Artist Leah Dorian uses a chainsaw to take down her own creation outside the Provincial Court House on Saturday, Oct. 9. Photo Susan McNeil
People touring the Mann Art gallery this weekend will have noticed a common theme about some of the pieces, they were being painted over, pulled apart or cut up with a chain saw.
While public tours of the vault – a place where art works are carefully preserved, stored and catalogued – were available inside the building, on the outside Metis artists were busy destroying the creations they had made, deciding which paper bison they should keep and which should be consigned to a sacred fire.
It was all part of the focal weekend of Culture Days from the galleries perspective.
“This is kind of our big weekend day at the Mann Art Gallery,” said Lana Wilson, gallery educator on Saturday, Oct. 9. “This is the last day to see the Leah Dorian and Ashley Smith outdoor art installations,” said Wilson.
Dorian has taken on the role of mentor to Smith and 2021 marked the second year of the Inter-Generational Metis Artist Mentorship Project, a project she started with a different mentee, Danielle Castle.
“The goal of this is for Leah to be able to pass on different aspects of Metis culture,” explained Wilson.
While both mentees brought their own perspectives to the project, Dorian as teacher was passing on skills such as designing and planning a project.
“It involves Metis materials, skills, teachings and world views. They learned how to plan the project and do art installations,” Wilson said, “and, in these cases, using quite humble but accessible materials.”
An exhibit outside the door of the gallery showed colourfully painted cardboard bison being chased by cardboard horses over the cliff – in this case, a two inch high curb.
Another next to the provincial court house involved a willow woven meditation walkway decorated with orange ribbon tied on it and is dedicated to the survivors of residential schools.
“We think that a cross symbol – even a symbol that was widely embraced in the fur trade era by many cultures – placed beside a courthouse, we feel that’s a good site for a reconciliation piece,” explained Wilson. “So many people have interacted with it in a wonderful way.”
Inside the gallery, children or adults could pick a canvas painted by an artist who used to live in Prince Albert and choose to either keep it as is, add to it or paint right over it.
The idea was to educate people on what artists do with their finished pieces. Some sell it, some donate it or sell it to gallery collections. Others are prolific and just want their work out in the world.
The artist lives in a city for a few years, paints something every day and then divests it before moving to another city.
The artist suggested having other’s paint over his pieces.
“We can think of it as a collaboration,” Wilson said. “If they want, they can completely paint totally over his art and make it their own.” This is a technique used when an artist wants to add texture to their work.
Upcoming in this week for Culture Days activities in Prince Albert are a South Asian cooking class on Tuesday, Oct. 12 and a chance to try pottery on Thursday.
More details can be found a culturedays.ca and by going to Saskatchewan in the Regions pulldown menu.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
