ARCHIVE OF PRESS RELEASES

RURAL ROOTS EXTEND FROM STRATFORD TO BLYTH

Friday, July 31 2009

Picture: City Cow by Erik Sansom

RURAL ROOTS EXTEND FROM STRATFORD TO BLYTH

Stratford, like Blyth and many rural communities in Southwestern Ontario, has its culture, economics and history heavily influenced by the agricultural lands and farming people that surround it. For Rural Roots, the final exhibition of the 2009 season, the Blyth Festival Art Gallery has invited 19 artist members of Stratford’s Gallery 96 to take a look at the beauty of rural Ontario and some of the issues that face this community.

Currently located in an old Stratford furniture factory, Gallery 96 is an artist co-operative that has been together for over thirty years. Its membership is made up of artists working in variety of media: painters, print makers, sculptors, photographers, illustrators, graphic artists, props makers, a cartoonist and a fibre artist. The group seeks to promote and educate its artists and the larger community in the visual arts.

Artists are storytellers. They see and record beauty and ugliness, harmony and discord, life and death with an eye for the aesthetic. For example, painter Nancy Groenestege documents the corrosion of architectural detail with her fine brushwork. Printmaker Gloria Kagawa speaks to the issue of thoroughfares that bypass rural communities and exploit farmland, an issue currently facing the New Hamburg and Shakespeare area of Highway 8. Other members look at genetically modified food, animal rights and the loss of wood lots and fencerows in our environment.

Not all the work has a serious message. Carolyn Horley delights us with memories of a rural family picnic with her installation of prop food. The intricacies of a spider’s web are captured in metal sculpture by Glenn Elliott. Erik Sansom delights in visual puns adding to the element of humour. In all, nineteen artists will give us their take on life in rural Ontario.

Rural Roots opens on Friday, August 7 with a reception at 6 pm. The public is invited to join us and to meet some of the artists. The exhibition, curated by Greg Sherwood and sponsored by Lynda and Duncan McGregor, continues until the end of the theatre season. The show is presented in the Bainton Gallery, next to the Blyth Festival box office, open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 am to 9 pm.

The Blyth Festival Art Gallery is coordinated by an informal group of gallery volunteers. If you would like to become involved or would like more information about any of the exhibitions, please contact Robert Tetu at 519-345-2184 or email beechwood@cyg.net

NEWS & EVENTS

ARCHIVE OF PRESS RELEASES

RURAL ROOTS EXTEND FROM STRATFORD TO BLYTH

Friday, July 31 2009

Picture: City Cow by Erik Sansom

RURAL ROOTS EXTEND FROM STRATFORD TO BLYTH