Charlene Liska

I have had an artist’s studio at 80 Border Street, East Boston, for over 20 years, and helped found and build Atlantic Works Gallery.  We celebrated our 20th anniversary in the summer of 2023.

I have photosensitive epilepsy. My brain is drawn to the pulsing, eternal, impalpable, electronic image, pixel-mitigated experience. Realer than the real world, surer than memory.

I work in video, painting, and photography.  I take photographs, paint from the photographs, photograph the paintings.

I’ve lived long enough, now, to have had lots of lives, including…

Before Boston, 14 years in the frozen oceanic wilderness of Labrador (results – I can do and make an awful lot of things; I know what ‘nothing’ looks like.)

Before Labrador, University study of Old and Middle English literature in Toronto (results – everlasting joy in the beauty of language and frustration with the opacity of human history.)

Before Toronto, an adolescence fragmented by a series of grand mal seizures and related social ostracism (results – I’ve kept the secret for much of my life, and I have been shaped by the secret most of all.)

Ice Road, April, Paradise River

At the mouth of the bay, the river is a road

with two surfaces:  the one above,

the visible one, winter road to Cartwright,

solid as the rooted Western prairie.

Now flip to its mirror image,

gnawed,

or not, but surely soon,

by patient spring tides.

Charlene Liska

whatrolandsaw@gmail.com

youtube – A Blazing Flash of Light