What's it like at the centre of the AGO?
Hmm. Imagine being coloured, drawn, and placed
in a wooden frame, another hung woman, positioned
just so in the middle of a landscape surrounded by rocks,
lakes, mountains, and trees, MacDonald to your right,
Carmichael to your left. Imagine being forced to look,
to spend every unblinking moment of an 8-day week
staring at a Lawren Harris landscape, a frozen wall
of whiteness, when you know, outside, the glaciers
are melting, the trees are falling, one by one,
and the Beaufort scale has shrugged and turned its
back on September. Now, the winter legends are
sold in the gift shop—T-shirts, handbags, journals, calendars,
coffee cups, board games. Puzzling, isn't it? Makes you want
to laugh, a little, knowing you've been placed here
by kinder hands, to reconcile the past, to challenge
the climate of the centre. I'm a sign of the times,
still, no one knows my name. What's it like?
It's like I'm the number one answer to the question
you haven't considered, the one you never thought
to ask, the one staring you right in the face.
