A contribution requested from BLOUINARTINFO - Canada. I am one of many, many artists and academics who valued Lisa’s friendship, and abilities as a creative life thinker and artist. Reading the OCAD online tribute today I was unaware of the extent of Lisa’s academic awards and acceptance with funding to do a doctorate in California. As a conceptual artist and art historian I am aware of how good Lisa was in her conceptual artworks that she made with care, with precision, with a self-critical humour and ultimately with a rare believability. I taught Lisa when she was doing her BFA at Queen’s University. After she was done, when she was living at The Artel, we kept in touch. I paid her to paint my baffed-out kitchen cabinets and before that we discussed an ongoing contract for Lisa to be the Distribution Manager for Voicespondence Artists Records and Frances Leeming’s Cut-It-Out Films. She asked me if she could make a button edition of my 1970’s slogan “Art Kills Me” and I found one of those buttons rusting on a street in Calgary in 2012. We laughed at the mathematical improbability of such a find and I said I would return said button to her. She designed my unpublished book, Black, White and Read All Over - a collection of letters I had written and sent/not sent to the Globe and Mail. Mostly I am aware of the love Lisa earned from her peers working in Kingston and Toronto and how they as a generational group eroded my cynicism as an artist and as a professor. I have heard that Lisa’s family are wonderful people who helped Lisa develop and look forward to meeting them at Lisa’s memorial this Saturday. I am appalled that Lisa, the healthy eater and Yoga instructor would die this way and this young. Her smile, optimism, skepticism and artworks will live on for years to come. With the outpouring of grief and love that attends her passing, we collectively will make this happen! What modest Lisa herself would make of all of these remembrances and commemorations are hard to know. I hope she would be pleased.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 23:08:34 +0000
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