Burnaby Art Gallery is starting off the new year with a salute to two female artists.
The gallery is getting set to open two new exhibitions on Jan. 19: Talk of the Town, featuring work by Molly Lamb Bobak, and Travel Stories, featuring work by Julie McIntyre.
An opening reception for both is being held on Thursday, Jan. 18 from 7 to 9 p.m., and everyone is invited.
Bobak’s work will be featured in the lower gallery. Bobak (1920-2014) is a Burnaby-raised artist who was famous for her wildflower watercolours and crowd scenes painted in oil. This exhibition explores her early architectural views and city panoramas, primarily from the 1940s to the 1960s. Bobak’s work as a set designer, as well as her position as the first female Canadian official war artist during the Second World War, were vital influences on her cityscapes.
While her depictions of crowds often portray faceless groups of people, her buildings and carefully worked and significantly individualized, a press release notes – for Bobak, it seems buildings and cities provide a stable counterpoint to human chaos and inconsistency.
The exhibition is accompanied by an in-depth catalogue offering a look at Bobak’s early life and influences growing up in a farmhouse on the shores of Burnaby Lake, and later in Vancouver.
“Molly Lamb Bobak’s paintings are full of talk: people excitedly calling to each other in the crowd, chatting about this and that, whispering the latest gossip on a street corner,” said Hilary Letwin, exhibition curator, who provided an essay for the catalogue. “The faces of those doing that are often loosely drawn, devoid of detail, or completely obscured, but the language of everyday life is clear, in their gestures and bodies.”
In the upper gallery, visitors will be able to see work by Vancouver print and fibre artist Julie McIntyre. McIntyre incorporates a variety of domestic objects as the ground for a series of work that captures the complexities of one woman’s life journey.
McIntyre’s grandmother, Lucy Mood McLeod McIntyre, travelled the world on cargo ships in the 1960s and 1970s, snapping hundreds of photos along the way. McIntyre mined her slides to create a record of her grandmother’s search for adventure outside of the confines of an “ordinary” life.
The series consists of eight wearable hand-printed paper aprons, eight paper quilts and eight original artist books bound as handbags.
“The form of aprons was chosen as the most recognizable domestic icon, symbolizing not only a traditional version of motherhood, but the ‘apron strings’ of social anxieties and expectations placed upon mothers and children,” writes McIntyre in an essay provided for the exhibition catalogue. “The quilts I have created reference the tidy, stacked compartments where precious things are stored and act as a metaphor for my grandmother’s restrained and secret life. Only when she travelled did she seem to be free.”
McIntyre will be at the opening reception on Jan. 18.
The gallery is at 6344 Deer Lake Ave., and admission is by donation. See www.burnabyartgallery.ca for details.
SPECIAL EVENTS AT A GLANCE
Curator’s tour, Jan. 28, 2 p.m.: Join Hilary Letwin for a tour of the Molly Lamb Bobak: Talk of the Town exhibition, then continue upstairs and join artist Julie McIntyre and director-curator Ellen van Eijnsbergen in a hands-on tour of Travel Stories. Tea will be served in the Fireside Room following the tours. Free, all welcome.
Lecture, Feb. 25, 2 p.m.: Join Hilary Letwin as she examines both contemporary and historical artistic influences that inspired Bobak’s work. Free, all welcome.
More information: www.burnabyartgallery.ca.
