speaker:
Sheldon Williams.
Williams? As I, I just dropped in on Tim and he had it on the desk and he said oh I’ll Xerox this for you, you’ll just love this. It was a little, tiny paragraph about people who were lost when the telegraph was built, finding their way in the snow storms by these first sort of markers on the prairie of, of, of uhmmm a marker, a human marker that you know if you stayed, stood, you got to the markers you would get to Humboldt or you, you’d get to Fort Pitt or you’d get wherever you were on that that continuum. The telegraph trail changes quite quickly I, I wish I had the dates in front of me. I think it’s, is it 1771 the first is? It’s 1774 there’s another one and, and so the idea that you would do them then you’d erase them.
But I really remember the night that I sabotaged the whole painting by bringing in these storms. I had, I had polka dot storms and snow flying all over. I, I think my early training as a conceptual artist that Nescam (**phonetic) had, had this thing if you just, if you think of work as a performance and yet there’s nobody really there except Al if he popped in or Rene or somebody, right? And I went home and I was in total tears and I just said I just fucked up this, I just ruined this painting that I worked on for months and months and months. You know and oh honey don’t worry it. And I, I constantly done that self, that to me, myself where my clever side is kind of proceeding with what I know and this other side of me sabotages what I know. And then I’m left with how to find a new solution that I don’t previously understand.
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