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Local students tell story of pandemic through facemask art – Owen Sound Sun Times

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By connecting them with one of the artists it is currently featuring, the Tom Thomson Art Gallery has given some local students the opportunity to have their voices heard through their unique works of art.

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The art gallery recently launched its initiative Emerging Artists Unmasked, which features more than 20 creations of senior art students at Hanover’s John Diefenbaker Secondary School, who were guided and inspired by contemporary artist Don Kwan, whose own face mask works are a major part of the art gallery’s current exhibition Facing It.

Tom Thomson Art Gallery curator of public projects and education Heather McLeese said Friday that the gallery really wanted to connect an artist with youth again, something that has been difficult during the pandemic. And as it turned out, Kwan, whose own personal experiences and challenges come through in his work, turned out to be the ideal teacher.

“He is a wonderful speaker, an amazing teacher and an incredible visual artist so just connecting him to those students who are young aspiring artists was really quite a special experience and definitely inspirational for them,” McLeese said.

In the exhibit Facing It, which is currently on display at the gallery, Kwan uses a combination of Chinese takout menus, joss money, silkscreen and inkjet prints, wire, glue and thread in a series of masks that address his own emotional response to the pandemic.

A third-generation Chinese Canadian, Kwan said his work was brought forth by the pandemic as he dealt with isolation, loss and racism toward the Asian community that was magnified during the lockdown.

Kwan said working on the Facing It exhibit and doing the workshop with the students “reminded me of the power of art and how art continues to connect communities.”

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Artist Don Kwan with some of the works created by John Diefenbaker Secondary School senior arts students.
Artist Don Kwan with some of the works created by John Diefenbaker Secondary School senior arts students. Photo by supplied

Because the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the connection between Kwan and the students was done virtually. Kwan did a full artist talk and did an origami workshop with the students, going through the process of making a face mask out of paper, McLeese said.

Students were then asked to create their own facemasks, using various media and materials, to tell their own personal stories about how the pandemic has affected them and what they took way from it.

The results were varied and full of imagery and messaging. Some used newspaper headlines depicting the headlines of the pandemic, while chains and wire were prominent on others, illustrating that feeling of being locked in and unable to express their feelings. One mask depicts images of trees and grass of a local park, a place of escape when the pandemic lockdowns hit.

“Face masks are now a safety requirement, but they have become this way of expressing yourself,” said McLeese. “It was a fun project, a lot of sharing happened and a lot of the students really told a story through the masks they created.”

JDSS senior arts student Zanne Stassen created a mask that she said is about the stagnation of time and continuity as the world that felt off-kilter during the pandemic. She covered her mask in buttons that she arranged in a broken timeline “to show how the linear process of time feels disrupted; the buttons are wrapped with ideas that reflect this.”

“I have noticed pre-COVID a lot of our time was segmented into 14-day periods, such as the lending period for a library book or pay periods,” Stassen said. “I saw that this concept remained the same, but the context shifted to suit the times.”

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A facemask created by Zanne Stassen.
A facemask created by Zanne Stassen. Photo by supplied

Stassen said she included personal family photos of past decades and a more recent picture of her cousin with her grandfather “to show the passing of time has little effect on the dynamic of human nature; children still laugh and people still go on.”

JDSS Visual Arts teacher Anne McLaughlin said the students embraced the task of using facemasks as the bases of their major art project, which examined their reactions and feeling about the almost two-year pandemic.

“I am very proud of my students as they went way beyond the parameters of the project,” she said. “The artworks produced are both visually stunning and visually provoking. The students want to challenge the viewers to look closely for hidden or not obvious meanings in their artwork.”

McLeese said she is hoping it will get people talking about the work and their own experiences during the pandemic.

Kwan’s workshop is available on the art gallery’s digital portal at tomthomsonartgallery.wixsite.com/digitalportal

And the facemasks by the students are running in tandem with the Facing It exhibition and can be viewed in the lobby at the gallery until the end of January.

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PARIS RESTAURANT PLÉNITUDE IS REVEALED AS THE RECIPIENT OF THE ART OF HOSPITALITY AWARD 2024 … – Yahoo Canada Finance

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Announced in advance of the awards ceremony for the first time ever, this accolade seeks to help raise the profile of the art of hospitality

LONDON, April 18, 2024 /CNW/ — Paris restaurant Plénitude is revealed as the recipient of the Art of Hospitality Award 2024 from The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, ahead of the official ceremony taking place in Las Vegas in June.

