As soon as I moved back to my hometown 4 years ago I decided that I needed to get involved in the art community. I bought a membership with a gallery that supported local artists, and had space to have my first solo show. Unfortunately that place has since closed. It was a major turning point for me as I met other makers and started to go to Friday night Art Crawls. Even though I was by myself most of the time, a night out was just what I needed to keep me motivated and inspired. I've said it before, there is something about seeing artwork in person that is so exhilerating.
Last Friday night I went out with a girlfriend to the Art Crawl & she mentioned to someone that it was her favourite thing to do since moving here a year ago. I took a few photos of the places we went to & wanted to share them with you.
In my opinion Paolo Fortin, the Gallery Coordinator at Evans Contemporary really got the ball rolling with making Art Crawl so fun for everyone in the city. It was here that we got to see Japanese photographer Mamoru Tsukada's first solo North American exhibit called The Exhausted Sky.
This photo is proof that I spent 40 minutes blow drying my hair that day. My daughter told me before I went out that night that I looked "perfect" which was the cutest thing ever. I was wearing a skirt & that's fancy for me.
Here you see his installation of "112 black and white photographs, installed as a grid, and forming a large, saturated, black and white “wall” of images. Tsukada views this as a sort of memorial to Hiroshima – a mourning for the victims."
I came back to the galleries the next day with my daughters to show them all of the beautiful work I had seen the night before. This is why there is no one in my photo. Friday night it was packed in here!
"In this two-venue exhibition, Tsukada presents The Exhausted Sky in two very different displays at Evans Contemporary, and Star X. Each venue presents the project with unique emotions, concepts, and moods." One room was black and white, this room was all colour...which I loved by the way. On the Friday night everyone was walking on the installation snapping photos of the ground, who needs walls to hang art on?
"The installation at Star X consists of 250 colour photographs installed to fill the floor of the gallery. These images simulate the sky in Hiroshima the moment the atomic bomb exploded 600 meters above the city. Victims testified that the sky had become incredibly colourful, and displayed an unexpected beauty, even though almost everything on the ground was destroyed and contaminated by the invisible radiation."