For reasons hard to explain, I spent several years photographing the cemeteries of Western Canada. When asked why, I have no slick answer: I did not set out to pursue such a study. Nonetheless, I traveled tens of thousands of miles: highways, gravel roads, mud and dirt trails. Fort Assiniboine to Val Marie, Hinton to Dauphin, each year a different route. I shot countless frames of film, wrote reams of journal entries, and jotted marginal notes on county maps. I even wrote a book.

For years I kept those maps and journals in a box in the basement. But events conspired and I recently gained some square footage in the basement ( my partner calls it my mancave ). The maps have been torn and stapled to a carboard wall - the prairies remixed - a giant grid ripped to shreds. Hundreds of churches, cemeteries, and relic settlements are circled. Some margin notes have been preserved. There was plan of sorts. It was fun. I had to find some way to deal with those damn maps. I have an idea what to do with the negatives and slides, too - but that’s for another time.

I have always been fascinated by artist’s books. My mancave is chock full of artifacts ready to morph into more than merely stacks of stuff. But, in the meantime, the marginal notes and journal entries have become poems. In bookish, a digital media collaboration with babel, those poems have been broken into random lines that appear on the facing page of a book-like interface. The adjoining page repeats a database of funerary images. Keyboard score is by my rock’n'roll buddy, Dennis Meneely.

Bookish is an electronic artists’ book. Click on image:

Remixed: torn posters on power pole, 13th Ave, Regina.

See Flickr set

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I almost beat the sun across the sky, but it’s only March – come June you could make the trip and still have sunshine enough to wind down with tea and brandy on the beach in Departure Bay. But you’d have to have great luck to make that happen, because you’d be road-dodging tourists and the ferry’d likely be full.

I left Mom’s place in Edmonton at 6am and arrived at the Horseshoe Bay ferry dock in time to catch the 7pm boat to Vancouver Island. I took several digital images during the trip, through the windshield with a cheap camera, one hand on the steering wheel.

This postcard series is dedicated to my friend David Bergen - the imaginary stamps are scanned portions from illustrated letters that he mailed from Cairo. This is a narrative of sorts.