Homesense of Self

I went to 8 Homesense stores spanning everywhere from Burlington to Vaughan in search of this print. I had stumbled across three in the series while at Vaughan Mills and knowing that somewhere out there was a missing link drove me crazy. I had a chef playing pot-drums, a chef playing a whisk-saxophone and a chef singing into a spoon-mic but there was a gap and it was slowly eating at my sanity. I couldn’t look at them with their missing counterpart; like I’d assembled some ragtag band sorrowfully saying “How can we play without strings?” I knew I would have to find the chef playing his rolling pin-guitar or shamefully return the lot of them—defeated.

Thus began my journey to Erin Mills, Rockwood, Etobicoke, Heartland, Oakville, Burlington and finally Clarkson, after psychotically ravaging each of their ‘Wall Décor” departments and coming up empty I drove to Rona to buy a laser level and call it quits. As I walked through the store I stopped in their home furnishings department and there sitting in an oversized frame was the print; it was thinner than the others, and didn’t have the same black backing, but it was about the same size and if I could get it out of the frame it would almost be a match.

My reaction when I got home was the same reaction Bart gets when Lisa returns his soul, while she is prattling on about the journey of man Bart just eats the piece of paper in an animalistic fit of relief—I did the exact same thing to the frame, tearing away at the binding, stabbing myself with industrial staples in the process. When it was done I looked at my completed set and literally sighed, as though I’d been holding my breath. In retrospect it was a bit psychotic driving around the entire suburban GTA for a tiny print, but part of the satisfaction was in the journey:

Hitting 9 different stores based on general impression of where they were and never getting lost (for the record I get lost in restaurants coming out of bathrooms). Stopping at the Oakville Gallery on the way to Clarkson and taking in the Warhol exhibit. Accidentally driving up to a drug bust in the woods and having both the officers and guys being arrested wonder who the weirdo in his grandma car listening to Kate Bush was. Even stopping in the final Homesense, realizing I’d hit another dead-end and punching my frustration: “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” into pillows in the linens department, was all a part of the journey that made the final result that much sweeter.

Plus the fact I drove a couple hundred kilometres in search of a painting that in the end was a 5 minute walk from my house didn’t make me homicidal shows a lot of growth.