Roman Erratum

My most recent post on happenings in Barrie has prompted a comment from Will Gorlitz refuting any claim of mine that he once referred to Barrie as ‘the Rome of Ontario’ during a Visiting Artist lecture. And fair play to the man, as a review of my sketchbooks from that time period did eventually reveal (after much thumbing through ideas and sketches that made me cringe) that the comment was not his, but rather that of Alex Sorchentsky. I consider myself humbly corrected, and hereby clear Mr. Gorlitz of any responsibility for such a left-field remark.

So let’s talk about Alex Sorchentsky, a figure so obscure in my understanding of Canadian art that I can’t even confirm that I’ve got the spelling of his surname right (my notes reveal a couple different corrections, none of which ping on the Google radar). Compared to the soundness of thought and technical flair that comes through in my notes on Will Gorlitz’s talk, his visiting artist lecture revealed the sort of idiosyncratic personality that would make such an outlandish claim. His training as a potter and craftsman already places him somewhat outside the box, and his interest in such unfashionable kitsch as visual puns probably hasn’t worked to his advantage as a fine artist. And yet, on a November evening in 2001, he had the testicular fortitude to proudly declare his working home of Barrie ‘the Rome of Ontario’ to a room full of befuddled undergraduates. When pressed, I believe his justification was something to the effect of ‘all roads lead to it’ - which, if by all roads we really just mean Hwy. 400, then power to you. At the end of the day, it was still a ridiculous claim.

And it stayed in my head for the last seven years.

Which is why, cynical sneering aside, this misnomer persists as a positive imaginative tool in my perception of Canadian art. In a move that is as true as it is impossible, Sorchentsky identified Barrie as the geographic centre of Ontario - it is a gesture that lends credence to the existence of art-making in the northern reaches of the province as well as the south in a way that the Art and Cold Cash exhibition had to work overtime to justify. The very perception of a place as quasi-remote as Barrie acting as a cultural hub flies in the face of all conventions surrounding Canadian art-making as it seems to occur along the comfortable margin nestled against the American border, which is probably why the idea is so damn appealing. At the end of the day, it would seem my concluding notes on Alex Sorchentsky’s lecture as being both ‘kick-ass’ and ‘not quite relevant’ still ring true, though i’ll cling to the exact last words on the page: ‘…he sure is cool, though.’

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