Selling Cotton Candy

Photographer/Artist Kelly Wood

A few days ago I ran into a prominent Vancouver curator. He was all smiles. My relationship with many of the city’s art circle curators is a smiling one with the exception to one whose gallery is on South Granville and displays the works of two of my friends. This curator looks through me as if I were Claude Rains in the Invisible Man. If I am ever introduced to this curator, and I have many times, the treatment is as I we had never met before. The smiling curators look at me as if I were on the street selling pink cotton candy.

I wrote about this sort of thing here but of late as I plan on a new artistic project after so many years of not exhibiting in a gallery It has come back. Luckily I need not look for a gallery as doors would shut in my face. There is no market for pink cotton candy these days. I need not look for a gallery because I can display my forthcoming project here. It will be fun, I will not have to sell anything (nobody really did buy) nor will I have to spend tons of money on invitations, matting and framing. But this more pleasant turn of events does not mean that I do not question the mystery of the smiling but perhaps disdainful curators.

Some time ago I knew a local photographer who had come from abroad and had thrown a party to the advertising agency honchos in a beautiful studio full of exotic German and Swiss large format cameras. This photographer was really good. Yet the phone never rang and the studio had to close. I ran into the photographer one day and the bitterness in the voice was palpable. For an artist, a presuming artist, and even for this hack writing here, bitterness is the kiss of death to get work. Those that hand it out notice it right away. The key to all of this is that the world does not owe me anything even if I am good or think I am good.

Paul Wong video artist

There might be some comfort that when I finally leave Vancouver in that inevitable one-way-journey those who inspect my files will come to the realization that there is much more than pink cotton candy. I hope that my daughters and granddaughters will profit from those files but I have instructed them (and put it as a codicil in my will) that if some hovering buzzard offers to take over the photographs, negatives and slides for an archive in a selfless "effort to keep my memory alive", that they place the files outside and splash them with gasoline and set them alight. Will they smell of burning sugar? I doubt that!