creative forces

 Blog #139…March, 2023

 

To continue the theme of remarkable women that I began a couple of blogs ago – I just finished Linda Schuyler’s memoir. She’s a  teacher and the creator of the Degrassi TV shows that provided 35 years of education for kids in important, sometimes overlooked areas. Linda involved, respected and supported kids in the cast as scripts dealt with teen pregnancy, alcoholism, drug use, sexual abuse and bullying...an innovative way to educate both audience and performers. 

The Oscars are in a few days, I think it’s weird and oddly unfair to put Women Talking against Top Gun Maverick, Avatar  and a raft of vastly dissimilar films…a bit like racing a hummingbird against a giraffe.  But Women Talking is thought provoking and valuable no matter what happens on March 12.

We live in a multi dimensional world and three-dimensional forms have caught my attention recently. In Housewarming at the Gardiner Museum, Quebec artist Karine Giboulo uses ceramics to comment on features of life during the pandemic. Tiny figures are set in a world at once familiar and unsettling, charming and disarming: a long line of miniature figures with shopping carts lead to a food bank opening out of a super market bag;  a large packing box with a window shows hundreds of figures assembling consumer goods - a mirror stretching them out to infinity and a shelf of glass canning jars contains little wee elders using walkers and wheelchairs. The show is a great way to introduce children to art, they may not get the message we do, but they’ll love the teeny weenies.

The Art Gallery of Ontario is currently showing Radical Remembrance, by David Ruben Piktoukun who works in 3D too. A native of  Paulatuk in what's now Inuvialiut in the NorthWest Territories, David’s time in a residential school attempted unsuccessfully to extinguish his language and culture, it also failed to take his spirit and creativity.  As well as using traditional soapstone and portraying scenes from Arctic life in his work,  he incorporates wood, glass and metal and sometimes brings in contemporary themes with airplanes and computers. His images tell stories of growing up in a hunting and fishing community...and he was briefly married to my late friend Esther Atkin.                                                                                                                             

In 1955, Judge JH "Jack" Sissons arrived in Yellowknife as the first resident justice of the NWT Supreme Court, He quickly raised the hackles of Ottawa bureaucrats by insisting on taking circuit courts to try cases where the crime had been committed (expensive) and incorporating some aboriginal justice approaches into the law (unheard of!),

Both acts endeared him to the indigenous people he served however, and they showed their gratitude with carvings like this one by Allan Kaotak of Cambridge Bay where Judge Sissons is reading Allan his decision. Jack Sissons and his successor William Morrow felt strongly that the laws must adapt and were instrumental in advancing the case for indigenous rights and making changes in the law to secure them.

A collection representing landmark cases in the legal history of the NWT rests in the Yellowknife Courthouse Gallery.  I was moved when I saw these miniature tributes to the judgments when they came to the Power Plant over 30 years ago and they've stayed with me ever since - aided by Dorothy Eber's Images of Justice which served as the catalogue for the show. And how about this...Judge Sissons had polio as a boy and did all the rough travelling in and out of small planes in the north with leg braces and a cane!  I've got a lump in my throat as I'm writing about him.

Just a few days until International Women's Day...time to celebrate the women in your life, and if you are one...then celebrate yourself.

Back when April showers will be coming our way.