MIX: The magazine of artist-run culture
Fall 1996 Vol. 22.2

pp. 42-47

Deborah Waddington's David Tsubouchi and the Forty Stomachs of Parkdale

"May you be born in interesting times."

This ancient Chinese blessing/curse seems particularly applicable to the space/time known as Toronto's westend neighbourhood of Parkdale. For years, the area has been represented in the media with images of violence, prostitution and crime, and its population as an endlessly repeating procession of chaotic lives (definitely an interesting, but difficult place to be born in). This of course has engendered a media fascination with the reality and fiction of Parkdale. Besides almost daily reports of violence and crime or the occasional documentary on some specific social problem, Parkdale is constantly used as a backdrop locale for glamorous urban fictions, cop shows and the like. Movie shoots are so common they count as a traffic problem equal in disruption to the annual July Molson Indy invasion. Cast as the ultimate zone of the other, Parkdale is the place that every large modern city has: a place in which taboo fantasies get played out and fear is ghettoized. Except for the ratepayers railing against prostitution, there have been scarce cohesive and articulate voices originating from within this community compared to the endless reporting from without.

In Deborah Waddington's drawing installation work David Tsubouchi and the Forty Stomachs of Parkdale, rather than fall back on the usual sappy sentimental "truth" of photodocumentary, Waddington has chosen a methodology that one could call aesthetic anthropology. For the last three years, Waddington, a frontline worker for a Parkdale community health centre, has been dispensing condoms, syringes, information and support. In her art, she has developed a strategy for overcoming the indignity of speaking for others by taking a direct approach to her subjects.

Waddington explains, "I felt a lot of anger about the increased desperation I have sensed on the streets since the Harris government instituted the welfare cuts. I wanted to do an artwork that would access some of this anger and depict class difference. I approached some people I knew from work, shop owners and residents, with the question 'What is in your stomach?' and paid each person five dollars to draw a response. I also asked them to write a from-the-gut response to the question 'What is your biggest fear?'"

The resulting collection of responses is truly remarkable. Some drawings have the elegant simplicity of a Miro or a Klee, others are as bad as ballpoint pen drawings on the back seats of TTC cars. Some statements have the sparse beauty of Japanese Haiku, others are paranoid rants. Most of the drawings, even the most dispairing, seem to contain a vital and touching innocence of line and execution as well as being painfully honest. Along with the images depicted here, many of the drawings describe the body as completely mediated by culture. For example, Ms. Christofan Lucy, whose greatest fear is loud music, depicts her stomach as a nutritiously stocked Doric column, while William Coukell produced a fastidious computer-generated oblong filled with tea and milk that, oddly enough, looked like broken cement. One of the most interesting depictions was a stomach that appeared to contain a fiesty teardrop spoiling for a fight, supposedly against an Orwellian society ready to persecute heterosexuals. Unfortunately there is a preponderance of voids, drugs and junk food (both illegal and prescribed). There is also a tangible presence of dispair. If one was to make an instantaneous judgement, the most immediate response might be to assume that Parkdale is an area controlled by the pharmaceutical nightstick of the Harris government.

In the process of becoming an artist an individual is changed, somehow distanced from the way one normally reads a situation or set of events. Waddington has worked out a unique strategy for overcoming this pseudo-sophistication while creating a dynamic critical methodology for dealing with an era of hard-hearted, soft-headed social politics.

— John Scott

John Scott is a widely exhibited artist and writer who has taught at the Ontario College of Art for a number of years.

Deborah Waddington is an artist who is now also working at the Department of Public Health on the Works Van.

Selections from Waddington's installation work were on exhibit in two Toronto locations in August 1996, at the Area space at 401 Richmond Street West and the front window of Pages, a downtown bookstore. An additional element in the exhibit at Area has a hand-drawn replica of the infamous "welfare diet" proposed by David Tsubouchi in Ontario, rendered in careful magic marker scriptin an elementary-school style.