Art exhibition to mark International Overdose Awareness Day 2021
VANCOUVER, B.C. – To mark International Overdose Awareness Day 2021, Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) has partnered with local artists with lived and living experience to launch Not Just an Art Show: The Overdose Crisis on Canvas. From August 31 through to September 3, artwork will be on display at the Interurban Gallery in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), featuring more than a dozen pieces inspired by the artists’ thoughts around International Overdose Awareness Day and their experiences with the current overdose crisis.
VCH collaborated with Portland Hotel Society to display the artwork in the heart of the DTES, with individual pieces contributed by more than a dozen artists with lived and living experience of substance use across the Vancouver Coastal Health Region. Lived experience relates to people who have used one or more substances and who are currently in recovery. Living experience relates to people who are currently using one or more substances.
This gallery offers people the opportunity to walk in the footsteps of people who use substances to understand the complexities of the crisis, which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. During 2020 alone, 1,728 people lost their life to overdose in B.C., which represents a 76 per cent increase of the previous year.
“People continue to die of overdoses in our communities at an unacceptably high rate. This art exhibition is an opportunity for artists from the community to express how the crisis has impacted them directly and share what Overdose Awareness Day means to them,” said Miranda Compton, VCH’s Executive Director for Substance Use and Priority Populations. “Overdose Awareness day is also an opportunity to acknowledge the hard work of peers and community members in responding to the crisis.”
Peer workers form the backbone of frontline response to the overdose crisis. As individuals with lived and living experience of substance use, peer workers have in-depth, first-hand knowledge of harm reduction, treatment and recovery services. They form an important connection between people who use substances and the healthcare community.
“Peer workers play a core role and serve as critical supports across all of the overdose prevention sites,” said Wendy Stevens, Peer Operations Coordinator with VCH’s Overdose Emergency Response Team. “While we remember those lost to this crisis, we also need to hold space for people who are in the trenches saving lives everyday.”
“Frontline workers deserve respect for what they do,” said Randy Pandora, an artist living in the Downtown Eastside. “They often don’t get acknowledgement for saving lives by reversing overdoses long before any help arrives. That is what Overdose Awareness Day is about: saving lives.”
The art exhibition will be open to the public on a walk-in basis from August 31 to September 3, 2 p.m. – 6 p.m. each day. For further information, visit the VCH website. To learn more about VCH’s harm reduction and overdose prevention response, click here.
Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) is responsible for the delivery of $4.1 billion in community, hospital and long-term care to more than one million people in communities including Richmond, Vancouver, the North Shore, Sunshine Coast, Sea to Sky corridor, Powell River, Bella Bella and Bella Coola. VCH also provides specialized care and services for people throughout B.C., and is the province’s hub of health-care education and research.
Jeremy Deutsch Public Affairs Specialist Vancouver Coastal Health
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.
