Aug. 30, 2006 - Issue #567: Anarchist Bookfair
45 Days on the Dog shows that Barc’s got bite
“But then I got fired, and I tried to sue my best friend for embezzlement ... ”
And suddenly “forever” became “until Friday.” Funny how something as simple as a professional disaster involving Brazillian hotel suites, company credit cards, ass-covering cash and a massive transit strike can turn your world around in an eyeblink. Faced with a scene turned nasty after three years in Brooklyn, Barclay made her choice.
“I still had friends, I still had my apartment, I still had my gig booking bands or whatever ... but I liked this dude, and it wasn’t working out, and I was, like, fuck it, you know?
“I had some money, but I also suddenly had all this time,” she continues. “I had no job there and no job in Edmonton. I had nowhere to be at all, ever, for the rest of my life. So I asked myself, ‘What can I do, if I can do anything?’ And all I wanted to do was run around the States and take pictures until the money ran out, so I did.”
Armed with her trusty supa-old-school Pentax K1000, a 45-day Greyhound bus pass and whatever cash money her larcenous chum had left her, she set out on a transcontinental pop-cultural scavenger hunt, her map laid out with the Internet Movie Database rather than tourist guides.
“You can do this search,” she explains, “type in any town and it’ll tell you what movie was filmed there or whatever. Some people want to go to museums and shit; I just want to go where movies were filmed. I’m obsessed with that shit.” From the grubby insides of countless bus stations to the drive-in theatre in Tulsa where scenes from The Outsiders were filmed, through the faces and bodies that link them, Barclay’s lens captures the street-level, the immediate, the here-and-now of the snapshot. Existing light of living-room lamps, streetlights, sunshine, fluorescents ... fast commercial grain and off-the-cuff composition ... often individually unremarkable, the results, as a body, depict her odyssey in terms as vague as everyday vision, as incomplete as barroom travelogues, as dreamlike as waking perception—without being nearly as precious as that sounds (sorry).
An indie scene-zine publisher, talent booker and event promoter in some of her many past lives, Barclay has long been devoted to online connection and networking ... is it weird that she’s shooting mechano-chemically, exhibiting with frames and walls? I guess not:
“I have my photos online,” she says, “And people were saying: ‘You have to do something with these! It’s not enough that you’re just emailing people ‘hey look at my travel photos.’ Everyone wanted me to do something ‘real’ with them.
“I also thought it would be a good way to patch back into the Edmonton thing,” she adds.
Part of that patching is getting more momentum going for Listen Records as a visual venue (“They’re doing things, but they could be doing, you know, more.”), and generally adding her energy to her city’s pool: even the refreshment table for the opening becomes a marketing opportunity for café coworkers who are trying to get a catering business off the ground.
After three years in New York City and a month and half pretty much everywhere else, Edmonton is still the place where Barclay belongs.
“I’m not one of those people,” she says, “who moves back here after Toronto or Vancouver and they’re all like ‘eeewww, Edmonton ... eeewww.’ I know what to expect from Edmonton, and I really like it. Edmonton’s always been my home. V
Sep 1 - 30
45 Days on the Dog
By Sheri Barclay
Listen Records (10629 - 124 Street)
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