Dear Blog,

So sorry to have neglected you over these past few weeks. It's not that I don't cherish our time together. I do. I just felt like we needed a little time apart.

It's not you, it's me.

Jen.

Theatrics aside, it truly has been quite a while since I've contributed an entry to these bloggish pages. To what can I attribute this laziness? Perhaps the heat of the Toronto summer? (I never could get a handle on those sticky, humid days of late July - early August.) Maybe. Or perhaps there just wasn't much happening in my life on which to report? Nah, definitely not that. This summer -- more so than many previous -- was a busy one indeed.

Firstly, there was my solo exhibition in Toronto at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery. This opened June 22 and closes next week. The JMB is a fairly prestigious venue which, regrettably, is often sparsely attended as it is tucked away in the bowels of Hart House and thus well off the beaten track for most Toronto art patrons. Ah well. Yet another notch on the bedpost of my art career. (Ha! I wish! Likening my art career to a bedpost sounds more salacious than it is true ... it more closely resembles a slow-moving oxen cart than a notched bedpost).

At the end of July, my second solo show of the summer opened at Alternator Gallery, an artist-run centre in Kelowna, British Columbia. This exhibition featured the work from the "St. Ursula" series which I created 3-4 years ago. I flew out to Kelowna to attend the opening reception and deliver a brief artist's talk on the work. (Yes, the photo at the beginning of this post is a panorama of Kelowna ... I bet you were wondering when I'd get around to explaining the significance of that image.) Of course, the actual artwork didn't arrive in Kelowna until the day I left home for Toronto, but that's a long and frankly uninteresting story.

For me, Kelowna was four days of relaxation and respite from my motherly duties, as husband and child remained at home in Toronto. Highlights of the trip include swimming in Lake Okanagan and lying on the adjacent beach (see photo of beach above), listening to the conceptual sound art piece which was performed live at the reception, attending the Duotone arts festival/exhibition/live band schindig, and last but certainly not least, hanging out with Katherine, the exhibition coordinator of Alternator, and Bernard, a Belgian artist and one-half of the conceptual sound-art performance duo. They are both pictured on the left. The three of us attempted to visit an Okanagan winery, failed to do so (another long story) and instead held an impromptu barbecue of west coast salmon.