Blog 30…February 2014

The beauty in ordinary objects…Mary Pratt’s show, on now at the McMichael Gallery, is full of wonderful glimpses of the world she saw around her as she kept house and tended children in an isolated corner of Newfoundland in the 60’s…always seeing - and painting - that world through an artist’s eyes. 

Meanwhile, two young Toronto artists who both work in wood have also developed a fascination with the beauty of ordinary forms and functional objects, the delicate place furniture holds between engineering and fine art and the many ways wood has been used over the years.  

 

Invited to contribute to SMALL, a show that opened in the vitrines at Harbourfront last month, they took their inspiration from a photo that they discovered online from the Museum of Gears dating back to late 1800's

Prior to the development of modern casting methods, wooden patterns were used for gears, pressed into wet sand to make a mould which was then filled with liquid iron or other molten metals.  The gears were an important part of the heavy machinery that was in production following the industrial revolution. 

Finding a surprising beauty in these patterns, Carey Jernigan and Julia Campbell-Such began to conceive and render images of the moulds with off- cuts of wood found in the shops where they work.  The result is a remarkable display of an old form with both the charm of natural material and the spare elegance of an object important to the industry of its time. As well as nostalgia for that time when craft was done with care by hand, the show incorporates the economy of using discarded material in a creative way. 

                                                    

Seeing everyday objects as having an inner beauty that amplifies their importance and use in everyday life has long been a standard in aboriginal art too, as has using available materials to create traditional objects both valued and essential to everyday life.  Check out the Raybans.

Blog 29…January 2014

The film Gabrielle, in general release this week was Canada’s entry in the foreign language Oscars this year…it  didn’t make the short list but it’s definitely worth seeing for director Louise Archambault’s sensitive and realistic handling of the many issues of independence faced by individuals with disabilities.   

It made me think of a couple of involvements I had many years ago in Quebec during my life as an occupational therapist.  I handled the publication of CJOT, (Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy) and we chose as printer L’Atelier des Sourdes, a shop in Montreal that trains and employs deaf people – not being bothered by the noise in a print shop was an added benefit I guess.  My second discovery (and this was in the 70’s) was a shop, on a fashionable street, also in Montreal, that marketed beautiful articles made by people attending a centre that helped them deal with mental health problems.  Both the print shop and the store were taking creative approaches to help people make the most of their abilities, allowing them to enter the mainstream in a unique way - amongst the forerunners in a number of other activities taking this approach now.

But back to Gabrielle… the title role is played by a young woman with Williams syndrome, a form of neurological disorder that features expressive language skills and a strength and fondness for music as well as distinct learning disabilities.  Les Muses de Montreal is a choir of developmentally challenged adults, again played not by actors but real individuals (they keep their own names in the production) who are not only talented but extremely endearing for their enthusiasm and sense of community. Gabrielle and her fellow musicians struggle with the issues of maturing and seeking independence with the common ground of singing together (and with Robert Charlebois, it’s a real treat to see him interacting with the singers around his song Ordinary Guy).

We first meet Gabrielle as she’s falling in love with Martin, a fellow singer. Their love affair and wish for autonomy is met with resistance by their families who express their feelings with loaded phrases like “people like them”. Archambault uses a fictional approach with a touching performance by Gabrielle Marion-Rivard at the centre of the piece.  Her wishes to be normal, to have her own apartment and a love life like everyone else are expressed in a natural and unaffected way that brought a lump to my throat.  Gabrielle’s story challenges our notions of what’s normal and who fits the definition. It also reiterates and celebrates the power of music to erase the borders and bring us all together even if only for the length of a song.    

Blog 28… December 2013 

Could it be the recent horror of the sweatshops in Bangladesh, our leaner economy, or maybe it was just time for its re-appearance on the scene…whatever the case, sewing seems to be going through a renaissance.

There’s always been a hard core group of quilters around though and this extraordinary story is about the champion of them all.  It began when Esther Bryan, an artist living in a tiny centre in eastern Ontario traveled with her father to Slovakia shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain.  Inspired by many aspects of life there, Esther was particularly touched by the valuing of family connections and simple objects and the comforting creativity of fabric. When she returned to Canada, the notion of making a quilt to celebrate our cultural diversity gradually emerged. Her community included a number of women with both the interest and skills in sewing as well as a remarkable wealth of ethnic connections. As the project began to take shape, it expanded to include every nationality in the world with residents in Canada as well as our Aboriginal First Nations.

 

Official launch - April 1, 2005 -  Canadian Museum of Civilization

 The result of their amazing collaboration, the Quilt of Belonging, shows that there’s room for all of us in the human tapestry. Composed of 11 inch fabric squares, 263 of them are sewn together to create a panel that stretches out almost as far as the eye can see.  I was lucky to discover it about 5 years ago at the Canadian National Exhibition, thanks to my friend Karen Paavila who lives near Williamstown, a small crossroads town that was the centre of activity…Karen’s married to a Finn, qualifying her to be part of the creation of the Finnish square.

