The Sechelt Arts Festival flows on this coming weekend, just like its overall theme of water. The Emerging Sounds music performance is on Saturday evening. Free workshops and two exhibitions of art and heritage are offered until Oct. 23.
The 10-day art exhibition, Waterworks, now on at the Seaside Centre has a reputation in the past for being unusual. Each year it improves on that reputation. How do you convey the theme of water in art? It turns out that many mediums work well. For example, the most dramatic work is Freefall, a fibre waterfall by four artists. You can practically hear it splashing on the felt rocks even without the handy recording available on the earphones. Curator Gordon Halloran portrays the perpetual motion of water in his piece Drawing Water, while Miyuki Shinkai creates glass raindrops. Diego Samper’s Dreamscapes is the closest the show comes to using paint. His fabric canvas flows to the floor like an endless stream from a mountain. Kristjana Gunnars’ Korean traditional clothing sculpture evokes women’s close ties to water. For the most fun, visitors can swim underwater in a sea of letters in Matthew Talbot-Kelly’s virtual reality device.
Sacred Water is a display of often prosaic items that we have used through the centuries to fetch water: from a pre-Columbian vessel to a mug from the Niagara Falls Starbucks to a galvanized bucket for use in gardening.
The clay water vessels by artist Kenny Torrance hanging along one side of the exhibition are called oyas. Their function is to dispense water gently while buried in the ground, giving the plants a slow drink. At Davis Bay Elementary last Monday, students painted these oyas as a fundraiser for the school. (If you’re heading out on the Art Crawl this weekend, stop by No. 91 on the map guide, Sechelt Sustainable Community Properties, to see the painted oyas in the demonstration garden.)
The Waterworks show is on until Sunday at the Seaside Centre from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. At tems swiya Museum, a heritage exhibit called the Salmon People is also on this weekend from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The Salmon Boy legend is told and acted out at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 23. Drop-ins are welcome.
Last Saturday’s two free concerts at the Arts Centre were a showcase for talented local musicians. Nir Blu was exceptional, performing a 45-minute, non-stop piano concert of his own exquisite compositions to a backdrop of watery visuals filmed by Tamar Kozlov. Vocal Intent, a six-member a cappella group, also showed their ability to move the audience with selections from popular and traditional tunes. The song Bridge Over Troubled Water almost brought down the house.
The weekend activities offer a self-publishing workshop on Saturday with artist Bodhi Drope and a wool dyeing workshop on Sunday with Silke Billig. See www.secheltartsfestival.com for details.
