NEWS RELEASE MACLAREN ART CENTRE ************************* Barrie buildings are soon to become art canvases as part of an intimate new outdoor public art project Wintertide. An initiative of the MacLaren Art Centre, this three-part series will utilize downtown windows to show projections of works by regional artists as well as a special international feature. From March 10 to 24, the project will transform ordinary public spaces with light, bringing joy and excitement to our community during these dark and difficult times.
Wintertide is intended to be an annual program run in collaboration with the City of Barrie and the local arts community. This year’s theme, Return of Light refers to the time change that occurs at the culmination of the project as well as the optimism afforded by mass vaccination and the eventual end of the pandemic.
MacLaren Executive Director Karen Carter says, “The program was conceived by our team, not only to brighten spirits, but also to provide support to local artists who have lost opportunities to show their work due to the pandemic. The projections will encourage residents to go outside, shop locally at downtown businesses and enjoy art while observing safe social distancing protocols.”
As part of the two-week installation, artwork and short films will be projected onto the MacLaren Art Centre’s Mulcaster and Collier Street windows. Additional displays will feature on windows at City Hall and the empty storefront at 46 Mulcaster St. Each art projection is approximately two minutes long and will be repeated on a continuous loop during the display hours.
Angela Aujla (Barrie), David Andrec (Barrie) and Krystal Ball (Toronto and Jamaica) are artists who have contributed to the project this year. Their artwork was selected to bring light and colour to the downtown core during the darkest days of the year and is meant to be a hopeful presence for passersby.
Joining the local artists, Los Angeles-based filmmaker Tarun Lak, has offered his India Vignettes video compilation to the series. An animator at Pixar Animation Studios, Lak is known for his playful work, which captures the familiar ways in which Indian children revel in their little moments of joy. Audiences can learn more about Lak’s practice in a free Zoom talk in March with the artist, Alana Traficante, Executive Director at Gallery 44 and Deepali Dewan, Dan Mishra Curator of South Asian Art & Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum.
Wintertide is part of a broader series of public programs at the Gallery known as MacLaren Offsite, which features local, national and international artists in collaborative pop-up exhibitions and community art projects across Barrie and Simcoe County. The program reflects the Gallery’s commitment to building a vibrant, healthy and creative community in the region.
This year’s Wintertide initiative was executed with a number of community partners from the Barrie artistic and cultural communities and made possible through the generous support of Founding Partners: the City of Barrie, Georgian BMW, the Sarjeant Company, Canadian Forces Base Borden and Simcoe County Archives.
All art projections featured in Wintertide can be viewed from the intersection of Collier Street and Mulcaster Street in downtown Barrie. They will run daily from dusk to dawn through March 24, 2021.
To learn more about Wintertide, visit www.maclarenart.com or follow along with updates on the MacLaren Art Centre’s social media platforms on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
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.
