Art gallery launches #myessential community mural project – Woodstock Sentinel Review

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What is essential to you?

Answers to this question by local youth – in the form of drawings and photographs – will guide a #myessential community mural project that will be created by Durham artist JP Morel inside Owen Sound’s Tom Thomson Art Gallery.

“We’ve really only been using this word ‘essential’ because we’re hearing about it in news and such and we’ve been told what’s been essential during this global pandemic,” said Heather McLeese, curator of public projects and education.

“And now we’re flipping that and asking people – what has been essential to them and their experience and what’s really gotten them through this difficult time of living through a global pandemic?”

Morel, a visual artist who has created several outdoor murals in Durham, said she plans to be at the gallery each weekday over the next two weeks to paint the #myessential mural on the walls in The Jennings David Young gallery space.

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It will be her largest mural to date.

“The kids provide the content, which are the images, and I would say the artist’s job is to answer that question – how does it come together?” said Morel, a youth workshop leader.

“That has to do with sitting with the ideas and absorbing them and stewing on them. There’s technical things; I’ll be dealing with composition and I’ve got a colour palette, so I’m concerned with all of those artistic questions. But I do want to really stay faithful to their images. I’m really interested in their images because it does lend their voices to the mural.”

The mural is one component of the community art project #myessential, which officially launched Saturday with the reopening of the gallery, following the recent provincial lockdown. It will run until May 1.

Also part of the project is an invitation to gallery visitors and others to share their answers to the #myessential question.

“I want it to be a project that really has a ripple effect through the community,” McLeese said.

Morel is no stranger to the Tom Thomson Art Gallery. In 2017, the visual artist worked with the gallery on a large-scale mural project involving high school students.

She applied last year to participate in the gallery’s upcoming community artist spotlight, which provides local artists with a chance to display their work in the atrium on a rotating monthly basis.

She said she proposed in her application creating a mural with community input.

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But McLeese said the spotlight series was put on hold due to the lockdown.

While the gallery was closed, staff came up with the #myessential project idea and decided Morel would be the “perfect artist” to lead it.

To kick off the project, Morel led a series of virtual drawing classes last week with Jenn Klemm’s Grade 9 art class at Owen Sound District Secondary School. The 25 students submitted a combined 100 drawings, each answering the #myessential question.

“How JP is translating the mural in this space is through three different vantages – what has been essential in the past, what is essential now and what will be essential in the future?” McLeese said.

“The drawings the students did are really timely. There’s everything from Netflix to cell phones to family members to music to things that have really gotten these kids through a weird time.”

McLeese said John Fearnall’s photography class at OSDSS will be taking on the project this week by responding to the same question, but through digital images.

The gallery will show the students’ photographs on monitors in the #myessential space.

There’s also a table set up with pencils and paper, so visitors can contribute to the project. People can also participate on social media by answering the question in any form – a drawing, poem or photograph, for example – and using the myessential hashtag.

“I think it’s a question that everyone should be thinking about and perhaps haven’t really taken the time to think about what has been vital to them through COVID-19. I think it’s important to really reflect on those things that have been making the days go by and us adapting to this new normal of living,” McLeese said.

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“It’s been so refreshing and invigorating having youth answer this question, but it’s something that our whole community can answer and really get something from. I think it will be a wonderful experience to welcome people back into the art gallery, asking them that question about what has been essential to them through this pandemic.”

Along with the #myessential project, the new exhibition David Beirk: A Sanctuary for Thought also launched Saturday. It features art from the gallery’s collection – some of which has never been presented publicly before – that highlight the late painter’s “anxieties over a threatened ecological landscape and the erosion of beauty, humanism and morality in art,” the gallery says.

The popular exhibition Group of Seven: The View from Here, which showcases the gallery’s collection of Group of Seven works, will also continue.