2 days 'til Christmas, 48 to opening

We kicked off the longest night of the year at the Lantern Festival at the Roundhouse in Yaletown. Ari was the master of ceremonies in a yellow vest, and Becky and Erik waved red and saffron flags onstage.



It was a magic event with hundreds of people watching fire dancers in the cold and an array of amazing events, including a Whirling Dirvish, and from the Sunshine Coast - Twisted String!

The word of the day is clinquant - glittering with gold or silver, and it's all around us -- everything that illuminates these dark days and nights - all in anticipation of Christmas, just days away.


On the way home from an excellent & fun holiday dinner with crew (Becky wore a dress! and Bri brought her boyfriend!) we passed huge cranes between the skyscrapers glowing with Christmas lights, and glimpsed the Olympic rings in the water, this time green.



At the gulag today The Province's Damien Inwood interviews Gord for an article.




Yesterday Allan May visited Minus 28 degrees, and snapped some photos - the work is so complex & layered, with things I have never seen before in the structure of the ice. Yesterday Gord said, "Every once in a while, I'm thrilled." It's part of his usual creativity see-saw, a combo of haunting doubt, necessary confidence and healthy skepticism.


Phase Five deliverables were due yesterday; this morning the lighting arrived on the coast and Allan May got the B-1 form stamped by the engineer for the wall itself. After the holiday, it's all systems go.



Last night I heard the hotel will most likely host a show of the Paintings Below Zero Turin installation during January and February for their 'Westin Unwind'. More on this later.



These short days melt into darkness so quickly.

Muscular

The ski goggles were a hit, a bucket of paint spilled and froze instantly and it was, by all accounts: “the hardest day”, the lifting, pouring, carrying buckets full of paint and water, chopping, sawing. And for Gord, making decisions. No more t-bars, for instance.


“The scale has been decided, the colors, the forms, but we don’t know what the final situation will be, exactly. Right now it’s exciting to be in the moment. The possibilities are open for us.”


“This is where it all comes together instinctively; it’s like stick-handling, you trust the moment, and go with your instincts. If you were a control freak, you would fail. The environment has its own measure of control; you just can’t have a pre-determined concept. You have to adapt to the qualities you find.


“With brittle ice, you get really interesting breaks; now we’re layering it; it’s somehow more muscular - and the separation of colors is more pronounced.”


“Gord doesn’t like pickles, unless it’s in a tuna sandwich,” Becky informs us with a smile, “I found out yesterday."


"The goggles are pink! Erik got the only pair of gray goggles, I guess he’s the ‘saw man’ so he deserves more manly-coloured glasses. I’ll get over it; now I’m embracing the pink." Becky is the only rookie crew member among us today, and I ask her impressions.


"Riding my bike through Vancouver, it seems tropical, it’s easy after working on Ice Gate,” she says.


“I knew I’d be cold, but I was open to whatever it required. It’s very physical; it’s hard, heavy work, but I’m toughing up,” she says, flexing a bicep. “It’s gender-equalizing.”


On the home front, Allan May’s crew has installed the first bank of lights and the Kingspan insulation on the back of the wall.



He begins rebuilding the wall on the site at Richmond City Hall on January 7th.


Check out the O Zone website! http://www.richmondozone.com/programming/element/ice_gate/


50 days until we open.

How cold is cold?

Tuesday, the thing was solved. “It was a good day,” Gord said, upbeat. “As if everyone knew exactly what to do – we were a team.” And essentially, the ice set well. On the way home, everyone fell asleep in the car.








That night we went to see Musica Intima, in a show called Noel at the West Vancouver United Church.
Twelve performers with gorgeous voices singing ancient melodies and carols from different locations across the world. Poetry in voice. We closed our eyes in the warm church and let the melodies float over us.


It was absolutely refreshing to sit in the same room as an ephemeral art form and just be with it.


Then yesterday, Gord came back, exhausted, yet on edge. His eyeballs were hurting from the cold. We went out – he seemed driven to get to the store before it closed, resolutely determined to get some goggles for the next day’s work. How many different ways can you say it’s cold? It’s really cold, It’s super cold. Scary cold. How long can you work in minus 28 degrees? With fan-induced wind chill? So we stocked up on goggles – who knows how long it takes an eyeball to freeze?


And, unlike the one-day reprieve on Tuesday, yesterday the ice was brittle. 70 per cent broke when they pried it from the trays.


“On the first day I could be in that space without a hat. Yesterday, it was impossible.”

I consoled the crew that we’re still ahead of the game. For Turin, the other winter Olympics, it wasn’t until January 5th that we had ice. And Gord got reassurances from Scott that they would concentrate the cold at the back of the building, not in the studio. “They’ve been helpful in terms of everything,” he says. “They made a ballet of carrying the plates on those forklifts, with two of those things backing up and moving forward. I had to stop and watch.”


Becky brings Gord a sandwich and they spend the time it takes to eat the sandwich in the warm room before heading back to the cold studio. Jaz took pictures yesterday – they reminded me of the inside of the church at Fenestrelle, before they figured out how to get ice from bubbly water.




This morning, Gord drew the solution he free-associated yesterday: a different way to cut the ice prior to removing it from the tray.


We discussed the benefits of petting the cat for one minute, how the cold studio warehouse is Not a church! And how Sleep Won. Maybe we’ll see Becky tomorrow at the best ever place for coffee on the west coast of Canada.

