Ca Cb: Lynn Crosbie looks at the work of Corinne Calrson.

December 16 I 01 - While showing me Road Test, her collaboration with artists Karen Henderson and Maria Hlady, Corinne Carlson states that she is a conceptual artist who likes the idea of "art before it's made."

She puts my coat and scarf on the radiator; when I leave they are like pieces of toast.

"Because of my training," Carlson notes, "I need a reason" to create things.

Walking away from her studio, along the arc of College west of Dufferin - past snow-laced trees and shrubs extruding ice roses, blazes of violet - I am writing this essay.

Road Test is an adaptation of Mason Williams, Edward Ruscha and Patrick Blackwell's Royal Road Test, a 1966 project wherein the three men drove along the US Highway 91 southwest of Nevada at 90 mph and hurled a Royal typewriter from the window of their Buick Le Sabre.

Hlady, Henderson and Carlson's modifications in 2000 included using a Macintosh Plus computer and a Ford Econoline. They drove significantly slower as well.

Among the remains of the 1966 crash site: rubber foot, spool and ribbon, shift balance spring.

Among the remains of the 2000 crash site: brightness dial, cathode ray tube, SHIFT key.

I pass a trophy store with a five-foot Wile E. Coyote seated outside; a manicurist, a window displaying an Elvis bust in a Santa hat. I remember that for weeks an ESC key lay guttered on the corner of College and Concord, west of where I am trudging along, where I am going.

I asked Corinne, "Why throw these things out of windows?" She said she hadn't thought about that.

Carlson's Arizona Topaz is a series of spirals drawn with Laurentian coloured pencils. Each spiral is two-coloured and spools into a heart at the centre.

Women pass me wearing CERISE scarves, DEEP-GREEN gloves, PEACOCK-BLUE jackets.

A CHESTNUT-coloured dog streaks past.

I consider whipping pencil crayons at passing cars, combing the snow-banks for lead, wood fragments, amputated words: POPPY RED.

This would be a performance of my frustration with art, how what I see and what I draw never bear any resemblance to each other at all. The tossed pencils moving like arrows across perception and realization, their concrete remains.

Carlson may be performing a different drama, commenting on the ways in which words restrict or strangle interpretation. A desire for criticism that is less linear, a spiral that moves in and out of ardour.

I studied commercial art in college. I remember this as a woman in a mangy coat passes, saying Hello, extravagantly, again and again.

I found this study detestable, hours and days and weeks spent working on orthographic projections of the interiors of boxes. My renderings always looked like the aftermath of a hurricane. Carlson's The Concept of Being Bad (Self Portrait) deploys the orthography of elementary school both to interrogate and interrupt the meaning of BAD, to gesture to how the word is inculcated.

The self portrait is a revamped cartoon, a panel in which superhero Phoenix, her hair styled like Carlson's, holds her face in a gesture that speaks to pain, amusement and deep frustration.

In the drawing, her body is cut and muscular. A colleague of Carlson's remarked, "So that's what you look like under your plaid shirt."

I am walking into the wind, head down, processed hair flying straight up. My eyes tear, radiating mascara. I am wearing four-inch heels and my feet are collapsing as I corner toward Dovercourt.

Dragging out the word BAD. Ba Bd. Demonstrating how one's self subordinates to this or that, the idea of beauty and strength. Defying these ideas.

I am cold and heroic. No one can walk as fast as me in shoes like these, something like 25 kmh in black faux-alligator.

The epigraph for Royal Road Test and Road Test:

It was too directly bound to its own anguish to be anything other than a cry of negation; carrying within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

I head for the Brass Taps, my local bar. I wonder if it is too early to drink, hear a rallying cry of negation.

Corinne's studio is at the front of her former storefront space, a two- block zigzag from the Dufferin Mail. She shows me an upcoming exhibition, a series of record covers, classical music: Dvorjak, Elgar, Bach. She has replaced the photographs or illustrations of the composers or musicians with similar images of her partner Karen.

The reverential prose that accompanies the pictures, the spoois of praise are now about Karen. Her beautiful face stares out or turns away, serene and certain.

The series is one of the most exact love sonnets i have ever seen.

Inside the bar, a purple velvet curtain blocks the doorway, barring cold air, light.

Inside Corinne's studio, a Kenmore sewing-machine box, white and purple. Shelves of tools and crates. Eggshell blue wails, red-and-grey tiled floor. Electrical detritus. Cassette tapes: Blondie, Madonna, Romeo Void.

Inside the bar, 80s music plays, Romeo Void, Madonna, Blondie. i write on lime green paper:

Art Before It Happens.

I have been walking this grid for a year, writing poems about found objects. Thinking about, collecting in writing, the barrette on the curb, the discarded shoe, the mushroom in a dirty puddle.

Carlson's other work: a billboard that says BAA? A goat sound, the words set in silver reflecto-light, dollar-sized discs that shimmer like a waterfall. The lyrics to a Peggy Lee song, strung up in sequence over flag-strung used car lots.

She is a graffiti-ist, an interpreter and manipulator of the kinds of phenomena I have been tracking. Like Phoenix, working on a much bigger scale.

Beneath the bar table, a folded paper. A white swan. It's too early to drink. As I stand, I watch the glass sweat, a pool of silver.

I was tired and disheartened going to Corinne's. The night before, I was stuck in a blizzard, the streets seemed ominous, malevolent.

I make the last leg of my trip home. Wondering about the nonsensical, perfectly reasonable BAA?, the chain of car lots, the 276 spirals that represent all the possible variants of two (of the 24) Laurentian pencils combined.

Absorbing Carlson's enigmatic message. Make what you want of the world.

A man in a hard hat west of Delaware saws into a stack of two-by-fours, chaos and construction.

Our initials combined.

Energy, Matter. The relative distance between them multiplied by the speed of light.

The computer thrown from the window, discharging a key on my street, 110 kilometres away.

The light of the sky through the filigreed trees is blinding. Before I turn my key in the lock, I have finished writing. My prints in the snow spiral back, ardently.

Lynn Crosbie is a Toronto writer. Her most recent books are Queen Rat: New and Selected Poems and Dorothy L'Amour.