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Recycled Beach Debris, Vancouver Island
Dimensions: 112 x 86 cm
This piece began with the white painted wood with the cutout in the middle. I found it while jogging on Long Beach during my lunch hour. The idea of a TV hit me immediately and the wood reminded me off an antique the way the paint was flaking off. Reality TV, which I enjoyed watching myself, was at its peak in popularity at the time. I wanted to celebrate the fact that my reality was actually more similar to the picture than what I was watching. I knew immediatley when I saw the blue-green painted wood that it would be the ideal backdrop for the TV. I styled the TV after an old black and white Zenith we had when I was a kid in Ottawa. I traced and cut out the word “Reality” from a scrap of boat fibreglass. I found the glass ball while searching for an-overly bold cougar along the West Coast Trail. In a scene I’ll always remember, Fellow warden Darren Salisbury and I were armed with shotguns as we walked the beaches searching for cougar sign. Over 3 days although we had found no cat, we had collected 30 glass balls between us. We posed for a photo at the base of Carmanah Lighhthouse rifles slung over our shoulder and the collected balls at our feet, we were truly the great glass ball hunters.
The melted rope is fairly common along the beach. I believe it is caused by friction when the rope gets heated on the winch (gurdy?) as the crab fisherman bring in their lines. I made the TV stand because I wanted to place the picture on my porch to hide a apot on my house siding that I had melted while bar-b-q’ing. This piece was first shown at the annual Whalefest art show at Long Beach in 2004.