Dad and me, near the finish line

In May 1989, I graduated from art school. It was the culmination of four years of hard work, study, and personal growth.

In his past career, my Dad had been a technician. I was always interested in technology, and had wondered at its promises for most of my life. Dad would sometimes tell us about projects he was involved in at work, and sometimes he brought tidbits of evidence home with him, like a recording of a synthesized voice that had been created using a waveform written in silver ink on paper tape. Radio frequencies that broadcast audio and video seemed to particularly fascinate him.

I was undoubtedly influenced by his past technical career, but I was certain that my future would be somewhere in the realm of art and design.

I knew that my world was very different from his, and I held little hope that he’d ever really understand or see me the way I wanted him to. Nonetheless, on graduation day at The Emily Carr College of Art + Design, Dad was there in his wheelchair to watch me graduate, and he seemed very proud. Having him there along with my sister, her boyfriend Marcel, and my beloved girlfriend Grace meant that I was there with my family, and that meant the world to me.

I was 23 when I graduated from art school. My Dad and I had almost a 45 year age difference between us. His values and the world as it had been when he was 23 were entirely different from mine. When he’d been my age, it was 1944 and just months before he’d enlist in the Army. Thinking about the difference in time between his 23 and my 23 still makes my head spin a little.

Dad might not have understood much about the art topics I’d covered in my studies, but he sure understood the television project I’d worked on as a student. I’d gotten course credit for participating on-camera in a studio art course that was broadcast across the province of BC. To me, it was a big part of why I thought art school had changed my life for the better.

Being on TV was a kind of modern legitimacy that me and Dad understood. Broadcasting was a realm that my Dad knew well from his long career as an engineer in both radio and television. In 1954, he’d been in a small crew of men carrying the first transmitter equipment into a new TV station in Victoria. It was called CHEK-TV. Forty five years later, Dad would watch me on TV in his one-room care home bedroom. He might have seen me clicking away at a computer screen in a large studio classroom, conversing with the program’s host (who was also my Dean). He may not have appreciated what the onscreen drawing lesson was all about, but he definitely appreciated that his son was doing it on-camera. Through his partially paralysed mouth, he’d proudly tell his nurses “That’s my son. He’s an artist!” My activities had become legitimized through the medium of television.

In the mid-sixties before I was born, Dad had been the Chief Engineer at CFQC-TV in Saskatoon. His boss was a man named Blair Nelson who, years later, told me in a letter how my Dad used to love climbing their antenna towers to perform maintenance high up in the air. It sounded heroic and romantic to me, and I still can’t listen to Glen Campbell sing “Wichita Lineman” without picturing my Dad up on some tower, high up in the steel fixing something all by himself. His own Dad, my Grandpa Love, had been a lineman too, splicing phone lines for the Prince Rupert Telephone company. There was something unexplained coursing through their bloodline, I guess.

My own heights had been like abstract metaphors, but my Dad’s heights had been real and more than a little dangerous. Many of his jobs had some element of danger in them. Before he worked in TV and radio, he’d been a Military Policeman in the army (and a crack shot with a rifle), a Fireman in Victoria, and a Lance Corporal in the Air Force. Adventure must have been part of my Dad’s DNA.

My grad ceremony was held on Granville Island, down the street from the art college inside an old warehouse that had been converted into an open-air parking garage during Granville Island’s transformation from industry to arts and tourism.

It didn’t look or feel like a parking garage inside. It had been transformed into a festive event space. Streamers and decorations hung down the walls, and hundreds of chairs were set out in neat rows with an aisle down the middle that led up to a large stage with huge speakers on each side. The buzz and murmur of hundreds of hushed voices filled the background as me and the other grads lined up for our moment on the stage.

Each of us had been asked to prepare two images on slides which would be displayed, along with a 10 second clip of music to be played when we crossed the stage. I’d spent hours going through my Mum’s old vinyl, trying to find something that reminded me of her. She couldn’t attend my Grad because the province wouldn’t supply a nurse to bring her out from Riverview. I’d wondered if she would have actually enjoyed the evening or if she’d have been overwhelmed or upset by too much commotion. I think that my mind was just coming up with ways to reconcile her absence.

I ended up picking part of the song “World on a String” by Louis Armstrong – just a couple of lines saying those very words – a joyous, almost triumphant melody from the era of my mother’s youth when I imagined that she was at her artistic height, and not much older than I was. There was always a lot of gaps and lack of information where my mother’s past was concerned, so I relied on my imagination a lot to fill in the gaps.

I recorded the song passage onto quarter inch tape and delivered it and my two slide images (computer graphics from my grad exhibit). Light-hearted dixieland jazz and two abstract images based on integrated circuit patterns; it was an idiosyncratic combination going up on a big screen, honking out of giant speakers for ten or twenty seconds, but it was what I was into and who I was at that time, and it felt perfect.

When I crossed the stage to get my diploma, I heard Kim and Grace yelling my name. Grace told me later that Dad had been vigorously banging the armrest of his wheelchair with his good hand. It was his version of one-hand clapping. He was proud, and they were proud, and that meant everything.

Kim and Marcel took Dad back to Carlton Lodge, and Grace stayed with me for the rest of the evening, enjoying the after-ceremony opening of that year’s grad show. I could finally show my girlfriend and colleagues my grad pieces, which I’d spent most of my grad year conceiving and designing. In order to graduate, we were all required to participate in the grad show. For my submission, I created two electronic installations: one resembled a stand-up video game kiosk with a big screen and a plexiglass panel with colourful game buttons, but instead of a video game it displayed an interactive slideshow of computer graphics inspired by images from integrated circuits.  My second grad piece, located right next to it, was a collaboration with my brilliant classmate, Martin Hunt. I’d devised small floating robots that would paddle themselves towards a light source, like moths to a flame. The design and testing had taken me many months, but my “water bugs” worked: They paddled around in a clear plexiglass tray mounted at eye level in a wooden frame that had been designed by Martin. My grad pieces were very technological, but each was driven by the interactions and expectations of their audience. (I later showed Dad a video of the pieces, and explained them to him.)

In the fall after graduation, Dad got a bad case of pneumonia. It was so bad that they had to put him on oxygen. Dad’s emphysema and fifty five years of smoking had left him with a very compromised set of lungs. After some really bad nights of not being able to breathe, they took him to Burnaby General Hospital.