My visit to the Vancouver Art Gallery allowed to me learn more about art and creation as well.
Current exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery
By Jerrison Oracion, Senior Columnist
When I go to a science centre or a museum, I take my time to look at all the things in the exhibit so I can learn and look at the details of objects. It allows you to get the idea about something and to appreciate it more. Going to an art gallery would require more time to fully immerse yourself in art as well as interacting with it which was the case for one of the exhibits that I saw during my first visit to the Vancouver Art Gallery.
There were times in the past few years when I could have gone inside to see a specific exhibit. But I finally wanted to go inside when I found out that an exhibit on Yoko Ono is going to be showcased. Originally, I was going to explore the art gallery for two hours. However, because the feature exhibit had a lot of artwork and activities, it took me four hours to see everything including Yoko Ono: Growing Freedom.
While Yoko Ono is often blamed as the person that broke up The Beatles, Paul McCartney has stated it was not her fault since the band was already breaking up. Her artwork presents her and Lennon’s philosophy of giving peace a chance and using peace as an act of protest which can be avant-garde and clever. When you go inside the exhibit, the first thing that you will see is footage of Ono doing an art performance where she just sits down, and people go on the stage and cut parts of her clothes until she barely wears anything. Participation is key in the first half of the exhibit “The Instructions of Yoko Ono” where you contribute to her artwork like putting a nail on a wall, playing chess and making an art piece with broken plates.
The first time that Ono and Lennon met was during an art exhibition she was presenting in London where he was amazed when he went up a ladder and used a magnifying glass on a wall until he could see the word “yes.” In a similar fashion for this exhibit, there are art pieces that you can do with your head while reading Ono’s words of wisdom. The second half of the exhibit entitled, “The Art of John and Yoko” highlights their marriage and presents photos and artifacts from their infamous bed-in protest in Montreal where they record the protest song “Give Peace a Chance”. In the end, there are more interactive exhibits and a special showcase on local Indigenous artists curated at the request of Ono herself with “Water Event”.
After going through that exhibit for a long time, I went upstairs for two more exhibits. In “Jan Wade: Soul Power,” another collection of protest art is presented addressing the struggles of being black and Wade showing her pride as a mixed African Canadian. There is an area where you go through a pathway of a colour collage to demonstrate the moment when Eric Garner says the famous last words as he was suffocated by a police officer, “I can’t breathe.”
Next door to it is “From the Earth” where Emily Carr’s oil paintings and the ceramics of UBC professor Edith Heath are showcased; both are inspired by the land and their adventures around British Columbia. The last exhibit “For All Time” is a quick one where a rare copy of the first publications of William Shakespeare’s plays is displayed.
