When I was your LGBT Executive in Toronto-Danforth between 2004-2008, it was a very transformational time for me. Through working with you and being inspired by you, I learned that a person has power. Like you have shown us by your positive lifestyle, it only takes one individual to reach out to another to start a chain reaction of good in a world gone so wrong. You were and will continue to be an example of hope for a truly human society.

With love to You, Olivia, family, and friends.

Scott, Teacher (Thames Valley District School Board)
LGBT Executive (2004-2008), Toronto-Danforth NDP

(1) Be honest with your feelings and be willing to say “no” to forces that are not in your best interest.

(2) Tell them directly, intellectually and honestly.

(3) Repel those forces from your life.

Tweener - Just Men Berlin - September 2010

TWEENER

By Scott McEwan

The body of work presented in this exhibition is spawned from pro wrestling culture, sexual orientation, identity, social connections made through the internet, and lived experience.

Pro wrestling is an athletic, performative, and ritualistic act.  It is a key component of my life orientation because of the unique social spaces, culture and a community it offers.  One of the most intriguing aspects of this lifestyle is the language it possesses.  Pro Wrestling Speak is derived from English carnival culture of the 1800’s.  Casual words in English have been appropriated and given new meaning.  It is not unlike codes of secret security or secret societies.  The only difference is that pro wrestling’s secrets are very much in the public domain.  It is in this language that I find inspiration for my Neo Psychedelic paintings.  The tension between words in Wrestle Speak and English are the catalyst for every work.

Within pro wrestling there are four major types of characters.  The Jobber (the perpetual loser), the Heel (the rule breaking villain), the Face (the super hero), and the Tweener (the wrestler of ambiguity).  In today’s pro wrestling its mostly a juxtaposition of Heel vs Face.  Good versus evil.  I miss the days when Jobbers and Tweeners were more prominent.  The duality of Face and Heel seems, to me, another easy fit in this world of the bipolar schism.  Where individuals are relegated by choice and social manipulations into extreme dualities such as Coke or Pepsi, left or right, top or bottom, happy or sad,  and Mac or PC.  These dualities are imposed by a rigid global power structure and finds its way into many aspects of our lives.  Even pro wrestling is not immune.  It is for this reason that I based the exhibit around the concept of the Tweener (the ambiguous wrestler). It is in this character that I find an acknowledgment of the real world.  The one where living and non-living things are connected through infinite set of relationships.  A world of possibility as opposed to terminal options disguised as complex choices.

Conceptually this interconnectedness is found in the images appropriated from wrestling magazines and those sent to me randomly by friends on social networking sites. In these paintings you will find images of wrestlers, masks, and gear juxtaposed with cartoon characters, flowers, nuclear reactors, and other random images.  These images are woven together in a visual webbing of definitive contours and oozing ink outlines  This morphing lacework of imagery is the result of an 8 step structured process.  The complexity of the aesthetic is created through my own rigidity and obsessive behaviour.  Two opposite words from Wrestle Speak act as book ends or brackets between the connected imagery.  The outcome is a fine line between representation and abstraction.  Here in the connected and fluid imagery is where I hope the viewer can find the Tweener in my work.

For the past 6 months I’ve been busy with art, work, wrestling and of course sharing with my partner Tom.  However, during this time, I’ve also been experiencing a paradigm shift in my thinking about realities and power relationships at work in the world.  Part of this is a re-evaluation has come with the passage of time, but for the most part I think it has come from external forces and profound sense of feeling “duped” by geopolitical structures.

As a teacher, I find the pronouncement “think of the children” when it is used for political agendas and corporate marketing a vile practice.  Children are often used as pawns in adult misadventures as opposed to being nurtured and given the space to be self-realized.   With that said, this entry is for the children I work with.  For those who know me well, I am a positive person by nature  believing in possibility, the value of ideas and continuous potential for growth in all people.  When I work with children and get to know them on a personal level I find myself  contemplating what their future holds.  Increasingly, when I try to picture this in my mind’s eye, I see more and more limitations.  At one time I could see a clearer future for their generation and everyone else for that matter.  Now, the future seems questionable.  I’m simply being honest with how I feel.

During the last four years of my Toronto life, I was actively involved in politics within the community of Riverdale/Leslieville where I was the LGBT executive on the riding association for Toronto-Danforth NDP.   In working with Jack Layton, MPPs Marilyn Churley and Peter Tabuns,  and City Councilor Paula Fletcher, I was introduced to the complexity, formality and oddities of political culture.  For me being a New Democrat wasn’t about simply belonging to a political catergory, but rather it was about resisting the Canadian political duopoly which in my opinion isn’t really much better than a monopoly.  As Tommy Douglas once reminded us “we are mice governed by black cats and white cats”.  Of course, as the story goes, cats do what is best for cats.  This is how true power creates the world of the divide.  Where people are turned in on each other and there productive energies are used like a ping pong ball in a perpetual political game of table tennis.    Just stand back and observe.  The structure that controls political culture is absurd, destabilizing, and it doesn’t produce effective results like it should.  Even as a NDPer (a political party with the potential for creating a national transformation) I am becoming more skeptical about how governance operates.  Even if an NDP Government were to be elected, would they be taken to the woodshed and told what to do and how things really are done in  the globalist scheme of things?   As a politico, I don’t even want to vote anymore.  “Why feed the monster?” I often say to myself.  As an aside, I wonder how a truth seeker like NDP M.P.  Libby Davies feels about this deep down inside.