Australia

  

The Quilt has travelled to every corner of Canada, the US and abroad. 

Central African Republic

Its message of inclusion and recognition of the unique heritage of each of the nations it represents helps inspire tolerance in us all.                                                                                                      

 It speaks also to our need to embellish, to provide beauty and to mirror and proclaim our identity both in harsh and peaceful times.  The material  used - from homespun to fine linen, sealskin to African mud cloth, wood and metal, thread and wool as well as the colours, designs, styles, motifs and techniques used all reflect the particular culture being honoured in the square.       

Inuvialuit

St Lucia

            

More than any of my other blogs, this one presented the enormous challenge of capturing the richness and complexity of the Quilt of Belonging and the notions, emotions and process that went into its creation.  The Quilt nails clearly and exactly the essence of what the blog sets out to do and Blog #28 is a tribute to it and its creators.  I hope I’ve made you want to know more…check out the website www.invitationproject.ca

And Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.  

Blog 27...November 2013

Who hasn’t struggled at times with their relationship with the “parental units”?  A couple of recent books explore these complicated and inevitable connections from unique perspectives.  Not only are their situations compelling but both writers are immensely skilled at story telling as well as being candid and generous with their feelings.

I’ve been following Priscila Uppal’s writing since loving her 2002 novel The Divine Economy of Salvation which was dedicated “for my mother wherever she may be”.

Blog # 7 featured Winter Sport, her poems celebrating the 2010 Olympic Games. In an essay covering the Paralympics, Priscila credits her father, a paraplegic who raised Priscila and her brother as a single parent, for her dedication to physical activity. In September, Dundurn Press launched Projection, encounters with my runaway mother.  This tells the compelling tale of Priscila’s chance discovery of her mother’s whereabouts on the internet and her subsequent contact and visit to her in Brazil.  This story is poignant, witty and surprising (isn’t it usually kids who run away?) and Priscila takes us on every step with her on this painful but illuminating voyage of discovery.

credit www.schwichow.de

In Miriam Toews’ Swing Low (a life) we learn early on that her father killed himself after a life struggling with a mood disorder. Diagnosis and treatment began when Mel Toews was a teenager.Despite many episodes of mania (which was as distressing as his depression) he had a significant career as a teacher as well as being a loving husband and father. A prodigious note taker, he left volumes of written material that allowed Miriam to construct this first person account of his life.

She is able to take us along on a close look at Mel’s life at school, his marriage, the birth of his 2 children, numerous struggles with hospitalizations, his life as a very successful teacher, through to the final trip that ended in his death.  Along the way we get a glimpse into the Russian Mennonite community in Manitoba where the family lived and a droll self portrait of Miriam through her father’s eyes.          `           .

Abandonment, whatever the surrounding conditions, is one of life’s most brutal blows.

Both of these books handle it with a dash of wry humour in places, raw pain in others. Each woman explores her parent in a sensitive, loving way despite hurtful circumstances that could foster blame, either of the parent, themselves or both..

Writers have once again stepped up to the plate, helping us to make some sense of life and the slings and arrows it sends our way.

Blog 26…October 2013

I’m very happy to see the rising confidence and exciting visual presence of indigenous artists from here and around the world.  Earlier this year there was Beat Nation at the Power Plant, in the summer I discovered Sakahan at the National Gallery in Ottawa (Blog 23) and here in Toronto, Imaginative, the festival of indigenous film has just finished at the Lightbox. Now, the Ryerson Image Gallery in Toronto has Ghost Dance, activism, resistance and art, created mostly by Aboriginal artists, running until December 15.

The Image Gallery has a fascinating history…opened last year on the Ryerson campus, the collection originated in Berlin in the 1930’s with the Black Star photo agency.  Politics in Germany prompted a move to New York where the agency became the principal source of news photos for magazines and newspapers for the next 70 years, accumulating an archival history of most of the 20^th century.  As other media took over, the Black Star collection moved around for several years, finally being donated to Ryerson, who have created a superb venue to store and exhibit the images. The Gallery also serves as a showplace for Ryerson students and others, providing exposure for a variety of still and moving images.

 

The current show has a focus on injustices and oppression suffered by native people around the world. The pieces range from a series of small screens with phone receivers where we can listen to women incarcerated in a federal prison for native women in Alberta to visual messages from protests at Palm Island, Australia and from Wounded Knee in the US.

Sonny Assu is posed beside posters created from Department of Indian Affairs material encouraging “absorption as the happiest future”.  Although this is moving, it’s his piece called Leila’s Desk that touched my heart most deeply. Sonny’s grandmother was nervous and excited to be the first native person to attend her local high school. Many years later, as an old woman, she still felt the shame of her arrival the first morning to find a bar of Lifebuoy soap sitting on her desk. Sonny has built a replica of the kind of small pine desk used at the time and the offending bar of soap that shouted “dirty Indian”.  My breath caught in my throat when I saw this piece, and in case you get to see the show, which I hope you will, I’m not putting up an image of it so the impact will be as powerful for you as it was for me.

