I’ve been meaning to go and see these two exhibits for a couple of weeks, but life has been a bit hectic lately. This afternoon, though, I had the pleasure of seeing both Elizabeth Holmes: Thinking About Loss and Ron Langin: terrain. These are two very different exhibits, by two very well-established and respected Sudbury area artists. Both exhibits are on until Sunday, April 21st.
As Gallery 1 was a bit busy, I headed up to see Ron Langin’s exhibit first. Langin has been exhibiting his work in Sudbury since 1992. There are four different terrains that you journey through in this exhibit, from the Red Rock Coulee Natural Area of Alberta, to the mountains, to the prairies, and finally to the impressive hoodoos of Alberta’s badlands.
As I walked through the exhibit, I was taken by the beautiful colours and the way in which Langin chose to document and creatively interpret his travels through Alberta and British Columbia in 2017. The mountain paintings are my favourite, mostly because I recall the first time I saw the Rockies when I went out to write at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in April 2016. They were breathtaking. If ever you need to sort yourself out, in any way, the best thing you can do is head to an ocean (either west to British Columbia, or east to Nova Scotia or Newfoundland) or go into the Rockies. Sometimes, you just need to feel how big something else is, so that you realize you’re small. It puts everything in perspective. Standing in amidst Langin’s paintings, I kept thinking of what it had been like, the first time I’d come to them, to see the Rockies out the windshield of a car, on that highway from Calgary to Banff. It was, for me, life changing.
I loved Langin’s mountain paintings most because even the way they are framed reminded me of the view out the car window I was in when I first went to Banff. And, again last March, while reading out in Calgary at Pages Bookstore in Kensington, my poet friend Emily Ursuliak and I went up to Banff for a day. It was, as it had been two years before, just as beautiful. Walking along that wall of paintings this afternoon, it felt as if I could recall those two trips. It brought me back to a place in time where I met very dear writing friends whom I’ve stayed close with since 2016. The same can’t be said of other friends I’ve met from other retreats, but those Banff friends are dear to me in ways I can’t quite explain. They’ve stuck with me, while others haven’t as much. Maybe it’s Banff, or the magic of certain spaces, or just timing. Whatever it is, this afternoon’s visit to the gallery made me think of all of them, and made my heart glad.
Heading downstairs again, I spent time with Elizabeth Holmes’s Thinking About Loss. I love the notion of layering images, so to spend time looking through a gallery with a number of beautiful collages was lovely. My favourite pieces are the ones to the right of the main door, the ones that highlight the beauty of old, worn down and much loved books. One, a mended prayer book with its spine taped, with images of Jesus and Mary on opposite covers, especially drew me in. So much of it spoke to me of memories I have of my maternal grandmother. She used to have little prayer books like these, tucked into the top drawer of her bedside table in the old house on Wembley Drive. I kept thinking: Who used this prayer book? Who used it so often that it fell apart? What was their life like? What trials did they struggle with, the very things that led them to the comfort offered by the ritual of prayer? I can imagine them heading off to church, to say a rosary or light a candle, offering up prayers to God. It reminded me of my grandmother, that one.
Walking around the gallery, so many layered pieces spoke to me. There were collages with bits of envelopes, tickets from concerts, pieces of handwritten letters and burnt paper, stamps, and even imprints of leaves. Holmes uses layers of gesso wash and thin papers applied over the surfaces of images, suggesting the passage of time. All things, Holmes seems to be saying to the viewer, decay. All things wear down. As humans, we age and fall prey to illness and frailty. The detritus of our societies, too, seems to speak to this. We leave fragments behind. There is a sort of patina there, too, though, and I kept thinking of a sort of layered ambering that seems to take place as we get older, as we gain more experiences in our lives. What Holmes does, in this exhibit, is suggest that our own individual lives are woven things. What seems solid and sure is not often so for very long. A decade can bring a number of changes to a person, to a relationship, to a life. She gathers together the fragments, searching out the bits and pieces that seem to document our lives, and then places them carefully and insightfully into tapestries of image that speak imaginatively to the way in which we live our lives. Her works are haunting. They nudge at you, ask you to imagine how loss works in your own life, and how you shed your skin as you grow and change over the years. To not evolve would be sad. To be aware of these evolutions of self, well, it brings mindfulness, of time past, of people and of love and loss, and of the value we place on one another as we journey.
Time passes, she seems to say to you through her work. To pretend it doesn’t is silly. To gather up bits and pieces of your own life, to catalogue it, to document your life, is a way to witness a life. I think I do this with my writing, and I can look back on earlier books of poems to see how I’ve evolved, and how the people I’ve loved have come and gone, for various reasons. There comes a place, I was thinking as I stood there quietly, where you recognize that time is fleeting, and that you need to be sure you are content, that you have a path, that you are able to be inside yourself as you go, mindful of others and creating.
Leaving the gallery, I wandered into the tiny gift shop. If you’re a member, you get a discount. I fell in love with this little Sudbury water tower pencil case made by local artist, Sydney Rose. I didn’t really need it, but it’s an iconic image of my hometown, so I bought it. One water tower has already been taken down, but the other still stands perched on the Lloyd Street hill. (It’s the famous one that’s made national news, with the “Skoden” tag, but I still always think of how pretty it seemed to me as a little girl, how it was painted light blue and how it seemed to almost bloom from the rocks. It felt, to me, as obvious and certain as the Super Stack or the slag dump, in terms of how I defined ‘home’ inside my own head and heart. It kind of still is, in a weird way.)
Sydney Rose’s Sudbury water tower pencil case is available for purchase at the Art Gallery of Sudbury.
So. This is blog is, too, a way for me to say that there are a few copies of my new book of poems, These Wings, at the Art Gallery of Sudbury. You can purchase them there, for $20 each, but they’ll also be available at a couple of other places around town.
And…this blog entry is also a way for me to say that, if you’re around next Thursday night, April 25th, the Art Gallery is having its annual gala fundraising event. It’s dear to my heart, this art gallery of ours. I volunteered there as an undergraduate in my early 20s, when it was still directly affiliated with Laurentian University. I actually met my first boyfriend through an art history class at Laurentian, and I have fond memories of time spent with him in that gallery space, looking at art. Then, I worked there for a while in my late 20s, after I finished my graduate degree in Ottawa and came home to find work. It’s the place where I had an encounter with Mrs. Bell’s ghost (whether or not people believe me doesn’t matter…) and it’s embedded in my heart.
You can buy tickets to the big gala, Party Art Tres Chic, at the gallery. They’re $65 if you’re not a member, but $55 if you are a member. (One more reason to become a member, eh?) You can call the gallery at 705-675-4871 for more information. Who doesn’t want to spend a night at the mansion, though, if you’re in town? It’s a night to celebrate art, fashion, and culture. That, for me, is more of what Sudbury needs…
Just be sure, friends, to pop in to the Art Gallery of Sudbury before next week rolls around. Do yourself the favour of experiencing the Langin and Holmes exhibits. They’ll settle into your heart and shift your soul. They’ll make you believe that spring is almost here…and that time is to be cherished and honoured.
peace,
k.
The Republic of Poetry 