PARKSIDE GALLERY
FEBRUARY 2017 NEWSLETTER
In the Main Gallery until this Saturday, February 4 th : Robert Keziere: The Days of Augusta
NEXT SHOW:
Robert Brunet Aerials: Feb 10-March 11
Drop into Parkside to enjoy the photographs taken
by Robert Brunet, an amateur photographer, whose
primary interest for aerial landscapes are the Canim
Lake and surrounding areas.
To get altitude, Robert used a Yunee Typhoon G
quadcopter which carries a Go Pro 4 Black camera
that takes video and photos simultaneously.
Normally his photos and videos are taken between
200 to 300 feet.
As it is strictly his hobby photos will not be for sale.
Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art. Ansel Adams
Springing Into Spring: Call to Artisans and Artisans
Got Crafts! Got Art! Spring Edition! Contact Parkside.
As our Christmas Bazaar has always been popular with both our patrons, artisans and artists we
have decided to fill the gallery this spring with all things Spring! So if you have crafts, art, jewelry,
weaving, baskets, pots, textiles, woodwork, birdhouses or anything that you think would fit into
Springing Into Spring contact Parkside Friday between 10-1 and ask for Claudia.
The show will run from March 17 – April 15.
One of Our Springing Into Spring Workshops
Making A Willow Vase: March 25 from 1-3
Instructor: Barb Brown
Cost: $10 (Willow will be provided) But you will need to bring a pair of cutters
along with a 3” nail
Minimum Age: 12
Please sign up by calling or dropping into Parkside.
There is unspeakable beauty and potential to be found in nature. It entices me and is an invitation I just have to accept. Jil Ashton-Leigh
Photos by Tom Godin
Living Photo Created with Growing Grass
Most people don’t pay any attention to grass and the way it grows, but
British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey have always been
fascinated by it and have found an ingenious way to incorporate it into
their art. By manipulating the way grass grows, they are able to literally
print detailed photographs onto a living wall of grass that develops
according to how much light it receives.
The two artists start by covering a large canvas with water paste
and rubbing germinated seeds all over it. They then cover the windows of
their studio turning into a dark room, and making sure that the only light
that reaches the canvas is projected through a slide of a negative
photograph. They then let photosynthesis run its course, and in a few
weeks time the grass-covered canvas grows into a living print of the
photograph. The amount of light shining through different parts of the
negative determines which parts of the canvas turn out a vibrant green,
and which remain yellow and undeveloped, making the details of the image clearly visible from a distance.
In The Recipe Gallery: Raspberry Chocolate Tofu Pie
Ingredients
1½ cups semisweet chocolate chips (about 10 ounces)
1 12.3-ounce shelf-stable package firm silken tofu
1 tablespoon pure maple syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup raspberries, fresh or frozen (thawed), plus more for garnish
½ cup confectioners' sugar
1 9-inch graham cracker pie crust
Directions
1. Put chocolate chips in a medium microwavable bowl. Microwave on Medium for 1 minute. Stir, then continue microwaving on
Medium, stirring every 20 seconds, until melted.
2. Place tofu in a food processor or blender and process until smooth. Add the melted chocolate, maple syrup and vanilla. Process
again until smooth. Add raspberries and confectioners' sugar and process until very smooth; scraping down the sides as necessary.
Spread the mixture into the crust. Refrigerate until firm, at least 2 hours. Garnish with raspberries, if desired.
You can make this ahead and loosely cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for up to 3 days.
With 20,000 Sunflower Seeds Artist Creates Portrait
Shanghai-based artist Hong “Red” Yi is well known for her use of unconventional
materials, and her latest masterpiece – a portrait of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei made with
20,000 meticulously arranged sunflower seeds – is worthy of her reputation.
Inspired by Ai WeiWei’s quote – “the seed is a household object but at the same time it
is a revolutionary symbol” – Red sprinkled 20,000 sunflower seeds onto a white canvas
and painstakingly arranged them all by hand to recreate Weiwei’s famous portrait with
his hands stretching his eyes wide open. Remarkably, she managed to capture his
features in great detail, just like she had managed to do with other unusual mediums in
the past.
Want your Art linked to Parkside’s Web Page?
www.parksideartgallery.ca
If you are a member of Parkside and sell your art through Parkside you may link your web page to ours.
Jut send us your link and we will make it happen!
PARKSIDE HOURS
Tues-Fri 10 am – 4 pm
Saturday 10 am-3 pm
A Volunteer non-profit society
LOCATION/CONTACT
401 Cedar Avenue in 100 Mile House, BC.
Box 1210, 100 Mile House BC, V0K2E0
250-395-2021
Website: www.parksideartgallery.ca
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/parksideartgallery
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If you have time…
Here is your Parkside “Tea and Toes Up Read” for February:
Kent Monkman fills in the blanks in Canadian History by MURRAY WHYTE
One of Canada’s most acclaimed First Nations artists reads between the lines of our national mythology in Toronto show, in
time for its 150th birthday.