It’s great to see these shows and get to know our fellow Canadians through their art, I hope though that we’re on the way to recognizing and appreciating indigenous art more widely in mainstream galleries. We should be grateful to artists who connect us with the world around us and within us from their own unique viewpoint, whether they’re women, gay, Chinese, white guys…or Aboriginal. 

And, a final thought,  the community of native people, artists and others deserve a loud shout out from the rest of us for the heavy lifting they're doing in preserving our home, the earth.

BLOG  # 25…SEPTEMBER 2013

“By words one transmits thoughts to another, by means of art one transmits feelings”…if you don’t know who said this, you’ll have to read the rest of the blog and I’ll tell you at the end. Art also gives substance to our feelings and calls our attention to issues when words don’t do the job.

 In his current show at the AGO in Toronto, Ai Weiwei is making powerful statements about injustices and corruption in China. His horror at the deaths of over 5,000 children, killed when their badly constructed schools collapsed during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province, inspired several moving tributes. The snake which curls around the ceiling in the entrance to the exhibit is composed of schoolbags like the ones carried by the children as they walked to school and to their deaths.

His works are huge and often involve work by many artisans for many hours to execute his ideas.  Hundreds of strikingly realistic hand crafted porcelain crabs scattered across the floor evoke the millions of creatures (including humans!) displaced by the diversion of rivers to create the 3 Gorges Dam project.

Working on a smaller but equally important and far reaching stage Rebecca Difilippo is making powerful statements with and about her art in the videos that she’s recently mounted on Facebook.  Rebecca is the editor of Moods Magazine and has expanded her reach from the magazine into social media to explore the symptoms, emotions and behaviours associated with depression. Creating images was able to help her during the darkness of her own episodes with depression and she hopes that telling her story alongside her paintings can help other people with similar despair.   

“Broken is the title of this work and strongly reflects the way I felt as I struggled with depression. During the darkest time of my depression I felt so incapacitated, so broken that I just couldn't feel any hope of getting out of the black hole I was drowning in.”

“I painted this butterfly as a way to express my newfound freedom from depression, my ability to feel and become something beautiful and living again. I was held captive by my depression for so long that when I was finally able to feel again, to feel the wonderful beauty of the world around me, I felt alive, as though I had stepped into a new world,  as though I had been transformed. For a very long time, I was unable to feel and appreciate so many of the simple pleasures in life... things I had once taken for granted, things that had just suddenly vanished from my life when depression took hold of me.”

“Art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings…indispensable for life and for progress toward the well being of individuals and society.”

That, and the quote at the top are from Leo Tolstoy who said many smart things about the value of art. 

BLOG 24…August 2013

I’m always on the lookout for art and artists popping up in unusual places and my ears perked up recently when I heard about Ronna Bloom, poet –in- residence at a large downtown Toronto hospital.  Seems a nice synchronicity to be celebrating two years of blogging by reminiscing about the sessions we had with writers, artists and dancers at TGH in the 80’s and 90’s, glad that the notion of arts having a place in treatment settings is alive and well.

Poetry is one of the offerings of the Employee Emotional Wellness Program that “support the wellness of your mind, body and spirit.” at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. It’s a very sensible as well as sensitive approach to running a large institution entrusted with caring for people and where burnout is hard to avoid.

As well as the conventional writer-in-residence format of receiving individual work for coaching and offering writing workshops for groups (some titles include Addressing Compassion Fatigue in Note Form and Have You Seen the Patient?)  Ronna tailors her program to the setting. She has a monthly poetry booth in the basement staff lunchroom.where individuals sit with her, tell her what’s on their mind and she crafts a quick poem for them…”often either they start to cry or I do,” she says. In a high stress atmosphere like a hospital “it’s kind of therapeutic to stop, write and reflect, makes them better at their jobs when they go back” she adds.  Lindsay Drysdale, program coordinator echoes this feeling, “Personal well-being can play a major role in how you’re working.” 

One Friday morning last spring, several hundred people filled the lecture hall on the 18^th floor for Psychiatry Grand Rounds - not for the usual lecture on a new psychotropic or insight into depression, but POETRY.  Much to my surprise, near the end of the session, after describing her work, Ronna asked if anyone in the audience wanted to read their poem aloud for her comments. A bunch of people volunteered, doctors, nurses, technical staff, all seemed willing and comfortable sharing their creative work. She had set the stage for comfort with the theme of the session Who will care for me?

She also showed that poets and poems can be funny or sad, that poetry is enlivened by the broad range of experiences and feelings which are often accentuated in hospital settings for patients, their friends and family as well as for staff members.

So, a shout out to Mount Sinai’s Healthy Workplace Initiative, putting their money (along with some from the Ontario Arts Council) where their mouth is with poetry.