one million tubes on a tree

I lugged my tube collection of one million tubes in a U-haul all the way from Utah and they have been hanging on my wall for a year taunting and those facts alone put every artwork i should be finishing in two weeks on hold while i finally excute one of my nagging ideas for them: paint them with found house paints and stick them on a tree, looping in similar ways and colours to my recent drawings.
This is the view as you exit the freeway in a vehicle.

Fittingly, this is the exit you could use in soliciting one of my favourite Richmond thrift stores: Diversity Thrift, which employs broad rainbow stripes as a cleverly blatant design element on its buildings and trucks to announce its purpose as a fundraiser for the local homosexual community. Because of my palette and proximity with this piece, the neighborhood may easily mistake this as a Diversity Thrift project, conflating tree hugging with gay pride. It is a spot that an organazation has 'adopted' for litter control - how perfect would it be if Diversity Thrift is that adopter. I will imagine this to be the case...they will love this! The community wouldn't dare risk the political incorrectness of dismanteling this art! That way I can be assured that the tubes will remain long through the winter and spring waiting for me to photograph them during all the seasons.

I had kept an eye peeled for weeks for a large tree limb which had been torn down in a storm so that I would be abusing a dead object instead of oppressing a living thing. I had four other limbs on my list, but this one was the largest and in a great sort of surprising spot.







I also filmed here this morning, but its really boring. Maybe even these are enough photos to bore you. Well, a couple more:

I hope I can get a future snow shot of this...




p.s. I did this the week before going to New York City this last weekend. If nothing else it has been supremely satisfying to get these monkey tubes off my back and out of my studio. Blogging about it is the other ever-appearing modern monkey I am now flicking away so I can finally get back to my studio...blogs could ruin your life, but monkeys in general should be cherished.