County Fence Bi-Annual

Category: Art & Culture

Art & Culture Title card for article: Gregaro McKool’s Socialist Extravaganza featuring a white on black line-drawing of a woman in an eighties business suit looking like she’s spent the afternoon crawling through dense bush.

Gregaro McKool’s Socialist Extravaganza –or– An Exercise in Over-Confidence, Part Two

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This is Gregaro McKool coming to you from the County Fence Bi-Annual Skunkworks deep in the wilderness of Eastern Ontario and this week I’m back with more thoughts on art, why I do it, and what the hell I’m going to do with mine.

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Art & Culture Title card for article: Gregaro McKool's Socialist Extravaganza. White on black line drawing of a dishevelled woman with a messy Edwardian pompadour haircut and a torn 70's skirt suit trying to keep her composure.

Gregaro McKool’s Socialist Extravaganza –or– An Exercise in Over-Confidence Part One

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County Fence has our very first feature-length script: Gregaro McKool’s Socialist Extravaganza —or— An Exercise in Over-Confidence.

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Art & Culture Title card for Walter Liu's piece 'Art Versus Commerce.' Image is a white on black French-language Canadian five-hundred-dollar bill featuring semi-nude baroque portrait of a fertility goddess luxuriating in an orchard with a sickle and sheave of wheat.

Art Versus Commerce

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Once again we find Art Editor Walter Liu scratching his head as he wonders what makes someone an artist and why they’d want that in the first place.

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Art & Culture Title card for 'River's Place.' White on black drawing of a broken down log cabin with shipping container addition and greenhouse made of old screen doors.

River’s Place

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Audio Version Here River’s ‘studio’ is straight-up the kind of place my parents warned me about. They’d tell me that they didn’t immigrate to Canada so I could hang out at grow ops on the rez without cell service. Yet last week I parked my car beside a cornfield, said…

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Art & Culture Title card for 'Real Men' by Brenda Hogg featuring the Greater Napanee highway sign. Slogan: Greater for many reasons.

Reason Greater Napanee is Greater #2: Real Men

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Audio Version Here Greater Napanee is greater for many reasons and if Avril is #1 then our men are #2. That’s right, I said it: Greater Napanee has real men. Our independent country spirit raises them right. Our men know how to play hockey, fix the car, and catch you…

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Art & Culture White on black picture of Brenda Hogg peering over a generic privacy fence.

Gentrification

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Audio Version Here. The greying privacy fence behind Brenda Hogg’s white aluminum-sided wartime home may look like nearly every other house on the street but what lays behind is an artist, or so our art editor Walter Liu tells me after the dust up at the gallery the other week….

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Art & Culture Cover of Gregaro McKool's forthcoming novel, 'That Naked Dream,' featuring an inverted portrait of the author with women tumbling out of his head.

That Naked Dream — or — Men Writing Women

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Audio Version Here Writing something down makes it real. Until you do it’s just a collection of thoughts in your mind, likely incoherent. It’s in the act of writing that you’re forced to work out the incongruities your mind glosses over and from there the story truly takes shape. It’s…

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Art & Culture Title card for 'Everyone's Got Cholera' featuring Cornelius Krieghoff's painting 'Breaking Up of a Country Ball in Canada, Early Morning.' A chaotic classical oil painting of a rural Canadian pub in 1857 as the sun rises on an ongoing overnight party.

Everyone’s Got Cholera

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Audio Version Here Cornelius Krieghoff was the first artist to capture the Canadian landscape in oil paint. That’s what my Canadian Art History teacher told me in art school, anyway. She also told us that the landscape somehow informs all Canadian cultural output. My family is from Hong Kong. I…

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