Beta Vulgaris: The Sugar Beet Projects
217 بار بازدید -
7 سال پیش
-
Exhibit opening BETA VULGARIS: THE
Exhibit opening BETA VULGARIS: THE SUGAR BEET PROJECTS by Kelty McKinnon with music by Keri Latimer. Saturday Feb. 10, 2pm. Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre, 6688 Southoaks Crescent, Burnaby, Canada
Nikkei National Museum’s gallery will be transformed into a Japanese dry garden, punctuated by large sculptural ‘boulders’ made of molten, burnt, and sculpted sugar. A wooden boardwalk will traverse overtop of this landscape conflating the “hills of Mission” to the flat, striated furrows of the sugarbeet fields in southern Alberta.Beta Vulgaris: The Sugar Beet Projects explores the relationship between an apparently benign material, sugar, and the hard times the Japanese community went through. Audiences will be invited to a multimedia Zen garden made of granulated sugar and punctuated by large boulders sculpted out of molten and burnt sugar.
“The traditional Zen garden is an enclosed, meditative space of raked sand and strategically placed boulders. Historically the white sand symbolizes purity, and in the Zen garden it represents water, emptiness, and distance,” explains McKinnon. “Contrasting the expression of sugar’s purity, generosity and neutrality is its history and conditions of labour.”
For most Japanese-Canadians, the sugar beet fields stood for gross injustice during the Second World War, when the BC Security Commission Council organized the Sugar Beet Projects. Due to the labour shortage and the need to supply troops overseas with cheap sugar, Japanese-Canadian internees had no choice but to move to the Prairies or Ontario and work on the sugar beet fields. They were told only if they did so would they be able to live with their families. The evacuees at the time supplied the labour for 65 percent of Alberta’s sugar beet acreage.
Nikkei National Museum’s gallery will be transformed into a Japanese dry garden, punctuated by large sculptural ‘boulders’ made of molten, burnt, and sculpted sugar. A wooden boardwalk will traverse overtop of this landscape conflating the “hills of Mission” to the flat, striated furrows of the sugarbeet fields in southern Alberta.Beta Vulgaris: The Sugar Beet Projects explores the relationship between an apparently benign material, sugar, and the hard times the Japanese community went through. Audiences will be invited to a multimedia Zen garden made of granulated sugar and punctuated by large boulders sculpted out of molten and burnt sugar.
“The traditional Zen garden is an enclosed, meditative space of raked sand and strategically placed boulders. Historically the white sand symbolizes purity, and in the Zen garden it represents water, emptiness, and distance,” explains McKinnon. “Contrasting the expression of sugar’s purity, generosity and neutrality is its history and conditions of labour.”
For most Japanese-Canadians, the sugar beet fields stood for gross injustice during the Second World War, when the BC Security Commission Council organized the Sugar Beet Projects. Due to the labour shortage and the need to supply troops overseas with cheap sugar, Japanese-Canadian internees had no choice but to move to the Prairies or Ontario and work on the sugar beet fields. They were told only if they did so would they be able to live with their families. The evacuees at the time supplied the labour for 65 percent of Alberta’s sugar beet acreage.
7 سال پیش
در تاریخ 1396/11/19 منتشر شده
است.
217
بـار بازدید شده