Art just doesn’t offer a different perspective or reflection on life, but is able to teach us about our history and development as a nation and culture.
The Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery (MJM&AG) will be presenting two exhibitions starting Thursday.
Saskatchewan’s only serving Second World War artist George Campbell Tinning and contemporary artist Tracy Bultje will both have instalments open to the public Thursday.
“We open at 7:30 p.m. and the talented three-piece band The Midnight Roses from Swift Current will be performing for everyone,” MJM&AG education co-ordinator Christy Schweiger told the Times-Herald. “Both of these exhibitions have travelled across Canada ... over the last two years 22,000 Canadians have seen the exhibit.”
Schweiger said this will be the last time the full collection is displayed before it is put back into storage.
“Some of the pieces will come back out, but not at this size and scale,” Schweiger said.
According to MJM&AG, Campbell Tinning: the Newfoundland Seriesfocuses on, “the only Saskatchewan-born official Canadian war artist, who fell in love with Newfoundland when he was briefly posted there in 1943. He did go back in 1949, the year that the people of Newfoundland voted to join Canada.”
The exhibition focuses on the art Tinning created during this period of his life and art making career.
Chatham, Ont., resident and artist Tracy Bultje’s exhibition, titled Remnant, involves large, colourful landscape paintings, “which evoke the colourful and ground-breaking early 20th century paintings by the Canadian Group of Seven,” MJM&AG stated on Bultje’s work.
Bultje’s uses photography as a springboard in starting and developing her paintings. “The photograph crops, flattens, filters and manipulates scale ... her straightforward, no-fuss approach, high-keyed colour scheme and jagged, crisp forms come together with a disarming freshness and a radical logic,” artist Jordan Broadworth said on Bultje’s art.
“We always want to fill our rooms with different kinds of themes,” Schweiger said. “We work with other galleries and they work with us, because they the quality of the exhibition will be good.”
Bultije’s exhibition was created by the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham, with The MJM&AG being responsible for creating Tinnings, respectively.
For more on this article pick up the next issue of the Times-Herald.