At the Art Museum at U of T, Kent Monkman sits with his painting The Scream, about the removal of indigenous children from their families by the state, to be
taken residential schools. On the walls are the decorated cradleboards, used for infants on reserve, and left behind when they were taken. Monkman's epic new
exhibition is aimed at shedding light on dark corners of Canada's historical relationship with First Nations peoples. (MARCUS OLENIUK / TORONTO STAR)
If you’re at all acquainted with the work of Kent Monkman, who is Cree and one of Canada’s best-known artists, you’d have little choice
but to be just as familiar with Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, his drag-warrior avatar.
With her campy good humour, Miss Chief has always been Monkman’s spoonful of sugar to help his vital medicine, of inserting First
Nations stories into the narrow, politely official version of Canada, go down. Never has she been lost for words — until, that is, here and
now.
About halfway into Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, Monkman’s epic revision of the history we upright colonials have hewed
to as a nation of virtue, you arrive in a small gallery, walls painted black.
Nearby, a collection of cradleboards — rough-hewn wooden infant carriers, made for children while on reserve and left behind when
they were taken away to residential school — sit in stony silence, ghostly emblems of how much was lost.
On the wall, two metres tall and almost three and a half wide, the dark history they evoke comes to vividly painted life: red-coated
Mounties and robe-clad nuns and priests wrest native children of all ages from the desperate arms of their terrorized parents; black
clouds gather above a prefab house. In the background, more children run for the woods, as though for their lives. Its title: The Scream,
and there’s nothing remotely funny about it.
Miss Chief, the narrator of the full sweep of Monkman’s epic, had waxed naughtily poetic on the various disasters visited on her people
by the interlopers: the decimation of the buffalo, the epidemic of urban violence. But here, she demurs. “This is the one I cannot talk
about,” reads the brief text, posted on a nearby wall. “The pain is too deep. We were never the same.”
Just over a year ago, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report on residential schools tore open a seam in the fabric of our
polite national mythology, just in time for its 150th anniversary.
Intentionally or not, the commission may have set the stage for a very different kind of anniversary, and for Monkman the moment is
opportune. “It’s a turning point for the country,” he says. “All of this was whitewashed and it left generations of Canadians in the dark.
How do we move forward as a society when the whole founding mythology is false, exclusive, one-sided?”
In 2014, Barbara Fischer, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto’s director, contacted him to gauge his interest in a Canada 150
project. “There just wasn’t anyone else, I thought, who had the capacity for tackling history the way Kent does,” she said. “For me, it had
to be his project.”
Monkman, who has made a career of defying the privileged myopia of official histories, took to it without pause.
“When Barbara approached me, I said, ‘This is what has to happen: it has to be a counter-narrative to all the celebration,’” said
Monkman. “The polished image of the Canadian Mountie needed to be tarnished a little bit.”
For the past three years, he’s devoted almost all of his time to that cause. It’s a national endeavour, spending the next three years
traveling the country from sea to sea. But this week, it debuts here at home in Toronto, and preparations are complex and many.
One recent morning, Monkman stepped gingerly around the various crates and artifacts and sheafs of plastic wrap scattered
throughout the multiple galleries where Shame and Prejudice was being installed. He arrived in a small, square space painted a deep
hunter green. It was going to be red, Monkman explains, but the author and philosopher John Ralston Saul, who is writing an essay for
the exhibition catalogue, told him that green was the colour of autocratic government here. “So I just said, ‘Thank you!’ and here we
are,” laughed Monkman, his good humour as intact as ever.
For maybe the first time, though, Monkman’s wit is deployed sparingly, as counterweight, not at the fore. A little humour was needed to
leaven the intensity, he allows — “at a certain point, you need to give the audience a break” — but Shame and Prejudice, above all, is a
deadly serious endeavour.
The show unfolds in nine chapters, each told by Miss Chief, each conflating artifacts and history with his grand, sweeping paintings of
revisions to the canon.
His absurdist view drifts in and out. In the chapter on Confederation, a naked Miss Chief arrives in the midst of Robert Harris’s famously
staid 1867 portrait Fathers of Confederation, demanding — naked and with champagne — her seat at the table as her ancestral land is
carved into pieces.
Throughout, the absurd gives way to a different kind of outrage. In the chapter titled “Wards of the State/The Indian Problem” — the
room painted autocratic green — Monkman paints indigenous chiefs Big Bear and Poundmaker in chains in a government chamber,
signing a treaty with founding prime minister John A. Macdonald. Reason (and leg irons) suggests a deal to which they could never have
freely agreed, and here Monkman leaves no doubt: he titles the work Subjugation of the Truth.