It's in the water

Countdown update: 12 days to Christmas, 60 days til the opening of the Olympics, as round tiny snow balls flurry past us.


World leaders meet in tension in Copenhagen, and a blizzard is expected to blanket the lower mainland for tomorrow. We are up at 5 for the first ferry into Vancouver. Early dawn stretches into darkness past 7:30. All weather stations predicting 10 centimetres of snow Monday afternoon and freezing rain on Tuesday for the rush hour drive home.The globe seems to be cooling on the West Coast. I say Let it Snow!


That was yesterday. A dusting of snow - then, nothing but rain since.

“Lots of things were happening today,” Gord reports at the end of Monday's work, “some of which were interesting, some of which were not. The process can be humbling; you’re at the mercy of unknown elements. I have to remind myself to be patient.” The ice isn’t coming out of the plastic trays cleanly; it’s sticking in certain areas. “I’ve never seen it before,” he said.

“It’s a lot colder in there than the other location ( in Chicago); there are technical differences. We did some tests on Thursday last week. Friday we poured a whole batch; only half were usable.”

At Artigiano, the day's work is laid out. Erik: “We ran into a few bumps; it’s really really cold in that space. We’re in the experimental stage, given the circumstances.”


“We know a lot about the variables that are at play,” Gord says. “the water on the site is unique to us; it’s mineral content; whatever is in it . That and the kind of freezing. This place uses air circulation to freeze, unlike Chicago." In Fenestrelle the water came down the mountain in streams, was very oxygen-rich, so it bubbled. Initially that slowed them down. (See http://paintingsbelowzero.blogspot.com/2006/01/we-have-ice-sitting-onstage-in-chiesa.html)


“It’s Improv, " I suggest. "Improv/Science,” Erik counters. It's the creative process, I think, confident in Gord's determination, the same he uses to excel in tennis, in hockey, in squash. Observe, be patient and disciplined. Because of intense cold, the plastic trays are super frozen when the liquid is poured, so that early liquid freezes too quickly. When the second layer is poured on top, it freezes more slowly. Both ices are different in structure and don’t adhere to each other effectively.

“You have to discover how to work with water – you might heat it before the pour to slow down the freezing. Or make sure the entire pour is done at the same time, so everything freezes uniformly.” Put the metal plates on the floor, so the freezing happens both from the air and from the plates. Put trays on pallets to see how that would change the consistency of the ice. It’s as unpredictable as the weather.

I sent them off to the gulag, this morning, all of them hopeful.



“We’ll see the results today.”

Below zero studio warehouse

“You don’t want to know,” Gord said last night over supper.


Jaz and I sat across from Erik and Gord at a corner table in a family-style Mexican restaurant on Denman. Lights of every color were strewn around in homage to the season; the place was jammed. Minus something-or-other degrees outside and we had begun to thaw.


We were asking about the safety tour the crew experienced the first day at the cold storage warehouse in Richmond.


But Erik and I pressed and the details came out: the place was spic and span clean, really bright and somehow colder than The Fulton in Chicago. With a breeze that sends chills to the bones faster. The smell – not so pungent. They do fish here, and the building doesn’t have the history.


“I’ve seen these places, I know what they’re about,” Jaz had said, taking inventory of his remembered experience.


These warehouse facilities –where foods are temporarily stored as they travel from harvest to truck to warehouse to supermarket– are part of all our lives, but we don’t see them, or even consider them. We were talking about the danger of this particular place. Jaz noted that the fork lifts, those speedy, turn-on-a-dime vehicles carrying thousands of pounds of stuff – which suddenly materialize around a corner -- are bigger here than at The Fulton. But they're just as fast.



“Don’t for one second think I can see you,” the driver of one had said to Gord, after whipping around him with a heavy stack of boxes towering above them both. “Think like a mouse,” he said, “mice are almost never in the center of the room, they wander exclusively on the periphery.”

But the worst was the caveat, “If you smell ammonia, get the hell out of there - fast. It will suck your body of oxygen and you’ll fall to the floor.”



“What does ammonia smell like?” Jaz asked. I imagined the alarm going off – as it did only twice in the past 30 years in that space. Wondered how quickly and how much ammonia it takes to drop someone to the floor, and once down, do they ever get up?


For your own safety, you’re always anywhere with a buddy.


You wear neon yellow and orange outfits. I suggested bringing your cell phone, in case you get shut into a space but they freeze into uselessness within a few moments.


On the ferry we had talked to a friend, caring for her 90-something year old mother. “It’s a beautiful day,” her mother had said, looking out the window at the snow-capped mountains from her hospital room in Vancouver. “That’s Switzerland.”

“We’re all subject to this, “ she had said, “no one gets out alive.”

That and the newspaper articles about deaths by drunk drivers needled into my sense of holiday euphoria and the excitement of beginning this new endeavour.

I felt like a child again, waking from a nightmare, or understanding for the first time what the phrase "putting the dog to sleep" meant. Or that dark sense of luckiness and dread - when you step into an intersection and the car whizzing past doesn't quite hit you. I looked into the faces of these men, whom I love, taking inventory of my attachments. Trying to understand how we got here, and what we’re doing.

The Globe & Mail photographer came today and Gord laments that we have nothing to show yet.

Photos by Jaz Halloran.