The World’s 50 Best Restaurants announces Paris restaurant Plénitude as the recipient of the Art of Hospitality Award 2024The World’s 50 Best Restaurants announces Paris restaurant Plénitude as the recipient of the Art of Hospitality Award 2024

The World’s 50 Best Restaurants announces Paris restaurant Plénitude as the recipient of the Art of Hospitality Award 2024

Located on the first floor of the French capital’s Cheval Blanc Paris, Chef Arnaud Donckele and Director Alexandre Larvoir have created in Plénitude an ode to the tradition of French fine dining, spending two years choosing the crockery, artisans, ceramicist and fabrics that help to create the restaurant’s intimate ambiance. With just 30 covers, every detail delivers an intimate experience for its diners, complete with the restaurant’s signature French elegance.

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Normandy-born Chef Donckele, who also runs Cheval Blanc Saint-Tropez fine dining restaurant La Vague d’Or, has taken on the role of master perfumer in his creations to make sauces, known as the essence of French cuisine. In his hands, each is treated like a perfume or liquid painting, created such that the sauces are the main event, with meat and fish as their complements. Under the leadership of Larvoir, the restaurant’s impeccable service team knows Donckele’s creations intimately and conveys their essence to guests stepping through the door of Cheval Blanc Paris, which was placed at No.34 on The World’s 50 Best Hotels 2023.

William Drew, Director of Content for The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, says: “We are thrilled to announce Plénitude as the winner of this year’s Art of Hospitality Award. Despite its relative youth, this Paris restaurant has been making waves on the global gastronomy scene for its flawless and inventive approach, celebrating the art of service and showing the world that French hospitality remains at the top of its game.”

Chef Donckele says: “Give yourself the pleasure of giving pleasure.” Larvoir adds: “At Plénitude, service is a wonderful encounter at every table. We seek to welcome our guests as if they were at home, to discover and understand them, to captivate and move them thanks to Arnaud’s fabulous sauces, to make them laugh too, before leaving them with the sincere wish to see them again soon.”

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The World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2024 Logo (PRNewsfoto/50 Best)The World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2024 Logo (PRNewsfoto/50 Best)

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Canada's art installation at Venice Biennale rooted in research, history, beauty – Hamilton Spectator

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Hundreds of thousands of tiny glass beads will soon be twinkling in the sun across the entire Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Canada’s newly revealed entry in one of the world’s most prestigious art fairs.

But Kapwani Kiwanga, the Hamilton-born, Paris-based creator of the work, wants you to get past the cobalt blue glass glinting in the Venetian light. She wants you to think of each bead as a character.

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Israel-Hamas war impacts Venice Art Biennale – DW (English)

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The Venice Biennale, which runs this year from April 20 to November 24, is one of the world’s most prestigious international art shows. It is also held alongside the Documenta in the German city of Kassel.

The lagoon city will once again become the center of the international art world in the coming weeks and months. Over 800,000 art lovers made a pilgrimage to the previous Biennale held two years ago, and two-thirds came from abroad, a new record.

Israeli pavilion to remain closed in protest

The Israel-Hamas war is having a direct impact on the prestigious art show. 

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A collective of pro-Palestinian activists, the “Art Not Genocide Alliance” or ANGA for short, had been calling for the exclusion of Israel from this year’s Biennale amid the conflict. 

In an open letter, the activists criticized Israel for its military action in the Gaza Strip — which the collective calls a “genocide” against the Palestinians.

The open letter condemns the “double standards” of Biennale organizers, noting that they remained silent on the situation in the Middle East while they had condemned Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine two years earlier.  According to the alliance, more than 23,750 people have signed the call so far, including US photographer Nan Goldin.

The Biennale rejected the calls for a boycott. The curators had already decided on the concept and participants of the central Biennale exhibition long before the Hamas terror attack on October 7 that prompted Israel’s retaliation in the Gaza Strip.  

But now the doors to the Israeli pavilion will stay closed anyway. The exhibition’s featured artist, Ruth Patir, an Israeli born in New York in 1984, announced in a statement on Tuesday that the show will only open “when a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.”

Italian soldiers patrol the Israeli national pavilion at the Biennale contemporary art fair in Venice.
Italian soldiers are now patroling the Israeli national pavilion at the Biennale contemporary art fair Image: Colleen Barry/AP Photo/picture alliance

“The decision by the artist and curators is not to cancel themselves nor the exhibition; rather, they choose to take a stance in solidarity with the families of the hostages and the large community in Israel who is calling for change,” the statement on Patir’s website adds.

