For over thirty years, my dad was a pilot for a Canadian commercial airline carrier. He retired when I was in high school — coincidentally enough, shortly after 9/11, which he said took all the fun out of flying — so I have many memories of flying on a standby pass, thanks to his seniority. (He ended his career as a captain flying the 767.)
There was always a fraught element to this way of travelling: my dad would hawkishly survey the loads online to ensure there were enough empty seats, and my mom forced my two older brothers and I to wear business attire (company rule!) in fear a ticket agent would deem any of us unfit to fly. No jeans, no casual shoes, no open-toed sandals. (At YYC, the flight code for Calgary International Airport, one of my brothers wasn’t allowed to get on the flight for wearing hiking shoes, so him and my dad had to go to a store to buy dress shoes to get on the flight. Canadians! We’re friendly, but also so anally uptight.)
Maybe this is all coming back right now because I’m at my folks’ place for the night, but this is also in part due to Lauren Pelc-McArthur’s Purr Saccharin, a work included in the AFC-curated online exhibition, Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies. Of all the landscape-minded works included in the show, Pelc-McArthur’s abstract works evoke a disappearing landscape, washing waves (or the view of a carwash from the windshield) that ebb and flow between an oil painting or distorted video.
This quality came to mind when I recently read about “sky countries“, a concept coined by author and airline pilot Mark Vanhoenacker. When you’re flying, you take for granted the vast skies you see from your window aisle seat. For pilots, these skies are airspaces, with their own geographic divisions. They’re specifically referred to as “waypoints”, and given short, radio-friendly five-lettered names, like MOTWN (which is expectedly over Detroit) or Maastricht, a sky country that covers the upper airspace of Northern Europe. Land and sea are the natural resources we still have at our ever-diminishing disposal, and it’s fascinating to consider the ways in which the sky above has been mapped by those who frequently ride its waves. Long-haul flights — where daylight can be extended crossing time zones — play on our awareness of light and dark, but also the vastness of the world we live in. Pelc-McArthur’s work, in its blur of data and information, suggests a similar vastness, as well as the ever-increasing liminal boundaries separating our physical from virtual.
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