WOLFE ISLAND ART WEEKEND

You guys might remember the name Arnold Swiles as the pseudonym for the schizophrenic illiterate guy I wrote about last year that made his own sex machine out of a pool noodle and a plunger. Last week Swiles and a mutual friend Ben invited me to his cottage for what he called an “Art Weekend” along the frozen Saint Lawrence River. Ben was going to set up a myriad of installations for us to observe, discuss and reflect upon while freezing our nuts off in the middle of an icy Canadian body of water. Of course it didn’t totally work out that way though thanks to Swiles’ misfiring a Drain-O bomb.

Anywhoodle, Ben’s cottage is on Wolfe Island, which is a thirty-minute ferry ride from Kingston, which incidentally houses the nation’s most serious federal penitentiary where all the awful Canadian super-villains live. After getting high on MDMA and rocking out to Elton John’s progrock epic Funeral for a Friend on the ferry ride over (not as gay as it sounds), we rolled up to Ben’s and met about twenty people at this small duck hunting cabin affectionately know as the Duck Club.

Immediately after arriving Swiles started showed me some explosives he had put together. Fireworks, miscellaneous gun powder creations and a Drain-O bomb. The latter wasn’t revealed until a few minutes afterward when it accidentally detonated beside some guy’s face.

Apparently you’re supposed to throw a Drain-O bomb like a grenade but Swiles overstuffed his with so much explosive nectar that the thing essentially blew up in his hand; burning his arm, and spraying hot corrosive chemicals all over the person standing next to him. The victim, who we will call Elijah, came running into the Duck Club screaming. Drunken nineteen year olds tried to flush his eye out with the limited fresh water that was available and I began to immediately regret my decision to “just rough it” and leave my cell phone at home. Ben wasn’t even on the premises yet and everyone seemed too drunk or spooked to call 911. But after about ten minutes of Elijah screaming that his eye was burning and me trying to find a phone, someone pointed out a cordless receiver lying beside one of the bunk beds. I called 911 and they sent an extra ferry with an ambulance on it from Kingston. Keep in mind, I’ve now been at this “party” for about an hour.

I stuck it out until about 4 the next morning, nothing to brag about, but I was a bit knackered from road tripping, beer, and having to deal with a guy who almost lost his sight because of a corrosive IED. I got myself to the nearest bedroom in the icy cottage and managed to kind of get to a half-sleep half-frozen coma stage.

The next morning, after a restless night broken up by a schizophrenic episode when Swiles attempted to spoon me and then began punching the window and cursing his friends at the top of his lungs until Ben’s brother found him and gave him his meds, I woke to find that Ben had already begun setting up the show along the frozen river. It’s not easy to curate an art show in the middle of nowhere so at this point I was ready to forget the violence and nightmare trauma to take in some sculpture art. You can see all of the pieces in this video my friend shot while riding on the back of a snowmobile:

Saint Lawrence Ice from Avery Hunsberger on Vimeo.

My favourite installations were an old man in a speed skating suit hired to stand in the line of artwork and an outdoor Duck Hunt NES station set up at the Duck Club.

All in all it really was pretty good weekend. One cornea got chemically burned, I was shown first hand what night terrors are really about, a few of us got to see some cool art on a frozen lake with wet socks, and we all got day drunk off Canadian beer while going 48 hours without showering. Sure, most art shows don’t involve vision-threatening explosions, but life is a give and take, I guess.

http://saintlawrenceice.tumblr.com/