march 22 The hut is now off the ice. With an unseasonable quick melt, I’m just glad it didn’t become a gigantic minnow trap on the bottom of the lake. There is a chance that the new regional hospital here in North Bay (due to open this summer) may be interested in acquiring it for a more permanent exhibition, but this would have to be coordinated with the director of the Kennedy Gallery here in North Bay. In the meantime, it is being stored on the property of an arborist who might also have visions of for an afterlife. I have small lot myself, so to have it on my property was never really an option. It would of also involved tearing a wood fence down to move into the ideal position. In fact, the after- life of this hut was never fully resolved or planned, and maybe for the better. I like the idea of it becoming something else, for someone else, somewhere else. But back to the construction. The 120 pieces of plexiglas rarely became tedious to implement. There were a series of actions that were done that actually made the whole thing go together in a kind of rhythm. Half way up the second wall however, I shot one of the nails through the 2x3 and it hit a knot and shattered the piece of plexi I had just installed. This was good for two reasons, the first: I must be more careful, and the second: what was my plan or method if for some reason one of the pieces of plexi mid-way up (on any wall) broke? How could I re-install if it is dadoed top and bottom? Never figured out what the replacement procedure would be, and never needed to – not yet anyway. More tedious was probably the 120 2x3s that I had to dado on each face. This reminded me more of tree planting in remote parts of northern Ontario than anything else – the repetition and knowing how much more there is to do. And was the whole wall system even going to work?
What made me most nervous was that this small 9’x9’ hut was heavy – 2000 pounds kind of heavy. Not exactly your lightweight mobile ice hut. But it actually isn’t an ice hut, there is no fishing hole in the floor, just 2x4’s on edge with 1/2” plywood spacers. Pulling it onto the flatbed tow truck was definitely humbling. The thought crossed my mind that this thing could just blow apart, roll off or just be too heavy. One thing that struck me when the hut met the weather was the sound it made. It was nearly identical to the sound of rice crispies when you first pour milk on them – it crackled and continued to do so until the wood acclimatised to the below freezing temperatures. I also wasn’t sure how brittle the plexi would become in such cold weather, and the combination of how the properties of the wood and plexi would react to the elements. After getting it on the ice and removing the temporary bracing for transport, I walked back a couple hundred metres and was relatively surprised at how the walls of the hut appeared. It was as though they were made out of bug screen – nearly translucent. I had been building it in a warehouse with only a few feet of space around the perimeter, so could never fully view it from a distance. Further to this, the plexiglas gave the illusion of parabolic curves – something that a computer model rendered, but didn’t expect it would occur the way it did. More than anything though, I probably underestimated not only the time to construct something relatively simple, but underestimated the unplanned results of something relatively simple.
v
opposite page, left: idealised permit-free micro-studio project, fall 2009 below: moving the ice folly, 14 February 2010.
this page: the unexpected effects of building a simple structure and putting it in place.
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On Site review 23
Small Things
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