regia aeronautica
Christopher Boyne
+15 Window Exhibition
June 6 to July 28, 2015
regia aeronautica is a project about shared experience and story. Through correspondence I requested that two childhood friends recount an experience we shared together as young children. The two were asked to write a simple description and make a simple drawing of what they remembered from that day. I used this content and my own to make this work.
The work offers three separate accounts of the same experience. These accounts are all that exist. It will never be clear which of the three is the most accurate or if there is any accuracy in the accounts at all- only the truth of the recollections can be confirmed.
From the Dartmouth Road on Wardour Street first it was Camden Street and Brook Street then Perth and Shore Drive. Donald lived on Shore Drive like me but further along with the water on one side and the fire station and train tracks on the other. Joey lived right beside the school on Perth Street. You could walk through his back yard to get to school. His mom would remind us not to trample the ferns. I used to walk through my own back yard then another back yard and come out right on Perth Street facing the grave yard beside the school.
The school was called Fort Sackville. It was very small. Only four classrooms—one each for primary then grades one two and three. In the center of the school was a small kitchen a library and a space for gym class. If your mom sent you with two dollars you could have a boiled hot dog and a package of peek frean cookies on Wednesdays.
Outside was a pad of asphalt and some jungle gym equipment made from logs. Also a tall metal slide and then an area of woods for playing. The woods. We would set up stores and sell bits of bamboo and leaves for small pebbles. If you wanted a bit of bamboo you would walk across the pad to the jungle gym and fill your shirt with dusty pebbles. If it wasn’t enough you were sent back across the yard to fill your shirt again.
In the summers or on the weekends Joey and Donald and I would meet on bikes. We spent time at the school. You could get a lot of speed around the sides of the school and come flying up over the bank that led down to the pad. One time we had a stop watch and we timed how long we spent in the air on our bikes. Half a second.
Once coming around the side of the school we found something.
Chris Boyne (b. 1984. Halifax, Nova Scotia) is a photo-based artist who uses found ideas, memory and fiction to create work with manifold complexities. His work has been shown across Canada and in the United States. Recent exhibitions include boutilier marine & black nance, Ryerson Artspace, Toronto, regia aeronautica, Open Space, Victoria, black nance, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto and boutilier marine The Craig Gallery, Halifax. In 2015, he will participate in the 33rd Symposium International d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec. He was also recently chosen as one of the inaugural artists for the Twenty-Three Days at Sea Traveling Artist Residency through Access Gallery, Vancouver. He holds a BFA from Ryerson University and an MFA from Concordia University and lives and works in Montreal and Halifax.