Next to it, an authoritative official portrait of Macdonald hangs in the suddenly muddied context. Fiction bleeds deeper into fact:
nearby, the artist has placed Poundmaker’s actual moccasins, borrowed from the Museum of History in Ottawa. The obvious question,
about whose stories they are to tell — and why — is the spectre that haunts the entire affair.
Monkman is well-acquainted with such ghosts. Growing up in Winnipeg in the ’70s, the artist, 50, who is half English-Canadian and halfCree from the Fish River band in northern Manitoba, found himself caught between two worlds. In “The Urban Rez,” another chapter,
his Le Petit dejeuner sur l’herbe, a dun-grey urban scene shows a seedy hotel on Winnipeg’s Main St., is littered with broken indigenous
female forms rendered in deliberate Picasso-esque cubism.
It’s stylized — Monkman’s complaint with Modern art, and a good one, is its eagerness to erase the past, and the ravages of colonialism
in particular — but also personal.
“I remember, as a kid, going to the Manitoba Museum and looking at tidy dioramas of Indians and then we would step outside and
see this,” he says, gesturing at the painting. “All the other kids in the class would just look at me and think, ‘What is wrong with your
people?’ And I couldn’t say, because I just didn’t know.”
A long, slow trickle has brought us closer to the truth: generations of a people raised in abuse, and without parents, can hardly be
expected to build healthy communities, and Shame and Prejudice means to speed it to a flood.
But for Fischer, Monkman’s canny juxtapositions do more than wobble the official histories he engages. “Think about the stories our
museums tell: they tell a Christian narrative, a European narrative, that doesn’t really take into account the last 200 years here,” she says.
“What I think Kent is doing here is building the foundation for a new kind of museum.”
Shame and Prejudice includes several installations. In one, a nativity scene Monkman calls it, a beleaguered native couple tend to the
birth of Miss Chief — in the universe of the exhibition, the saviour of the piece — in her ramshackle manger; in another, an eerie, sevenmetre-long dining table is decadently set with commemorative china celebrating the colonial triumph at one end and gradually
devolving to squalor and bones — aboriginal people, left with the scraps — at the other.
But ultimately, Shame and Prejudice is a show about painting and how, over the centuries, it has preserved an indelible, heroically
official version of the sweep of human progress. In 2013, Monkman painted a grand landscape of a shimmering lake beneath a snowy
mountain peak, Miss Chief at an easel surrounded by naked, lissome young white men. A satirical queer-culture reversal of the
European fetishization of the indigenous people they found here, the title is telling: History Is Painted by the Victors.History Is Painted
by the Victors.
It has been a highly selective view: artists employed by the powerful, from monarchs to prime ministers to presidents to chiefs of
industry, to tell their stories as they wanted them to be told. However subjective, they resonate with authority. They don’t call them
history paintings for no reason — see: Velazquez and David, Delacroix and Caravaggio and so many others —and their service to the
powerful, naturally, left large swaths of inconvenient truth on the cutting-room floor.
That’s as true of colonial Canada as anywhere else and, for Monkman, Shame and Prejudice became a matter of not only annotating
those heroic tales, but meeting them toe to toe.
“History is a narrative; it’s a collection of stories sanctioned by the ruling power, and reinforced through words and images that suit
them,” he says. “That was the whole point of taking on history painting: to authorize these moments that have been swept under the
rug for generations.”
In each chapter, his paintings are outfitted with gilded frames. It deepens the gesture, both mocking the grandiosity of the form’s
presumptive exclusions, and to meet it on its own terms. It yields bleak, affecting reversals. There is nothing grandiose about
Monkman’s scenes: Death of a Virgin (After Caravaggio), in the exhibition’s opening chapter, a young indigenous woman lies dying in a
hospital bed, attended to by her family. who burning sweetgrass and invoke traditional ceremony; in Struggle for Balance, an SUV
billows thick black smoke as it burns in the street in front of an ill-tended house, as indigenous youth do battle with police.
These, too, are our history, and our present, Monkman says, and there is nothing heroic here. But there is resilience, and persistence, to
go on. And finally, it’s time for those stories to be woven into the national fabric for good.
“You look at history paintings and they’ve been shown for hundreds of years,” Monkman says. “And they’ll be shown 150 years from
now. The question for me is, what will they be shown with? This is part of our history. And it needs to endure.”
If you are in Toronto…Shame and Prejudice opened Thursday, Jan. 26 at the Art Museum, 15 King’s College Circle, University of Toronto,
and continues to March 4.
Kent Monkman, The Daddies of Confederation, 2016.
Kent Monkman, The Subjugation of Truth, 2016.
Kent Monkman, Struggle for Balance 2013.
Kent Monkman, Death of the Virgin (After Caravaggio), 2016.
At the entrance of Shame and Prejudice, Monkman has installed his nativity scene –
a rough shack meant to evoke on-reserve squalor, where a native couple tend to
the birth of Miss Chief, his alter ego and the exhibition's hero and narrator.