On this day in 1945

This week has proven to be something of a time-hungry, blog-gobbling bitch in a way I hadn’t quite anticipated, such that I was growing quite anxious for something to write about today even as I was once again dragging myself down James Street North this evening on yet another round of errands, rather too numb with exhaustion to do much other than stare blankly at the pavement under my feet.

Thankfully, staring at the ground sometimes pays off.

I had already half-walked over this splayed fellow in the entryway of The Print Studio before I realized precisely what it was, much less registered that a full array of chalk-people were scattered the rest of the way along the sidewalk.

A passing sense of familiarity and Facebook have since filled in the blanks cast by these chalk outline figures - they are the result of an impromptu community art moment organized last night by Bryce Kanbara to mark the anniversary of Hiroshima by evoking the shadow traces of bodies burned into buildings by the heat and radiation of the atomic bomb.

Kanbara’s project here on this Hamilton street is also a restaging of his Hiroshima/Siesta in Cienfuegos, Cuba, where he had recently traveled along with other Hamilton artists on an exchange organized by the Red Tree Collective - ReMix will be bringing its Cuban contingent here to Hamilton next month.

As the title implies, a deliberate play between death and ‘just sleeping’ is at work in these outlines, which certainly lack the chilling gravitas of the shadows found in Hiroshima after the bomb. As renderings, they are complete inversions of their source - line rather than shape, white rather than black - and in Hamilton’s urban setting with much of its 1930s architecture intact (for now), they are more like the chalk outlines of some noir-era mass murder etched in clean lines.

A part of me can’t help but wonder if these fallen figures would strike closer to home if they were rendered darker, grittier than they are right now, or whether it is even probable or right to imitate such a horrific phenomenon as drawing in the first place. Perhaps the simple fact of the rain and the footsteps that will wash the chalk away well before the Cubans arrive is statement enough.

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