I went to Saint Johns School of Alberta for two years, grades 7 and 8. This year I have been thinking about the school this year because it shut down, because I have become Anglican, because I am ready to handle what it gave me. All of this is personal, the trauma and the ruptures that happened in that school were the expected ones, and those traumas are personal. I could tell you them, and you would not be surprised.

The personal is political, and the church is responsible for its history. I thought about these ideas when making this work. I thought about other things too: I thought about how grace can be transferred, about how to make the heft of guilt and mourning tangible, about corporate responsibility. I thought about the ephemera of religiosity, how we carry ceremonies in breviaries and prayerbooks or how we carry our temporal history. I thought about Felix Gonzales-Torres, who expressed his mourning, his uniquely catholic mourning, in rituals of transference. He would create posters to carry away, or piles of candy the exact weight of the combined bodies of his weight, and his lovers body.

The project I have proposed has three parts. There will be three piles of posters, smaller then Torres' work (11x17 or so) recreated through analog sources, scanned and made digital in order to be disseminated.

One of the posters will have two images from a homme d'nor ceremony. Cribbed from Canadian history, remade to be vaguely Christian, it was what happened when we went half way through the year's final canoe trip. Stripped to our waist, we said prayers, were beaten with pine or spruce branches. Afterwards in a parody of the Eucharist, we would have a shot of rum. The photos here are photos that have a specific time and place, with the bright orange time stamp, but are repeated, historically—they become a simulacrum of an event that might or might not have never happened.

One of the posters will be a enlargement of a information card from the Alberta Report, a paleo-conservative, and very pious magazine founded in Saint Johns and which later determined Western Canadian religious politics for a decade. This is part of the public response to Saint Johns—what the school wanted to be thought of, and what it was thought of.

The last poster is a photograph I took, the only photograph I took, when the show was shut down, a year ago. I brought a friend, and we wandered around the deserted campus, in early spring. The snow is melting—formally connecting the water in the Homme D'Nor photos, with the melted snow, and extending the metaphor of temporariness.

Though this is my history—the continued issues of trauma, masculinity, the construction of identity, the use of history to construct narratives of cohesion, the textual interventions that mark Christian lives, and what it means to make and keep pictures. I think that because this is about Anglican history, and much of my practice is about vernacular and unusual placements I think that it would deepen and complicate the matrice of meaning that are inherent in the work, if it is present in an ecclesiastical context.