In the 1970’s I grew up being exposed, through popular culture, to a world that I’d describe as a New Futurism  (not to be mistaken for the Italian art movement of the early 20^th century). In this depiction of the 21^st century, people of diverse opinion, life interests, and identities thrived in a cooperative fashion while holding onto their distinct qualities and the FREEDOM OF THOUGHT.  This new century never appeared.  Instead we live in the world of the Schism. Where communities are intentionally divided, manipulated and controlled.  It’s  the power of the pyramid, where the few on top own everything and go to great lengths (often deadly) to steer the population in a direction that is best for them.  Secretaries, Prime Ministers, Presidents and Chancellors may be elected and selected, but the world appears to be constantly pushed into a precarious direction on so many fronts.  With some internal and external truth seeking , it is not hard to determine that a small number of political elites (im not referring to authentic/compassionate politicos) work for an unelected higher power comprised of a very few people.  Their possessive and territorial thinking is a waste of human potential by not seeing individuals as active participants in their own lives.  This small group of power people have no empathy because they believe they know what is best for the many.

Listen less to MSM and inquire more for yourself.  The information is there if you want to find it.  In fact, those closet to you and your connections around the world are  probably the best resources to have.  Whether its Fox News or MSNBC, CBC or CTV the constant stream of lies, omitted facts are obvious and tedious.  It’s no wonder they want to shut down the internet.  Masses of global citizens are no longer buying the crap they are selling and I’m proud to be one of them. If we had MSM journalists permitted to speak to us about the facts (and less of  a soap opera) we could have turned the world around along time ago.  I have a suspicion that Humans of ALL kinds would be a united force if they knew what was really going on.  Just follow the money from crisis, wars, and economic misadventure and you will keep coming across the same names.  Be sure to call them out when you find them.  Remember, power works best when it is hidden in the darkness.  300 blood line, intellectually average, global proprietors (who have been running the show for centuries) can be shown a better way by 300 smart global citizens.

Could it be more blatant regarding who’s in charge and who gives the orders in the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher.  BP and its fraternity of corporate friends who operate in secrecy and take on the role of legal enforcement.  This network and their real owners  (I’m not referring to everyday shareholders) has a stranglehold over so much of our daily lives. We are manipulated by these unelected forces who dictate to many of those in political power.  The fact that this group has their own military and  access to very advanced technology should raise the alarm (more on this in another entry).  Be on the lookout for those who benefit the most from this situation and consolidate power.

If you want to know the truth stop listening to beltway political insiders and the global elite and start watching what they do.  A perfect example of this two-tier world is the upcoming G20 summit in Toronto.  An event where the end result will be secrecy, lies and spin which will cost more than 1.2 billion of our tax dollars.  At the same time, the city will be transformed into a apartheid state of citizens barricaded from the elite.  This visual alone is the clearest example I can think of that demonstrates how the world really works.  We live in a system comprised of multiple levels of secrecy and lies. J. F. Kennedy once warned us that this was the case.  Have you ever had the feeling that we are living is such an inverse world that the feeling of disconnect between people is irreparable?  It is time to ask lots of questions to find our own answers.  People have great potential which can be realized by fighting the reductivism of truth and the growing isolationism between each other (even with all the social networking).  Collectively we have what it takes to break the spell, defeat the Schism, to be unique and yet strive to be connected to others at the same time. Perhaps by letting others live more and reject the notion that we all have to live the same way.  Diversity is good.  It’s not as hard as people think it is to turn the pyramid of power upside down and make it work for us!

During my visit to NYC, I took time out to visit the Chelsea Gallery District. Of all the shows I took in, the most interesting was David Hockney’s Exhibit at Pace Wildenstein.  In this exhibit he presents a body of work of large rural landscapes, using non local colour on a mural scale.  The canvases, like his photographs are individual square segments merged together to make the whole.  The paintings are his trademark pictures of loosely painted images layered on top of each and very flat.  The only sense of depth is created through overlapping and relationships of scale.  There is little sense of depth created through colour tempurature and and atmospheric perspective.  However, there are about three massive paintings that stand out more than the others.  They come across as a new and refreshing direction for the artist.  They have more depth and an almost surreal sense of representation (there are strange multiple vanishing points). The colour relationships and the tensions they create are captivating and have the ability, for such large pictures, to draw you in.  So much so, that you become part of the painting.  I think the works shown above are some of the best by the artist I have seen in a long time.  I look forward to seeing more.  View work at Pace Wildenstein here.

After the defeat of equal marriage legislation in the State of New York last week and the amount of disappointment felt by many progressive Americans I have witnessed on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter,  I wanted to share a story told by the Greatest Canadian – Tommy Douglas (Canada’s creator of Universal Healthcare) with my American friends.  As early as the 1940s, he travelled the province of Saskatchewan using the story of Mouseland to illustrate the problems with political duopoly between two old line parties that exist to compete against each other in an outdated system for power.  Most often at the expense of the average citizen.  I have posted a video from the CBC series “Prairie Giant” that shares this story with you.  It just might give you some inspiration and something to seriously consider in your sad state of political affairs.  Not that Canada’s is any better at the moment.

Tommy Douglas – The Story of Mouseland

I am very happy about being in the current edition of Fab Magazine which combines the work of Canadian artists Daryl Vocat, Andrew Harwood, Me, Mark Ciale, and John Webster with underwear designs by contemporary designers. I am honoured that my close friend Matthew Simpson was juxtaposed with my work. He not only is someone very special to me, but also the man who designs my wrestling gear. A beautiful combination. View the art and designs here.