The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

I. Ijwcauswtfinataîïffiw» |KVIU*UiKRuTi/AI spy# I imiCTiiia / v y Wednesday, April 29, 1998 COMMUNITY CALENDAR • LIFESTYLES • SPORTS • COMMUNITY CORRESPONDENCE • TV LISTINGS by Lorraine Manfredo Staff Writer The theme for the show is the old brick mill where the Visual Arts Centre makes its home. But make no mistake, The Real Mackay is no "run of the mill" exhibition. It's blockbuster-big for one thing. Usually, visitors to the VAC can take in an entire show with a single circuit of the main floor gallery. But this current exhibit sends viewers up to the third floor attic, down to the basement, out to the backyard creek, and finally face-to-face with the neighboring subdivision to the west.. . And, because it's federally federally funded through a generous generous $12,000 Canada Council grant, it singles out the VAC as a gallery that has something valuable valuable to contribute to the national art scene. It's a bit of a coming-of-agc milestone, milestone, says curator Margaret Rodgers. "We're growing up," she says, clearly thrilled with the record-breaking turnout of about 175 people people at the official opening Sunday, April 19. The subject for The Real Mackay show is the mill building itself - its history, history, its ambiance, and its natural and human environment, environment, In fact, the gallery walls arc deliberately deliberately left bare this time to put the room itself in the limelight with its vertical beam pillars and factorysized factorysized windows. The show's title derives from the slogan printed on the Cream of Barley breakfast breakfast cereal box. The product product was manufactured at the mill between 1905 and 1950, over a decade before the place was used as a gallery. Seven artists, some from Toronto and some from Durham, have created created six site-specific installations, installations, each artist looking at the mill from a personal, social, cultural, or geographic geographic perspective. The show was curated by Margaret Rodgers and Carolyn Bell Farrell. Pieces include a small house, a wooden'cairn, and submerged lightboxes on the grounds. Inside there arc video and multimedia installations. As a kind of link between the outdoor and indoor exhibits, there arc several window treatments. treatments. Rodgers admits The Real Mackay can be something something of a "challenge" to folks who don't venture very often into the postmodern postmodern art world. "It's not like the earlier eras, when artwork was enjoyed for purely esthetic value. Artists got tired of that," she says, and they started asking if beauty alone is relevant. "Today, art is more connected connected to social issues or else it attempts to do something." Sage advice is to just open yourself up to the experience. And don't feel you're cheating or dense if you have to rely on reference points such as conversations conversations with the artists at an opening or reading printed handouts explaining the works. Feminist Buried History Post-modern pieces can point out connections you never noticed before. Rodgers herself had her RIVER VIEW -- This seven-foot-wide wooden cairn with swirling celebrates the Cream of Barley Mill and its history. Sculptor Rowcna surface patterns now sits on the Soper Creek bank behind the Visual Arts Dykins uses the markings to suggest river currents and the passage of centre. It is one of six installations in The Real Mackay exhibit which time. The show runs until June 5th. Window Blind eyes opened by Penelope Stewart's contribution to the show, Psyche's Inventory. This work is basically three large light boxes recessed in the lawn behind the mill bearing images of manual grain sorting. The use of female hands acknowledges the largely unsung role played by the Mackay sisters who ran the mill for many years after founder John Mackay died. Their economic success success was unknown to Rodgers who has been the resident history expert on the mill since she started there in 1989. One can read the recessed light boxes with their images of female hands as a visual way of "shedding light on buried history, and from a feminist feminist perspective that is a Peterborough photographer photographer Blake Fitzpatrick found inspiration for his Window Treatments when he wandered up to the rarely used attic in February and found an old window frame. "Photography is sometimes sometimes called a window on the world and I thought it would be an interesting metaphor to work with." He treated the multiple panes as separate frames into which he inserts a collage collage of sepia-tinted archival images, contem- SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW -- Durham College instructor Blake Fitzpatrick used new and old photographs and pencil rubbings of the mill building to create his unique Window Treatments. Displayed where old windows have been bricked or boarded up, the works are at play with the conventional notion of photography as a window on the world. "Like the window treatment, they arc as open as they arc closed," says Fitzpatrick. HOME INSTALLATION -- Gary Greenwood's small-scale replica of the Cream of Barley Mill copies the architectural architectural outline of the historic building behind. But this "updated" vision of the mill uses modern siding and other recent building materials to reflect the mill's present suburban context, s' O The Real Mackay art exhibit title comes from a cereal box slogan on a product manufactured at the mill in the early half of this century. The mill itself was built by John Mackay in 1905. Mackay's Scottish-inspired packaging, evident in the blue and yellow plaid running down the side of the box, was carried over to the show opening -- not only via the piper's colorful kilt (right), but in the complimentary complimentary eats as well. The tantalizing spread included scones and homemade homemade jam by Sheila Zastawny and apple cider from Bob Schafer of the Tyrone Mill, "a gift from one mill to another." political concern," Rodgers points out. Stacked Cedar Cairn Rowena Dykins' circular circular wooden Rivercairn is "drop dead gorgeous", according to visitors on opening day. • Using the raw-sawn surface as a canvas, the artist has burned, carved, stained and painted swirls suggestive of river currents. currents. Made of indigenous white cedar and situated by the Soper Creek, it draws inspiration from, and attention to, the natural natural setting at the mill. "Pretty much right from the beginning I knew I would make a cairn," says Whitby artist Dykins who has created them before from driftwood and rail ties. "The cairn has been historically historically used a a commemorative commemorative marker," she notes, and in this case the solid substance of the cairn covered with rushing water images is a marker of the forces of. change and the passage of time. * The meter-high Home by Gary Greenwood of Oshawa looks at the architectural architectural landscape. His work is a small-scale replica replica of the original mill, but while the artist has been faithful to the architectural outline, he wraps it in vinyl siding and imitation Colonial brick -- materials materials he saw in the modern subdivision that now overlooks overlooks the mill site. "It's a mix of the Mill and residences," he says. Part of his inspiration was the disappearance of local industry. "Everything that was industrial is now gone, There's Goodyear and a few other factories, but now Bowmanville is a suburban residential community community and the people go to work out of town at The Motors." porary color photos, and rubbings lifted from surface surface details of the building to create fragmentary views of the mill's past and present. Mounted where the original windows ■ have been blocked off draws attention to what the show guidebook calls "the half- blind nature of the building and the falsely Continued on page 12