In 1988 I won a fellowship to the Banff Centre for Fine Art which is located in the Canadian Rockies near Calgary, Alberta. It was an incredible place - a mountain spa fresh air fund for artists. During our first week they took us, an international urban group of artists, camping. Many of us had never spent time away from our local bars, cafes and other urban amenities. Now we were far from home (for some of us, home was China, Mexico, France, etc.) and in the middle of a National Park during the pre-hibernation season when the grizzlies are most aggressive. It was on the second day of this camping trip, the day it snowed, when I met Jaroslaw Kapuscinski and agreed to collaborate on two videos with him.

BADLANDS was the first of the two videos we made. It is a music video of sorts that leads you through a series of expectations. You begin in the "Badlands Motel" where a Patsy Cline style song drones about the presence of an absent lover. You, the viewer, leave the hotel and take to the road passing through the dinosaur burial grounds, the Hoodoos, and the oil rigs of the Badlands.

I shot the video and co-wrote and sang the country western song. Jaroslaw composed the majority of the soundtrack. Many of the fine musicians at the center contributed to the project including: Richard Gallardo, the head percussionist for the Mexico City Philarmonic, on Bongos; and the head percussionist of the Beijing opera using brushes for the first time in his career. Peggy Lee, a cellist from Toronto, lay her cello across her knee and played it like a bass since we needed one and couldn't find one.

Jaroslaw and I went on to create the second video, Woda, which involved weeks of hiking to and shooting mountain creeks, rivers and rapids. During our stay at Banff Jaroslaw also tried to teach me to waltz without much success. However, I did learn how to ski, kayak and sing to elk.