Patir’s exhibition, “M/otherLand,” features a video installation of ancient museum figurines representing “broken women” who “come to life and take part in a procession, in a shared public expression of grief, sorrow, and rage. The camera’s point of view is that of a bystander or a witness to the scene, thereby claiming a subjective, embodied take on world events.”

Israel has had its own national pavilion in Venice since 1950.

Russia’s pavilion to remain empty again

Meanwhile, the Russian pavilion will once again remain empty.

The Biennale did not officially exclude Russia, but after the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the artists and curators selected for the Russian pavilion resigned from participating under the national banner.

Ukraine is participating through a group exhibition titled “Net Making.”

A private security officer walks past next to a closed Russia's pavilion at the 59th Biennale of Arts exhibition in Venice.
The empty Russian pavilion, a photo from 2022Image: Antonio Calanni/AP Photo/picture alliance

‘Foreigners Everywhere’

Titled “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere,” the main exhibition is curated by the Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, who becomes the Venice Art Biennale’s first artistic director born and based in the Global South. The artistic director aims to show art from the Global South’s less privileged and less industrialized regions.

Pedrosa’s “primary focus is thus artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled or refugees,” he said in a statement. The exhibition extends across the Giardini park, the historic shipyard halls known as Arsenale and other art locations in the lagoon city.

The slogan itself is inspired by a work by a Parisian artist collective called Claire Fontaine, who had created different versions of the neon sign in 53 different languages. They now light up the Arsenale.

An art installation made of neon lights, that reads 'Fremde überall' (foreigners everywhere)
The German version of Claire Fontaine’s neon light installations: ‘Fremde Überall’ (‘foreigners everywhere’)Image: Galerie Neu, Berlin

The international art show features 330 artists, with 88 countries presenting their own exhibitions. Most of them are showing their works in the Arsenale, without their own exhibition hall.

This year, four countries will participate for the first time at the Venice event: Benin, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Timor Leste. Nicaragua, Panama and Senegal will also participate with their own national pavilions for the first time.

African voices at the Art Biennale

The African continent, in particular, has been strengthening its presence at the world’s oldest art show. Ghana and Madagascar participated for the first time in 2019; Uganda, Cameroon and Namibia followed in 2022.

Based on the theme “Everything Precious is Fragile,” Benin’s pavilion features the works of artists Chloe Quenum, Moufouli Bello, Ishola Akpo and Romuald Hazoume. It is organized by Nigerian curator and critic Azu Nwagbogu, who is also the founder and director of the Lagos Photo Festival and the African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting contemporary African art worldwide.

Among the foundation’s success stories is Romuald Hazoume. The now 62-year-old Yoruba artist and sculptor had already gained acclaim through his participation at Documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007, where he presented an impressive installation commenting on flight, expulsion and the loss of home.

Through Benin’s pavilion, curator Nwagbogu also wants to spark a new perspective on the decolonization of art, he told journalists ahead of the exhibition. Beyond the restitution of objects, he also wants to promote the “restitution of knowledge.” With the help of a “library of resistance,” he aims to give voice to women on topics such as African identity, ecology and science.

Azu Nwagbogu
Azu Nwagbogu is the curator of Benin’s pavilionImage: African Artist Foundation

Does he feel that African voices are sufficiently represented in Venice? “I would like to see many more,” Nwagbogu told DW. “More importantly, I would like to see more deep cultural infrastructure built and supported on the [European] continent and more support for those impressive events we have already built across Africa.”

Germany’s multicultural approach

Among the 28 permanent country pavilions in the Giardini Park, the German pavilion’s program opens with a presentation by Berlin theater director Ersan Mondtag and Israeli artist Yael Bartana.

Cagla Ilk portrait.
Cagla Ilk is the curator of the German pavilionImage: Nick Ash/Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden/dpa/picture alliance

Under the title “Thresholds,” they offer an exploration of the past and the future inspired by various artistic concepts. The curator this year, after Yilmaz Dziewior in 2022, is the Istanbul-born architect and co-director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Cagla Ilk. Referring to the title of the show, she explained that on the threshold, “Nothing is certain.”

The pope expected at the event

The Vatican offers one of the attention-grabbing shows this year: It is placing its pavilion in the women’s prison in Venice. Inmates accompany visitors on an art itinerary through the prison.

Pope Francis also wants to visit the pavilion. He would be the first pontiff to date to visit the Venice Biennale.

This article was originally written in German.

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