Current Exhibit -
KITCHEN
May 13 – July 10, 2020
Sivarulrasa Gallery, 34 Mill Street, Almonte, Ontario
The Carleton Place and Beckwith Heritage Museum is thrilled to partner with Sivarulrasa Gallery to bring you KITCHEN, a show that elegantly combines works by four contemporary Canadian painters with artifacts of kitchens past from the Museum’s collection.
The kitchen is often called “the heart of the home”. The act of cooking, and of sharing a meal, has always been a powerful symbol of our culture, our history, and our identity. What we do in the kitchen connects us to our past, to our bloodlines. Covid-19 and stay-at-home orders have forced upon us a togetherness in our homes. The pandemic has led us back to the kitchen, the traditional gathering spot. The constant of the kitchen, and the joys and comforts we experience there, are helping us adapt to isolation. These joys and comforts will be there still, when the pandemic recedes and we open our homes once again to welcome friends and family.
The artifacts from the collection of the Carleton Place and Beckwith Heritage Museum invite us to imagine and recollect the joys and tribulations of kitchens past. A cast iron frying pan #3 produced at Findlay’s Limited in Carleton Place, Ontario, recalls the company’s range of frypans, numbered from 1 to 10. In operation for over 100 years, this family-owned foundry produced iron cookware, furnaces and woodstoves, including the best-selling Findlay Oval Cookstove. The Five Roses Cookbook was a compilation of almost 600 recipes carefully chosen from the contribution of over two thousand successful users of Five Roses flour throughout Canada and was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company in 1913.
Artist Karen Haines sees the kitchen as a place of safety, where families gather, share stories and make memories for a lifetime. Her still life paintings pulsate with the energy of the everyday. Artist Caroline Ji explores the intermingling of the kitchen and the artist studio, a space that combines brushes, cups, studio props and sinks. Artist Cathy Ross aims to convey the uniqueness and special character of everyday objects in her watercolour works, exploring the intimacy and subtle joy of the ordinary. Artist Gillian Willans’ depictions of interiors, including kitchens and everyday spaces, is both nostalgic and critical, steeped in questions of gender and social structures. Devoid of figures, her paintings invite the viewer to imagine each private space as a stage on which a range of social interactions play out.
KITCHEN can be viewed online until Sivarulrasa Gallery is allowed to open once again to visitors. In keeping with health directives, we will not have a vernissage for this show. The show can be viewed online at https://sivarulrasa.com/exhibitions/kitchen/
